Black Studies and the Crises of Our Times

Black Studies and the Crises of Our Times responds broadly to the impact of the field since its formal establishment over 50 years ago. This multi-day conference, organized by the Department of Africana and American Studies in conjunction with the Humanities Institute, will articulate why we need Black Studies more than ever for both its national critique and its global articulations of political community.

Black Studies helps us make sense of current global relations and their significance to Black life and beyond

One account of Black Studies understands the field as emerging from crises produced when Black people demanded full citizenship rights in the USA. An alternate account concerns itself with Black peoples’ struggle to write a counter-history of the world we inhabit: the manner in which it has both been made and understood.

The 2025 HI Annual Conference draws from the second account of Black Studies, considering how scholars in the field bring different accounts of the world that we have made to intellectual conversations, dialogues and debates. Guest scholars, artists and activists will apply a wide array of political, theoretical, methodological and activist positions to problems internal to the field while examining, most importantly, how Black Studies helps us make sense of current global relations and their significance to Black life and beyond.

Keynote Speaker

Deborah E. McDowell, a scholar of African American/American literature, is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1987. Her publications include 'The Changing Same': Studies in Fiction by African-American Women, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and scholarly editions. She is co-editor (with Claudrena Harold and Juan Battle) of The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration. Extensively involved in editorial projects pertaining to the subject of African-American literature, she founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985-1993. This project oversaw the reissue of fourteen novels by African American women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, now in its third edition; contributing editor to the D. C. Heath Anthology of American Literature, and co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Her service on various editorial boards has included Publications of the Modern Language Association, American Literature, Genders, and African-American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.