Lectures and Events

A professor-student mixer to learn about Africana Studies courses, network with Africana Studies professors, hear from current students, and to build community.

Campus community only, please. RSVP required.

A talk by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and chief policy architect of the Green New Deal—a policy framework that puts justice at the center of climate action.

Author Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College, will be sharing her book, Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge. Reception to follow.

This lecture by Dr. Heba Gowayed, Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College (CUNY), will explore the marketplace between migrants, smugglers, and states.

This lecture by Dr. Fumilayo Showers, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, will explore race, the state, and the many African immigrants laboring in U.S. health care.

This talk explores the Black musical forms and songs of artists that have expressed African American freedom-seeking strategies and related political ideologies. Music has always been a major mode of expression for African Americans, connecting the group to their African homeland and deeply rooting them to American soil.

On February 16th, Lisa Collins will give a reading from her new book about a quilt made in mourning and the memory of its making.

Join Michael Gomez, Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and the Director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora, for this comprehensive discussion.

Professor Miles P. Grier (Queens College, CUNY and CUNY Graduate Center) offers a lecture based on his research on the transatlantic performance history of Shakespeare’s Othello, Shakespeare and early modern science, and Black Atlantic responses from Wheatley to Toni Morrison.

Campus community only, please.

From October 30 to November 1, 1969, Vassar’s Main Building was taken over and occupied by thirty-four Black female students. They demanded the creation of a program awarding a major in Black Studies. Far from being an isolated event, the takeover was part of a nationwide wave of student-organized sit-ins and protests to expand the boundaries of college and university curricula.