Minorities in Healthcare Professional Panel
Maybank Hall – Room 100
College of Charleston
169 Calhoun Street
Charleston, SC 29401
Thursday, April 20th
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (ET)
Join us for light refreshments, breakout sessions with MUSC advisors, STEM experts and much more!
The College of Charleston has named Anthony Greene, director of the African American Studies Program, as its inaugural Lucille Simmons Whipper Distinguished Professor.
This new professorship was created in an effort to attract and retain top talent from historically underserved groups and to identify faculty members of color at the associate-professor level who are at a point in their career to work toward promotion to full professor so that they may have the time to complete the work necessary for promotion. It is part of an initiative based on one of the cross-cutting themes of the College’s 10-year strategic plan, Tradition & Transformation: the value of diversity, equity and inclusion to make the institution more welcoming to all and more competitive in a changing cultural landscape.
Continue reading at The College Today.
Join Dr. Mari N. Crabtree with a presentation of her sabbatical research.
Addlestone Library: Room 227
205 Calhoun Street, Charleston, SC
Thursday, March 23, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM(ET)
Black Studies scholars often have sought to recover Black voices that have been excluded, marginalized, or erased from mainstream scholarship as a form of reclamation, and as a corrective to research that excludes Black people, and therefore distorts, our understanding of the world in which we live. But what if some of these Black voices don’t want to be found? What claims to privacy do the dead have? This talk offers answers to these questions and will be part of a collection of essays Professor Crabtree is writing on ethical praxis and the craft of writing in Black Studies.
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
Septima P. Clark Auditorium (Rm 118)
25 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
5:00PM – 6:30 PM (ET)
Join African American Studies affiliate faculty Dr. Nakeisha Daniel and Gary Marshall of the Theatre Department in a conversation with Dr. Patricia Williams Dockery, the former director of the Avery Research Center, regarding her play, Septima. Septima, currently showing at PURE Theatre, depicted the life of Septima Clark. Explore Dockery’s process for depicting Septima Clark on the stage and the importance of her life on African American life in Charleston, South Carolina.
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
Septima P. Clark Auditorium (Rm 118)
25 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
5:30PM – 7:00 PM(ET)
The Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston has invited Tamara Lanier to deliver a lecture about her enslaved ancesto
Many achievements of Charleston native, educator and activist Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) took place at locations on and near the College of Charleston campus. Clark was born at 105 Wentworth Street in 1898 (now part of the CofC campus) and was a student and later a teacher at the Avery Normal Institute (now the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston) at 125 Bull St.. In 1978, the College, during a ceremony in the Cistern Yard, awarded Clark an honorary doctorate in humane letters for 40 years of work as an educator, civil rights leader and advocate for the underprivileged.
Read more at CofC Today
Septima P. Clark Auditorium (Rm 118)
Thaddeus Street Jr Education Center
25 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC 29401
Thursday, February 16th at 5 pm
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center * Septima Clark Auditorium
25 St. Philip Street, Room 118
origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?
Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
My Soul Is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.
The Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture presents Tara A. Bynum and Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America
Tuesday, February 7th at 7 pm
Avery Research Center * Senator McKinley Washington Auditorium
In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. In her book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker’s pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter.
Don’t forget that we’ve got the Decolonizing the Curriculum: Teaching Race Across the Disciplines series happening this academic year.
There are still 2 more events this semester!
March 24th – Black English: Understanding and Honoring Linguistic Dexterity
Click to register for the zoom event.
April 7th – Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe
Click to register for the zoom event.
The DC Semester Program for Democracy, Culture, and the Arts (DCSP) is now accepting applications for the Fall 2022 semester! This study away program, which is run by the College of Charleston, provides students who are interested in arts and culture with an opportunity to synthesize their coursework with professional experience at Washington DC-area arts organizations. The program combines a full-time (and often paid) internship in DC (DCSP 395; 6 credits) with a seminar on democracy, culture, and the arts (DCSP 350; 3 credits). Students also take either a 3-credit independent study or a 3-credit online course at the College of Charleston. Combining an internship with coursework has the benefit of helping students build professional contacts and skills while still in school and connecting their academic interests to their professional goals after graduation. For AAST students, the opportunities for arts and culture internships in DC are bountiful—there are dozens of museums, foundations, non-profits, media companies, and government agencies with relevant internships. Also, the African American Studies Program is in the process of allowing DCSP 395 and DCSP 350 to count toward the major and minor in AAST.
Students are responsible for securing an internship in DC, but the DCSP director, Professor Neufeld, and the DCSP associate director, Professor Crabtree, will assist students in identifying internships. Tuition and housing costs are billed like any other tuition and housing costs at CofC, and financial aid still applies. However, there is a program fee of around $800.
If DCSP is of interest to you, please read through the DCSP Info Sheet, which includes an application checklist and application form. If you are interested in DCSP, schedule a meeting with Professor Neufeld (neufeldja@cofc.edu) by mid-February to make sure the program is a good fit for you.
Application Deadline: March 7, 2022
Requirements: Junior or senior status at the time of the program (Fall 2022)