Announcements

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

Simone A. James Alexander, director of Africana studies at Lehigh University, founded the Africana Inaugural Book Club to counter book bans and create a space for students, faculty and staff to engage with Africana literature. The club meets each semester to discuss works by visiting authors and scholars.

Amid growing efforts to remove African American and African diaspora literature from classrooms at schools and universities worldwide, Simone A. James Alexander has taken a stand. 

As the director of Africana studies at Lehigh, Alexander said she felt compelled to respond to book bans by advocating for diverse literature that reflects the experiences and resilience of Black communities. She also aims to expand the Africana studies department and bring important books back into the classroom. 

“My goal, in many ways, is to bring back these books as a way to resist that movement that’s attempting to completely erase them,” she said.

Her initiative, the Africana Inaugural Book Club, held its first meeting last semester. 

Read more from The Brown and White.

Historian Joseph Williams explores late 19th and early 20th century Black women’s discourse about the divine, the afterlife, and human nature.

America in the late 19th and early 20th century, often called the Woman’s Era by some historians, was a time of intense activism by women striving for racial and gender equality. A key organization in this movement was the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), founded in 1896, which advocated—and continues to advocate—for the rights of both women and African Americans. Historian Joseph Williams is delving into how Black women engaged with religion, the divine, and the afterlife during this period. 

Williams’ research, which will culminate in a monograph, draws from a range of mediums including books clubs, organizational meetings records (such as those from the NACW and its conferences), newspapers, magazines, and speeches. “The purpose of the book is really to both map those ideas, but also to document how these women use those ideas to shore up their campaign for racial and gender equality,” he explains.

One prominent voice Williams examines is Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, social activist and journalist from Boston, who established The Woman’s Era magazine, an offshoot of her Woman’s Era Club. A publication Williams discovered while studying at DePaul University, there’s a particular report in the magazine that captured his attention. The club hosts Ednah D. Cheney, a prominent lecturer, who spoke on religious toleration and spiritualism. The account of the event in The Woman’s Era offers an interesting discussion on the role of religion in community and how it applies to equal rights.

Williams uses this exchange as a departure point for his project, highlighting how these women created a space for Black women to engage in a conversation generally associated with the academy or private clubs. These spaces weren’t for the elite but everyday readers and women, some of whom lacked formal education, yet were nonetheless drawing upon a host of religious traditions to foster an intellectual community.

Read the full story on CAS News.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, the Frank Banko Alehouse Cinema will host a Jane Austen Film Seminar with Dr. Michael Kramp, Professor of English at Lehigh University, on Saturday, September 27. This seminar will treat the history, global reach, and ongoing allure of Austen’s stories on screen. We will consider the various ways in which Austen’s novels and ideas have been adapted and deployed and explore the different impacts of her narratives around the world.

Saturday, September 27
11:00 A.M. – 1:00 P.M.
Venue: Frank Banko Alehouse Cinemas

Buy Tickets

Part of Jane Austen at 250: A Celebration on Screen

Dr. Michael Kramp is a Professor of English at Lehigh University, with appointments in Film and Documentary Studies and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Programs. His scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, masculinity studies, and critical theory, with additional work in textual editing, Anthropocene Studies, and Health Humanities. He is the author of Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man and Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience: Late Victorian Speculative Fiction, and has edited or co-edited several volumes, including Jane Austen and Masculinity and Jane Austen and Critical Theory.

Dr. Kramp currently leads Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities, a multi-year public humanities initiative that uses Austen’s enduring cultural relevance to engage broader audiences in conversations about the value of humanistic study. The project includes a podcast, documentary film, public-facing monograph, and edited volume.

"Jaws" turns 50 on June 20. The anniversary will be marked with TV airings of the film and its sequels as well as a big screen re-release. Watch it once or hundreds of times and the scare seems fresh every time, said Dawn Keetley, editor of the journal Horror Studies and professor of English and film. "Sharks stand in perfectly for wild nature that’s at the edge of where humans can go, and as humans, we always push at the border," she told USA Today. "Sharks mark where we can’t go very easily, maybe where we shouldn’t go. To the dangerous and the forbidden."

Read story from USA Today

Last Thursday, Caryl Phillips visited Lehigh for a reading and discussion of his latest book, Another Man in the Street, marking the opening of Africana Studies' Distinguished Lecture-Speaker Series. 

With teaching experience at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India and the United States, Caryl Phillips has shared his knowledge of literature around the world. 

Last week, he brought it to Lehigh.  

Read the full article about the event from the Brown and White >

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Joan Anim-Addo is a writer and scholar. Her publications include Janie, Cricketing Lady (poetry); Imoinda (libretto); Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham, and Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing. Currently Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, she is also the UK’s first Black Professor of Literature and the Humanities. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow. Her most recent publication is This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books (co-written). She is Founder-Editor of Blacklines, the Journal of Black British Writing, and Editor-in Chief of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Black British Writing, 3 Volumes (forthcoming).

Public Events

March 18, 2025
An Afternoon with Joan Anim-Addo Faculty/Student Discussion 

March 20, 2025
Imoinda Speaks: Authorising the enslaved Black Woman After Aphra Behn Public Lecture

March 21, 2025
Imoinda World Premiere – A Youth Production Film Screening

Asian and Asian American Studies program hosted Peter Hessler, author and staff writer for the New Yorker, last week. His narrative non-fiction workshop about his article "Dr. Don" drew a large crowd in Linderman 200.

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