Lectures and Events
The Africana Studies Program offers lecture and other programming funds. If you’re planning an event, fill out and return the Programming Funds Request Form.
Events
C. Mildred Thompson Lecture: Dr. Laurie Woodard, Associate Professor of African American History at The City College of New York, on Fredi Washington’s career as a performer, writer, and civil and human rights activist.
This event is free and open to the public.
Lecture by Brandon A. Jackson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois and author of Brotherhood University: Black Men's Friendships and Transition to Adulthood.
Free and open to the public.
This talk explores how the ancient Greeks served as a rallying point for Caribbean diasporic communities in New York City in the 1970s. Professor Andújar will discuss how Greek tragedies featuring obstinate figures resisting powerful authorities (such as Prometheus and Antigone) and oppressed groups (like the enslaved women of Troy) provided important models for minoritized communities in the United States.
Campus community only, please.
Past Events
Celebrate culture, creativity, and community with Vassar’s Black Student Union as we honor our students, faculty, and the African diaspora. This year’s Afrofuturism theme centers innovation, resilience, and bold visions for the future.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP required.
Poet Gold leads an evening of spoken word, music, and conversation, followed by a book signing.
This talk examines how Black artists transform AI from a tool of command and control into a medium for intergenerational dialogue and alternative worlding.
This event is free and open to the public.
Please join us for The Albertine Cinémathèque French Film Festival presented by the Vassar College Department of French and Francophone Studies.
Free and open to the public.
Join Dr. Rachel Laryea as she talks with us about her book, Black Capitalists.
Explores how storytelling rooted in personal experience, Zambian proverbs, and mother tongues can heal colonial harms and preserve culture, featuring Mubanga Kalimamukwento, an award-winning Zambian author, magazine founder, and University of Minnesota Feminist Studies PhD student.
Free and open to the public.
This lecture examines literary and historical narratives to elaborate “colonial domesticity.”
Campus community only, please.
This talk draws on Philip V. McHarris’s book Beyond Policing to examine the failures of policing as a framework for safety and the ways Black communities have long enacted practices of care, protection, and refusal beyond the state.
Sherrilyn Ifill ’84 discusses reimagining a new American democracy, and the role of the legal profession in defending civil rights for this year’s Norman E. Hodges Biennial Lecture.
Ryan Jobson, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, examines how the rise and fall of the oil industry impacts post-colonial nationalist visions of the future in Trinidad and Tobago. Jobson asks us to consider if there can be a viable political and economic future for Trinidad and Tobago without oil, a question that should be relevant to us all living in a fossil fuel-based global economy.