AFAM Course Initiative Launches
In June 2020, BUCH published a statement announcing several projects designed to address systemic racism through the lens of humanities methods and disciplines. One such project was a commitment to “provide funding for an initiative that would support the development and teaching of additional courses in African-American humanities areas.” Thanks to collaborative efforts by the African American Studies program, the CAS Dean’s Office, the Kilachand Honors College, and several humanities professors, the future of this project is now concrete.
The initiative was conceived with several goals in mind: First, to support AFAM in their mission to augment course offerings as they seek to create an academic major and transition from a program to a department; second, to address the reality that more students wish to enroll in AFAM courses than current offerings are able to accommodate. This is the particular challenge that Dr. Maurice Lee, Professor of English and co-chair of the CAS Diversity and Inclusion Committee, had in mind when he first proposed to teach an AFAM course: “During the protests over the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I attended an UMOJA town hall and heard a number of students say that they wanted more courses on African American subjects. I noticed that all the African American Studies courses for the next semester were full, and I wanted to pitch in.” It was Lee’s proposal that sparked this interdepartmental initiative.
Lee’s initial observation also touches on a third goal of this initiative: to “increase the range” of AFAM course offerings. Expanded course topics will challenge the BU community to think about how traditionally Eurocentric disciplines might be framed more inclusively. One new course that will be offered in fall 2021 meets this challenge head on. Professors Hannah Čulík-Baird and James Uden, both from the department of Classical Studies, will co-teach “African American Literature and the Classical Tradition.” As Uden explains, students will explore the “connections between Classics and African American literature and history” through questions like “whose ‘Classics’ are they? What makes a ‘Classic’?” Čulík-Baird adds that “because of the historical centrality of Classics in western education, the Black intellectual tradition has often taken the Classical as a site for the renegotiation of power. As a result, engagement with Classics appears in the works of many Black writers, thinkers, and artists who seek to define themselves against as well as alongside it.” Given their own identities and the subject matter of this course, Uden and Čulík-Baird see their decision to co-teach as an effort to “decenter” themselves, so “there is not just one, authoritative answer.”
The professors who will be teaching via the AFAM initiative represent a wide variety of positions, including Post-Doctoral Associate, Senior Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. Not only will the course offerings expand, but teaching opportunities and models as well. For instance, Post-Doctoral Associate Trent Masiki, who holds a PhD in Afro-American Studies and who currently teaches first year and senior writing in the Kilachand Honors College, emphasized that being the instructor of record for a course in his area of specialization will allow him to “broaden [his] post-doctoral experience and teaching portfolio.” His course, “The Afro-Latino Memoir,” “aims to open the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature by centering a long, but often neglected, history of African American literary, cultural, and political influences in Latino life writing.”
The following courses will be taught as part of the AFAM course initiative between spring 2021 and spring 2022:
Spring 2021
- Professor of English Maurice Lee, “Resistance, Revolution and Slavery in African American Literature”
- Postdoctoral Associate Trent Masiki (KHC), “The Afro-Latino Memoir”
Fall 2021
- Senior Lecturer in Spanish Molly Monet-Viera (Romance Studies), “Latinx Identities, Families and Communities”
- Assistant Professor of Classical Studies Hannah Culik-Baird and Associate Professor of Classical Studies James Uden, co-teaching “African American Literature and the Classical Tradition”
Spring 2022
- Senior Lecturer and Core Curriculum Director Kyna Hamill, “American Minstrelsy”
The Center views this initiative as a starting point and a mitigating strategy, not an end point or permanent fix. Participating faculty and sponsoring colleges and centers hope that high enrollment numbers will encourage the University to make a more sustainable, long-term commitment to broader course offerings on AFAM topics. Professor Lee echoed this sentiment, adding that he hopes that going forward, “BU will hire additional faculty to meet such needs on a more permanent basis.”