Past Events

February 19, 2015

On Friday, February 27th 6 - 9 pm, African American Studies graduate student Jarvis Givens will participate in a panel discussion on #BlackLivesMatter and the civil rights movement at MoAD in San Francisco. This is event is co-sponsored by the MoAD Vanguard and the SF Alphas. 

April 17, 2014

GERALD HORNE, Ph.D., J.D., will be discussing his newest books, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance (NYU Press) and the Origins of the United States of America and Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Illinois Press). 

April 14, 2014

Liberating Dreams Symposium bitly.com/LiberateDreams On Saturday, May 3rd,   2014, the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley is excited to host a symposium exploring how we begin to Liberate Our Dreams.  Our guiding questions for the day are what does it mean to liberate our dreams and how do we begin?  Nikky Finney, John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair of Southern Literature & Creative Writing, English & African American Studies, University of South Carolina will bring our keynote address.  Interactive workshops designed to help symposium participants access their creative selves will also be featured.  This gathering is in an…

March 31, 2014

March 31, 2014

February 4, 2014

In honor of African American History Month, The Department of African American Studies is co-sponsoring a film and panel discussion on the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat at BAM/PFA this Friday February 7th.  Please join us and please spread the word! To register: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/free-event-kqed-presents-an-afternoon-with-basquiat-at-bampfa-tickets-10086875115

January 21, 2014

This year's keynote speaker is Bryant Terry... Bryant Terry is a chef, food justice activist, and author of four books, including the critically acclaimed Vegan Soul Kitchen. His fourth book, Afro-Vegan, will be published by Ten Speed Press on April 8, 2014. He is also the host of Urban Organic, a multi-episode web series that he co-created. His interest in cooking, farming, and community health can be traced back to hischildhood in Memphis, Tennessee, where his grandparents inspired him to grow, prepare, and appreciate good food. Bryant’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Food and Wine, Gourmet, Sunset, O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, Yoga Journal, and Vegetarian Times among many other…

October 30, 2013

The Cost of Sugar In her presentation, UC Regents' lecturer Cynthia McLeod takes us back to the 18th-century Caribbean plantation colony Suriname. She presents Surinamese society through the eyes of two Jewish sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the "New Jerusalem of the River," known today as the Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname which boasts the first synagogue in the Western hemisphere. The Cost of Sugar is a frank exposé of life in the Dutch slave colony when sugar ruled as kind - and the tragic toll it took on the lives of colonists and…

October 29, 2013

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist…

October 23, 2013

Geoffrey Raymond and Nikki Jones, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara Kristin Precoda, SRI International Abstract: This talk reports some initial findings from an ongoing, large-scale observational study of policing practices in two major cities. Using a large database of video recordings of police-civilian encounters (drawn from two sources, dash mounted cameras in patrol cars and video recordings made by researchers) and research methods that have enhanced the delivery of healthcare (by improving communication between doctors and patients, see Mangione-Smith, et al., 2004; Heritage, et al., 2010) this project has three main goals: (i) to understand and describe basic aspects…