Endowment and Fellows | Interdisciplinary Programs

Overview

Lehigh’s Africana Studies program has been awarded a prestigious $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that funds high-quality research, education and public programs at colleges and universities, museums and other institutions across the United States.

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Public Humanities Programs

Programs that will be funded through the NEH Challenge grant include Public Humanities Programs, including a new Community Visions Program in which faculty and students will join with Bethlehem, Pa., residents and other community partners in forums, town halls and public meetings to deliberate on local concerns that they can address together.

Student workshops

Africana Studies faculty will work in partnership with teachers and administrators to create classroom, curriculum and workshop events that regularly connect high school students with collegiate scholarship. In turn, these partnerships will help inform curriculum development in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Digital documentation

The Africana Studies program will more robustly document and archive its efforts, allowing for broader dissemination to area schools, church and community groups.

Public Humanities Visiting Fellows

Nationally and locally recognized public intellectuals, artists and activists working in the arts, humanities and social sciences will take up residencies on the Lehigh campus to provide public lectures or performances, conduct workshops or visit classrooms at area schools, among other activities.

Public Humanities Graduate Fellows

A yearly tuition and stipend will be established for a graduate student pursuing work in Africana Studies and the public humanities. The emphasis will be on linking scholarship to public knowledge building through research activities directly related to community concerns.

Public Humanities Research Grants

Grants will be awarded each semester for research and humanities initiatives. Eligible projects might include gallery exhibits, oral history projects, digital storytelling or public theater performances, among others. Community Interactions. The Africana Studies program will use endowed funding to expand partnerships into long-term collaborations and to begin working with new partners in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. To date, Africana Studies has built partnerships with the Greater Shiloh Church in Easton, Perkiomen School in Pennsberg, the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Liberty High School in Bethlehem, and PBS-39.

Contribute to the Endowment

The three-to-one matching grant will require Lehigh to raise $1.5 million over the next five years.

Donate Here

Meet our Fellows

With the support of the NEH Public Humanities Visiting Fellows Endowment Fund, Lehigh University’s Africana Studies Program is pleased to welcome visiting fellows to engage with the faculty, staff, students, and local community for two-week residencies. Fellows provide public lectures and/or performances, conduct workshops, and visit classes, among other activities.

Past Fellows

Spring 2022

Salamishah Tillet

A scholar, writer, and activist, Salamishah Tillet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015. She writes about popular culture, politics, gender, sexuality, and race, and before The Times, wrote about politics and culture for The Nation and The Root. She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021), and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). She is the co-host and co-producer of “The Because of Anita” podcast with Cindi Leive of The Meteor.

Currently, she is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies and the director of Express Newark, the Center for Socially Engaged Art and Design at Rutgers University - Newark. Upon arriving at Rutgers, she founded New Arts Justice, an initiative for feminist approaches to public art in the City of Newark.

Erica Williams

Erica l Williams poses for a photo and wear a white shirt and blue earrings

Erica L. Williams is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), and co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018). She has also published in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; as well as several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently working on two projects - an ethnography of Black feminist activism in Salvador, Brazil, and an autoethnographic travel memoir.