Past Events

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Join the Department of African American and Africana Studies for their first Brown Bag of the semester. Dr. Beka Guluma will be presenting his preliminary research titled, "The African American Dream? Comparing Black Immigrant and Native-Born Black American Beliefs about Social Mobility"

"Scholars and observers have long noted that Black Americans exhibit a high degree of political unity. Despite great diversity within Black America, Black Americans tend to overwhelmingly back the Democratic Party and show wide support for a host of social programs and policies designed to uplift Black America. But with a large and growing Black immigrant population, the question emerges: is Black political unity waning? In this Brown Bag, I present very preliminary research that seeks to address the question of  whether Black immigrants exhibit similar levels of support for the Democratic Party, and for pro-Black social programs and policies as do native-born Black Americans."

Event Date and Time: Wednesday, October 30, 2024 from 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location: Hybrid event - 1102 Taliaferro Hall/ Zoom

Learn more here

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You're invited to the annual Social Justice Fall Workshop hosted by the BSU-UMD Social Justice Alliance and 2nd Lt. Richard W. Collins III Foundation! The theme of this interactive workshop is "Cultivating a Multiracial Community Towards Healing and Justice."
 

The BSU/UMD SJA Fall Workshop will be held on Friday, October 25th, from 10:00am to 3:00pm, in The Robert H. Smith School of Business (Room 2202 - Second floor), located on UMD's campus at 7621 Mowatt Ln, College Park, MD 20742. Lunch will be provided for attendees. Please RSVP by Friday, October 18th.
 

Learn more and register here.

Act Like You Know is a podcast preview and talk-back event that centers the technical and professional communication value of Black cultural and rhetorical practices. Featuring Dapper Dan Midas (aka DDm), who hosts the Secretary of Shade YouTube channel, the event will screen excerpts from the first episode of the Act Like You Know podcast, followed by a talk-back style panel discussion. Together, we’ll explore the use of Black and queer cultural knowledge and language practices to communicate and translate complex social and political commentary. The event’s goal is to spark a dialogue about language, expertise, and ethos among folks within and outside the academy and to prompt us all to consider the cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic skills that Black (and other marginalized) writers and communicators bring to the task of making complex and specialized knowledge more legible, accessible, and ultimately more useful.

October 24, 2024 Tawes Hall, Room 1121 Ulrich Recital Hall 5-7pm, followed by a light reception

Hosted by the Frederick Douglass Center for Leadership through the Humanities

Learn more and RSVP here

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Second Annual TerrapinSTRONG Symposium

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In the early 1960s, Malcolm X famously criticized the philosophical and political bases of the African American “civil rights” movement, calling instead for a turn to what he called “the level of human rights” and redress through the United Nations rather than the U.S. federal government. This lecture seeks to understand the political and philosophical contradictions of Malcolm’s internationalism by placing its surprising mix of revolutionary liberalism and anti-imperialist nationalism in productive tension with earlier African American internationalisms, especially efforts at “worldmaking” through the United Nations. Recovering the important philosophical differences within oft-collapsed accounts of “black internationalism,”  the lecture takes stock of the different philosophical justifications for engaging the politics of global governance by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Patterson. Taking seriously these distinctions as central to the careful study and reconstruction of black political thought, I consider the lessons that Malcolm’s trajectory portends for contemporary efforts to connect aims of global justice and peace to African American struggles for racial justice.
 

This event will be held in a hybrid format both in-person and online from 2:00-3:30pm ET on October 23, 2024.

Learn more and register here.

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Drop in to the Stamp Student Union from 12-1:30 on October 23 in the MICA Cozy Corner to enjoy some food and engage in an open community dialogue about Black Art, and why it's so important to do it in public!⁠

Learn more here.

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Global Research Resilience: Navigating Social Unrest - Insights from Africa
This event is co-sponsored by the Office of International Affairs.

The UMD Symphony Orchestra opens its 2024-25 season with William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American,” the first symphony composed by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra when it premiered in 1931. This remarkable piece is a love letter to blues and Black culture, showcasing Still’s vision to elevate the blues, which he felt was often considered a "lowly" expression, to the highest musical level. By masterfully integrating blues progressions and rhythms with traditional symphonic forms, Still created a symphony that resonates with profound emotion and cultural significance.

