Announcements

Join us on Thursday, April 2 at 3:00 pm in Drown 010 for a discussion with Dorothy Berry, Curator at the National Museum of Africana American History and Culture. Please RSVP here by March 26.

As cultural heritage institutions across the nation grapple with the realization that their collecting histories have captured an incomplete picture of history, curators and archivists like Dorothy Berry have been drawn into complicated conversations. The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities brings together years of those conversations from their origins in conference halls, webinars, and reading rooms to open them up to the public.

Dorothy Berry is an archivist and writer whose work can be found in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Public Domain Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her writing is informed by archival methodologies from a range of cultural heritage institutions, where she continues to implement creative methods to make archival collections related to Black life available more broadly.

Presented by the Africana Studies Program and the Lehigh Libraries.

Click here to purchase the book.

Join us for Faculty Film Screening and Discussion on March 17 at 12:00 pm in Drown 010!

Kwakiutl L. Dreher is a director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, and author from South Carolina. Dreher wrote the screenplay, Anna (2018), and plays the mother, Nan, to the main character in the story. Anna won Best Animation at the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles and the research on the film received the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize. She directed, co-wrote, and -produced The Bell Affair, a feature-length film based on the true story of Daniel and Mary Bell, an enslaved family who initiated the largest escape to freedom in the history of the nation. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bell Affair won Best Animation in the Prince George’s County Film Festival; received a Certificate of Nomination for International Award – Experimental in the Cannes at the Silk Roads Film Festival; and won 2022 Creative Work of the Year by NuTech Ventures at the University of Nebraska.

Please RSVP here. Lunch will be provided.

Wandi Wang, assistant professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University, has been awarded a grant from the ASIANetwork Embodied Learning About Asia Program to support an innovative, multidisciplinary initiative in Wang's "Five Senses in Traditional China" course this fall.

Read the full story from CAS News.

As part of a series of events celebrating Women’s History Month, the Africana Studies Program at Lehigh University welcomes Kwakiutl L. Dreher for a presentation of a feature length film The Bell Affair, a project in collaboration with animating artist Michael Burton and historian Wiliam G. Thomas, III. Based on Thomas’s research from his book A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War, Dreher will screen The Bell Affair and facilitate Q&A thereafter.

About the film: Daniel and Mary Bell sued for their freedom from slavery and won. After slaveholders threaten to re-enslave them and their children, the Bells led one of the largest escape attempts in American history. Their inspiring story is brought to cinema for the first time.

Historian Monica Najar has spent many years unraveling one of the most sensational and misunderstood stories in American publishing history — the tale of Maria Monk, whose lurid 1836 account of convent life became a 19th-century bestseller. It told shocking stories of sexual assault, murder and abuse inside a Montreal convent, stories that helped fuel anti-Catholic sentiment in America for generations. But Monk herself — a 19-year-old pregnant woman who arrived in the United States from Montreal — was most likely never the convent and she died penniless in a poorhouse, never profiting from her own narrative.

The book, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, sold 300,000 copies before 1860 and continued to be reprinted well into the 20th century. Monk made sensational accusations that during her time as a nun at Montreal's Hôtel-Dieu, she had been forced by church authorities to participate in horrific acts including the murder of a fellow nun who refused priests' immoral demands. Capitalizing on intense anti-Catholic sentiment, newspapers and New York editors promoted Monk's allegations as exciting "true" revelations about  convent life.

When the very pregnant Monk took refuge in the Bellevue Almshouse in 1835, she had nothing but a salacious story to tell. But a host of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant men saw her narrative as opportunity to convince Americans of the threat of Catholicism—and to make a lot of money for themselves as they did so. Collectively, these men and Monk worked to produce a book they could publish and that would excite a purchasing public, eager for scandal, despite the big holes in her story. 

Read the full story from CAS News.

The Africana Studies Program hosted our End-of-Year Party and Kwanzaa Celebration on December 3rd in Williams Hall Global Commons Featuring Lehigh AAS Alumnus Michael Tahiru in our inaugural segment "Where Are They Now?"

Image

Image

Image

The Africana Studies Program welcomes their Fall 2025 Visiting Faculty Fellow Merle Collins for an exciting and engaging week of discussions. Join us for these upcoming events:

Monday, November 10, 2025
Welcome Reception
4:30 pm in Global Commons, Williams Hall

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 Public Lecture and Book Signing
"Society, History and the Voices of Caribbean Literature"
4:30 pm in Sinclair Auditorium

Thursday, November 13, 2025 Faculty Book Discussion*
"Rhythm, Rhyme, Recitation and the Shaping of Imagination"
12:00 pm in Williams 341
*RSVP Here by Fri, Nov 7

Friday, November 14, 2025
Dramatized Reading with Merle Collins
11:00 am in Drown 210

Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her most recent novel, inspired by the story of the Grenadian mother of Malcolm X, won the 2025 Caribbean Studies Association’s Barbara Christian Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (UK) and longlisted for the 2024 Bocas Prize for Literature (Caribbean).   

Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995), La Couleur de l’oubli (French edition, 2023), Angel (2011, 1997); short story collections: Rain Darling (1997), The Ladies are Upstairs (2011); poetry collections: Lady in a Boat (2003), Rotten Pomerack (1992), Because the Dawn Breaks (1987); a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe (2013). Her critical works include “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of the caribbean island of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. From 1995 to 2021, she taught Caribbean Literature at University of Maryland, College Park. 

Derek G. Handley is an associate professor in the English Department, affiliated faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies department, and affiliated faculty in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before arriving at UWM, Derek taught in the English Department at Lehigh University and was an affiliate of Africana Studies. He was a Chamberlain Project Fellow in English and Black Studies at Amherst College, and a Mellon Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Currently he’s  the co-director of the Mapping Racism and Resistance research project, which comprehensively maps racial covenants and uncovers Black resistance to such discrimination.

Join us Tuesday, October 14, 2025 for these events:

Book discussion Struggle for the City: Narratives of Place in the Black Freedom Struggle 12:00-1:30pm in Drown 010

From Blight to Belonging: Narratives of Place in the Black Freedom Struggle 4:30-6:00 pm in STEPS 101 

For more information, please contact incasip@lehigh.edu