Upcoming Events

Our last event of the semester will be a talk by Professor Mũgo as part of the postponed celebration of Africana@50.  She was scheduled to deliver her address on Friday on May 1^st, 2020.  As they say, the rest is history.  We are very pleased that she has agreed to give the talk virtually this year.

In 1969, following the civil rights movement, amid student protests nationally and in the wake of the historic student-led occupation of Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus, the Africana Studies & Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell University was formally established as the trailblazer of field of Africana Studies as an academic field committed to rigorous intellectual knowledge production and learning with critical capacity applied to social transformation. It was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary academic field with a focus on global Africa encompassing the African continent and the Diaspora. Opened in Fall 1969, under the leadership of its founding Director, Professor James Turner, the center initially offered an undergraduate major, a robust master’s degree and about forty years later, a PhD program was created. The celebration of fifty years after its inception is critical and fosters forward-looking reflections on the remarkable journey of arguably the most far-reaching academic innovation of the second half of the 20^th century. This celebration calls for the need to reclaim the pioneering role of Africana Studies at Cornell University by ensuring its agility to respond to the new national and global dynamics in academia and society at large and remain at the forefront in theoretical and pedagogical innovations while sustaining its commitment to activism and community engagement.