Learn more here.

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University of Maryland's Bahá'í Chair for World Peace, the Department of African American and Africana Studies, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and The Anti-Black Racism Initiative co-sponsor a discussion featuring presentations by Professor Olufemi Taiwo (Cornell University) and Professor Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali (Howard University). Professor Taiwo will explore "Against Decolonization: Africa's Place in the Global Circuit of Ideas," while Professor Mabeko-Tali will discuss "British Magna Carta vs. Mali Empire's Manden Kouroukan Fouga Charter: Comparing Historical Visions of Human Rights." The conversation will be moderated by Professor John E. Drabinski of the University of Maryland, College Park, and will conclude with a panel discussion and audience Q&A. 

Learn more and register here.

The University Maryland’s Do Good Institute and the Association of Fundraising Professionals (DC Chapter) will host Envisioning the Future of Black Philanthropy through Afro-Futurism on Thursday, August 8 at 12PM.

In alignment with the 2024 Black Philanthropy Month (BPM) vision, we are activating a contemporary look at Afro-futurism to envision a more impactful and powerful future for Black Philanthropy. Join us as we explore the tomorrow of Black philanthropic practices, its history, identities, and how we can prepare today for a bold expression of love of humankind.

• Learn about the 2024 BPM vision and its focus on contemporary Afro-futurism
• Use Afro-futurism to imagine innovative and transformative possibilities for Black giving
• Identify practical steps we can take today to advance and prepare for the future of Black philanthropy
• Discuss how others in the philanthropic sector and the broader community can align with a more powerful future for Black giving

Moderated by: Ebonie Johnson Cooper, Faculty Director, Do Good Institute, University of Maryland; Founder of Young Black & Giving Back Institute

Panelists include: Chelsea Brown, Principal, The Black Mill; Edward Jones, Vice President, ABFE; Princess Gamble, Associate Vice President and COO, Howard University; and Joy Bentley Phillips, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer, Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School

Learn more and register here.

Join the Graduate Art History Association (GAHA) and The David C. Driskell Center for a lecture by Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. 4 pm tea, 5 pm lecture.

Learn more here.

Free African Language Resources

Connie DiJohnson and Bryan Anderson, both from the NFLC (ARHU), are our featured speakers.

Learn about the NFLC-UMD's free resources for African language learning and maintenance with Connie DiJohnson and Bryan Anderson. The NFLC-UMD's portal has over 1,000 language learning materials and self-assessments in African languages. Join us for a tour of the portal and share your language learning needs. While this session will focus on African language resources, we will also share some additional resources available to language learners more broadly, including for learners of less commonly taught languages. Many of the resources can also be adapted for a classroom setting. Come learn about the different language learning resources made available by NFLC-UMD. If you are a language learner or teach languages, you won’t want to miss this session about free language learning resources that are available to you.

The virtual event will be held on April 29 at 12:00 pm via Zoom. Attendees must register to receive a Zoom link. 

Learn more and register to attend.

The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and School of Public Health co-host a screening of "Birthing Justice," a feature-length documentary discussing the issues fueling the maternal health crisis within the African American community and advocating for best practices to enhance birthing equity for all women, especially Black women.

The filmmakers explore this national epidemic in four regions—Washington, D.C., Augusta, GA, several areas in Missouri and California, interviewing those affected by current policies, i.e. birthing individuals and healthcare professionals, as well as those at the forefront of advancing policy change, such as birthing advocates, activists and policy makers.

Following the film screening, there will be a conversation about Black women's health and resilience, healthcare inequities, policy solutions and more, with:

Denise Pines, Executive producer and co-writer, Birthing Justice
Stephanie Shonekan, Dean, College of Arts and Humanities
Mia Smith-Bynum, Professor and chair, Department of Family Science, School of Public Health
Ruth Zambrana, Professor (WGSS), director, Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity
There will be a brief reception after the screening and discussion.

Date: Friday, April 26, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. 
Location: Gildenhorn Recital Hall in The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland
Reception to follow.

This event is free, but space is limited, so RSVP to attend!

Learn more and register here.

