Announcements

Last Thursday, Africana Studies program faculty, staff and students had a meet and greet to learn about the major and minor. The event ended with a small Kwanzaa celebration!

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New Africana Studies Director Brings Global Perspective to Lehigh. This fall, the College of Arts and Sciences welcomes Simone A. James Alexander as the new director of the Africana Studies program and a new faculty member in the English department. Alexander brings years of experience as chair and director of Africana Studies from her time at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Alexander chose Lehigh because of the opportunities for collaborative work and to engage with different departments. “Lehigh was interested in enhancing Africana in so many ways that I felt that I had something to contribute,” she says. Her research, teaching, and scholarship are sure to expand the program’s diverse and multicultural aspects.

Read the full article >

B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods. His perspective and theoretical orientation are rooted in the histories and paradigms of Black Sociology and the Black Radical Tradition. 

Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. His second book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a collaborative photo-essay collection featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.

Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also building an expansive archive of oral history interviews and photographs focused on the histories and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural South.

Click here to download the PDF of his visit to Lehigh

Public Events

October 10, 2024
Trouble in Mind—Theatrical Performance and Talkback
Learn More >

October 11, 2024
We Travel, We Dance, We Make—Film Screening and Talkback
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October 15, 2024
Art in Dialogue: Placemaking Practices by Folk Artists from the American South—Walk and Talk
Learn More >

October 17, 2024
It’s Only Hidden if you Don’t Look: Race, Ghosts, and the Archive—Public Lecture
Learn More >

Journalist and author Victor Luckerson will speak about the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its resulting impact when he presents a lecture titled, Beyond the Massacre: The Legacy of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street," February 28, 2024, 6:00 p.m.  in room 108 of the Business Innovation Building.

Luckerson’s award-winning book, Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District chronicles the history of Tulsa’s Greenwood District through the eyes of families who have called the place home for generations. It is the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased. Over more than a century these families endured racial violence, urban renewal, and gentrification—but they were building for themselves all the while.

“Built from the Fire provides an engaging immersion into Tulsa's Greenwood district both before and after the 1921 Tulsa race riot,” said Brian Creech, professor and chair of journalism..”But it also provides a portrait of American racial capitalism, and the more mundane injustices visited upon Black communities throughout the 20th century in the name of urban development and renewal. We are excited to bring him to campus and to share this story with the Lehigh community."

Built From the Fire was named a top book of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was recognized with a Best in Business Book Award by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

“Prior to writing Built from the Fire, Victor’s success as a journalist for Time, Sports Illustrated and The Ringer primed him for his well-researched, essential debut book, which brings neglected black history to the public,” said Meredith Cummings, teaching assistant professor of journalism. “He does what good journalists do: give voice to those that might have gone unheard and holds power accountable.”

Currently the Writer in Residence at The University of Tulsa, Luckerson has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, TIME magazine and Smithsonian magazine. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre in Rosewood, Florida. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of black history called Run It Back.

His lecture is co-sponsored by the department of journalism and the Africana studies program.  For more information about the event, contact Meredith Cummings in the department of journalism.