Robert Lee Allen was lovely to me. He was certainly the calmest revolutionary I ever met. My first association with The Black Scholar was publishing in it, an experience wholly started by Dr. Allen. After a traumatic, but ultimately successful QE experience, it was Robert that helped me find my confidence again. JFinley and I were his GSIs for 5B, and he asked us each to do a guest lecture based on our own work. Then he asked me to review one of his articles. Then he asked that I be invited to participate in the symposium for the 40th anniversary of his Black Awakening in...
I first met Robert when he was on the Board of the Oakland Men’s Project, a group in Oakland working with men to educate young men and boys about violence against women.
I couldn't believe my eyes, or my heart. Here was this gorgeous, dimpled, well-read, smart, accomplished, empathetic, introspective man with acute intuitive intellect, who was a social justice warrior with a sense of humor and adventure, and one of only a few men in the country dedicating himself to ending violence against women, which was also my job then at Futures without Violence.
Darieck Scott’s The Dream-Slaves is a queer, science fiction odyssey that pulses with themes of liberation, identity, and survival amid dystopian forces. Published by Punctum Books in September 2024, Scott’s novel transports readers to Norio—a city where reality and magic blur, and the boundaries of humanity itself are contested. The Dream-Slaves is now available for review, and we hope you'll consider...
Deborah Freedman Lustig, Associate Director of Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI)
Stephen Small, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAS) and Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), is retiring in December 2024 after 30 years as a faculty member at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in Liverpool, England, Professor Small came to Berkeley in 1984 as a graduate student in Sociology, where he became a graduate student trainee at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, now ISSI. After completing his PhD in 1989, he briefly left Berkeley for teaching positions in the UK and at U-Mass Amherst, and then returned as a faculty...
African American Studies is excited to welcome our newest addition to the faculty, Assistant Professor Henry Washington Jr.! Professor Washington was previously an Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. We recently sat down with him to learn more about his work and ideas for his new role:
What does your research focus on? My research interests are pretty wide-ranging, but everything I write shares a curiosity about how racial and sexual...
The University of California, Berkeley, is making a hopeful case for African American studies amid attacks on academic freedom.
Critical as they are to a healthy democracy, open conversations at public universities on race, history, and freedom are increasingly threatened by an array of attacks—from cuts to funding for humanities departments to...