Join us on Wednesday, April 24th as we inaugurate the new Frederick Douglass Center for Leadership Through the Humanities, a hub for humanities scholarship and programming that engages the public and works towards social justice and equity, with a special event featuring world-renowned poet, educator and activist Nikki Giovanni. Her work exploring race, gender, sexuality and the African American family has inspired generations to fight for change. Giovanni will chat with ARHU Associate Dean GerShun Avilez, who leads the Douglass Center, and ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan, as well as answer audience questions. A reception will follow.

This free event is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities, Arts for All and the Division of Student Affairs. 

Learn more and register here.

In this presentation, we will share our experience working with Scholarly Editing to create a digital edition of fourteen stories centering Black and Black-Native life and humanity, which are derived from Louisiana's colonial archive.

After a brief overview of the Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) project and our guiding principles, we will walk through the process of undertaking the digital edition, choosing the stories we have foregrounded, designing the components of our edition, and collaborating as a team to transcribe, translate, and encode the primary source documents. Our discussion will address the ways in which we have utilized, remixed, and stretched the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to highlight the presence and lived experiences of named and unnamed enslaved people, connecting them and their stories using specific keywords such as kinship and wellness. To conclude, we will place this micro-edition within our broader vision for the digital life of the project: a pair of interoperable static sites. As a whole, we make the case that digital scholarly editing—when guided by scholarship in Black Studies and Critical Digital Humanities—can offer a toolkit that can be adapted explicitly to confront the violence of slavery's archive and build a praxis of recovery, repair, and refusal.

Learn more and register here.

Are you an undergraduate student contemplating pursuing a second degree and are interested in research? Are you a graduate student who could benefit from hearing about the dissertation process?

CRGE is excited to host the Qualitative Research Interest Group (QRIG) Spring 2024 Advanced Doctoral Student Dissertation Award Panel on Zoom from 12 to 2 PM EST next Thursday, April 18, 2024. This event is open to UMD faculty, staff, and students, as well as participants external to UMD.

At this year's panel, "Why Critical Thinking? Black Girls, Spaces, and Education," three past QRIG Awardees will discuss their successful
research and dissertation processes. Please see https://crge.umd.edu/ with more information on the panelists

Please use this link
https://umd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtdO6pqz8iGdBWdXHdMbqyTCNa8hVJ49AQ to register for the event. Once registered, you will receive a confirmation email with the Panel Zoom link and an opportunity to add the date/time to your calendar.

Please email crge@umd.edu if you have any questions.

Join the BSU-UMD Social Justice Alliance and 2nd Lt. Richard W. Collins III Foundation for the 6th Annual SJA Symposium titled: "Lift Every Voice:'' Artists for Social and Racial Justice on Friday, April 12th from 11:00am to 1:00pm. Hear from University President's, the Collins' family, members of the Social Justice Alliance and symposium panelists: Amanda Seales, Keisha Knight Pulliam, Nikkolas Smith, Laura Coates and Leon Timbo as they explore the intersections of anti-Black racism, social justice, entertainment and art.

Learn more and register here.

Join the University of Maryland as we welcome alums back to College Park to celebrate with friends, reconnect with fellow classmates and celebrate Terp pride!

Learn more here.

The 2024 Bebe Koch Petrou Displacements Symposium, hosted by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies in the Department of English, features speakers and workshops focusing on the theme of displacements.

Learn more here. 

Join us Tuesday March 26 at 12:30pm for WILDWOOD: BlackDH Adventures in Southside Chicago Worldmaking, a lecture featuring Elizabeth Murice Alexander.

From the archive to the screen, Black digital humanists regularly engage hypertext literature and interactive media as tools of social justice-based creative placemaking.

In this presentation, Alexander examines the use of interactive media for Black community worldbuilding and presents her own work in this area. WILDWOOD, a Black solarpunk digital gamebook, visions life in a rewilded future version of West Englewood, a neighborhood on the southside of Chicago. In the game, Alexander incorporates elements of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling and tabletop gaming to explore community histories and futures through adventures in Black speculative worldbuilding, while also experimenting with hypertext fiction and AI image generation as digital placemaking tools. As such, WILDWOOD offers tools to write future visions of Black communities, and space to enact these visions through digital play.

Learn more and register.