Swarthmore College Hosts Event on Future of Black Studies

Noliwe Rooks
Historian and Associate Director of African American Studies at Princeton University

Friday, October 17, 2008
4:30 p.m. 
Science Center 199.

The Rooks lecture, free and open to the public and immediately followed by a reception, is the keynote address of "Black Studies in the New Millennium: Pedagogy and Promise," a workshop that will examine both the challenges and the promises of Black/Africana Studies programs at liberal arts colleges.

"Programs in Black/Africana Studies often appeal to a wide variety of students and serve as an intellectual home for minority students at predominately white institutions," says Associate Professor of History and Black Studies Coordinator Allison Dorsey. "Yet the programs themselves are often strained as a result of too many completing demands upon faculty, limited academic resources, and institutional isolation."

Rooks, who's lecture is entitled "Back to the Future: Black Studies in the 21st Century," is the author of the critically acclaimed White Money/Black Power: The History of African American Studies and the Crisis in Higher Education (2006), in which she examines the discipline as it struggles to define itself. She is also the author of Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (2004).

This event is sponsored by Black Studies and Mellon 23 Funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.