Black Studies and African Studies: Institutional Histories and Futures

Join The Center for African Studies and the Stanford Center for Humanities in the first installment of their Producing Knowledge In and Of Africa series, Black Studies and African Studies: Institutional Histories and Futures. This virtual event features renowned Stanford faculty that will touch on the prevailing dynamics between African Studies and Black Studies, discussing what the future holds for both subjects. We hope you'll join us for what promises to be an engaging event. 

Please note: Registration is required to attend any part of the Producing Knowledge In and Of Africa Workshop.

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Speaker Bios

Clayborne Carson - Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History and Ronnie Lott Founding Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute 

Dr. Clayborne Carson is the founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he is also the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History. He has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movements the iconic orator inspired. Dr. Carson’s scholarly publications have focused on African-American protest movements and political thought of the period after World War II. In 1985, Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to edit and publish the papers of her late husband. Under Carson’s direction, the King Papers Project has produced seven volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. He has served as a consultant on several documentary films and has appeared on many national TV and radio programs.

Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of American History and Director of African and African American Studies at Stanford University

Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (2014), examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. Allyson is currently at work on two books, both forthcoming from Penguin Press. Nowhere to Run: African American Travel in Twentieth Century America explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that African American motorists experienced on the road. To Tell the Terrible examines black women’s testimonies against and collective memory of sexual violence. 

Ato Quayson, Professor of English at Stanford University and President of the African Studies Association 

Ato Quayson is Professor of English at Stanford University. He took his BA (Hons; First Class) from the University of Ghana and gained a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cambridge. He is Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), the Royal Society of Canada (2013), and the British Academy (2019). He has published 5 monographs and edited 8 volumes, along with several articles in a variety of fields including African and postcolonial literature and literary theory, disability studies, urban studies, and diaspora studies, among others. His most recent monograph, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014) was co-winner of the Urban History Association’s Best Book Prize (non-North American category) in 2015. His new monograph titled Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and he is completing Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra with Grace Toleque for Chicago University Press and Intellect Books. Quayson is founding Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and President of the African Studies Association.

Richard Roberts, Frances & Charles Field Professor in History at Stanford University

Richard Roberts is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University and former director of the Center for African Studies. He has published widely on the social and economic history of French West Africa. His recent monographs include Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912 (2004) and Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Soudan 1800-1946 (1996). He has also co-edited multiple volumes on law, gender, and the family in colonial Africa, including Marriage by Force?: Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (2016), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (2006), and Law in Colonial Africa (1991). An award-winning teacher and scholar, he has received numerous prizes and fellowships for his research from a variety of institutions, including the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. His latest book is a study of colonialism, law, and the bargains of collaboration in what is now Mali, as told through the life of Faama Mademba Sèye, king of Sinsani.