Bushasche Etude by Dr. Pearl Primus
Department Manager Jennifer Adams receives handcrafted drums from West Africa ordered by Professor Momar Ndiaye for Africanist movement practice.
Production Manager Jonathon Hunter unpacks handcrafted drums from West Africa ordered by Professor Momar Ndiaye for Africanist movement practice.
Production Manager Jonathon Hunter unpacks handcrafted drums from West Africa ordered by Professor Momar Ndiaye for Africanist movement practice.
Music Supervisor Susan Chess admires the new African drums.
In 2021, Melissa Gilliam became the new Provost for the university. She brings a clear dedication to building on the strengths of the faculty and promised 350 new faculty to be hired over the next decade under what she named the Race, Inclusion and Social Equity (RAISE) Initiative. In November 2021, the first call for proposals was issued, asking for departments to create proposals for hires around unifying themes or topics. The turnaround was fast, but the opportunity was exciting and with funding coming from Office of Academic Affairs for some years, the college could approve proposals more readily.
Through strategic conversations, the Department of Dance partnered with the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of History of Art. The chairs, Adélékè Adéèkó and Karl Whittington, respectively, along with Susan Petry, co-wrote an extensive proposal for a new faculty member in each department, under the umbrella title of “Global Black Arts.” Each department has a unique profile, but the three new hires will be brought in as a cohort to establish some cross disciplinary research and teaching.
The dance faculty put forward a proposal around broadening the program’s Africanist expertise. This hire will be a full-time tenure-track position as part of the Global Black Arts cluster hire. The department is deepening ongoing investments in African, African American and African diasporic practices across the undergraduate (BFA) and graduate (MFA and PhD) programs and this artist and/or scholar will support and extend this work with a focus on dance, music and/or cultural practices in the African diaspora with a focus on Brazil or the Caribbean.
Our proposal was accepted and the provost’s office wrote, “We were impressed by the prospects of the Global Black Arts group to become a place that not only produces the highest caliber of arts research, but can serve as a space that would ignite the campus community and stakeholders more generally to seriously engage with the arts as a space that both universalizes and personalizes the role that arts and creative expression play in larger social, historical, economic and political processes which are raced by design.”
A search committee will begin work in August, and the three departments will intersect with each other’s searches as well, to develop cogent connections across the hires. The new faculty member will start in Autumn 2023.
