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Updates from the Africana Studies Program, housed in the Department of History and directed by Prof. Susan Eckelmann Berghel.
Africana Studies Funds Travel Grants for Faculty
The Africana Studies program, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences, invites full-time faculty to apply for an Africana Studies Faculty Travel Grant. Successful applications are funded up to $500 for conference, research, or creative activity travel relating to Africana Studies topics. UTC’s Africana Studies program promotes interdisciplinary perspectives on African, African American, and Afro-Latin American history, culture, literature, and politics from the historical beginnings to the present day. For more on the grants click here.
Last year’s Africana Studies Travel Grant funded three research proposals in fields across the College of Arts and Sciences. Recipient English faculty member Dr. Hannah Wakefield’s proposal, “The Black Church and African American Literature,” funded a research trip to New York City’s Schomburg Center. Her book project examines Alexander Crummell’s uneven relationship with the Protestant Episcopal Church. Archeologist Dr. Lindsay Cochran’s proposal, “Finding New Orleans: An Archaeological Survey to Locate an Elusive Antebellum Cemetery,” funded student research on Gullah-Geechee communities. History faculty member Dr. Julia Cummiskey’s grant proposal funded conference travel to the World History Association Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico where she presented research from her book manuscript, “Placing Global Health in Africa: Virus Research in Uganda, 1936-2000.”
Upcoming Africana Studies Events
Bridge Refugee Service client Hemedi, a Congolese refugee who was resettled in Knoxville, and volunteer Brian Notess, an executive producer for video production at the University of Tennessee, screen their film “Congolese,” about a Congolese boy who meets an American girl shortly after he has moved to the United States, at the Knoxville Film Festival on Sunday, Sept. 15 at 2:00.
Screening of the documentary Agents of Change on Thursday, September 26, 2019 as part of the 50th anniversary of black studies programs in the United States
Day-trip to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery on Saturday, October 26, 2019. The trip is part of campus events and discussions to observe this year’s 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the English colony of Jamestown. For more information, check out the 1619 Project.