Word: afros
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story of the book’s circuitous journey from Harvard Yard to Washington Square began in the mid-1980s. In 1985, Harvard’s Afro-American studies program was facing one of its greatest challenges since the dramatic founding of the department in 1969. The administration had, by many accounts, abandoned the department: funding was scant and there were few concentrators. That fall, civil rights activist Roger Wilkins, who was overseeing a newly-formed external review committee, met with Afro-American studies concentrators and graduate students affiliated with the program. “What should University Hall hear...
Meanwhile, Cabot Professor of English Literature and of Afro-American Studies Werner Sollors, who was then the energetic and resourceful chair of the department, was also working to raise the program’s visibility. With the 350th anniversary of the College less than a year away, he devised a plan. He and a few department members had recently published an informational pamphlet illustrated with photographs of African-American writers of Harvard. Why not ask the administration to underwrite the republication of these authors in a larger pamphlet for distribution at the 350th? The President and Fellows assented...
Today, Harvard’s curriculum offers a myriad of concentrations focusing on ethnic and regional studies, including Afro-American Studies, East Asian Studies, Sanskrit and Indian Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. These concentrations bring together the cultures and histories of various ethnic groups to define their position in culture and society. But problems arise both about whether the bounds of these concentrations are too specific, and about whether this specificity marginalizes and Orientalizes the study of ethnicity in Harvard academia...
Ethan Y. Yeh ’03 is currently spearheading an effort to establish an ethnic studies concentration under the direction of Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies Werner Sollors. The idea is to create a concentration for the study of the self-definition and boundaries of all ethnic groups...
...Chair Werner Sollors, professor of Afro-American Studies, has created the post of student liasion on the committee, although the liasion will not be a student on the Academic Affairs Committee, as some students had hoped. Instead, the liasion will be a student currently writing a thesis on ethnic studies or otherwise studying ethnic studies...