I hope everyone is settling into the fall semester. We have lots to be excited about this academic year, including the formal launch of Prairie View A&M University’s (PVAMU) African American Studies program! As Director of the program I would like to introduce myself to the campus and share a bit more about the field of African American Studies, program goals and priorities, and future events.

During the start of President Simmons’ tenure at PVAMU she called for the creation of an African American Studies department, emphasizing the importance of the field’s ability to provide critical knowledge for our students in the areas of race, social justice, African American history and culture.

While PVAMU is one of a handful of HBCUs with an African American Studies bachelor’s degree granting program, HBCU students were at the forefront of college activism that led to the creation of Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies overall. During a period of unprecedented growth at PVAMU, launching a program in African American Studies honors our historical roots and allows our students and faculty to look to the future.

African American Studies as a discipline was founded in 1968; it is the interdisciplinary study of Black life (past, present, and future) across the diaspora. For over fifty years African American Studies has produced scholars that have conducted rigorous academic research on the effects of environmental racism and health disparities, they produced generative theories and analytical frameworks that help us understand systemic racism and unearthed Black histories that had been lost and/or subjected to erasure—helping move our narratives and lived experiences from “margin to center.”

I took my first African American Studies course while in high school at my local community college. African American Studies helped me understand who I was as a young Black girl from East Oakland. The field gave me a language to interrogate the many inequities I saw and experienced in my community (from environmental racism to dilapidated housing), and helped me connect them to larger systemic and global issues. Moreover, the field also provided a space to have critical conversations and conduct research that would make needed interventions to advance racial equity in public policy and other sectors.

With a rapidly diversifying workforce , it is my hope that every PVAMU student considers taking an African American Studies course to not only have a space to critically discuss the Black experience with their peers, but to also gain integral interpersonal communication skills and the language to help navigate 21st-century workplaces.

This program has been in the works for some years, and there is much that needs to be done to ensure that African American Studies at PVAMU will indeed serve as a model for other HBCUs. With that in mind, I will spend much of this year: (1) launching African American Studies core courses, (2) recruiting majors and minors, (3) building relationships and partnerships on campus and in the community, (4) coordinating co-curricular programs and events, and (5) collaborating with the Ruth J. Simmons Center to boost research opportunities for students.

Students that are interested in majoring or minoring in the program please do not hesitate to contact me. Staff and faculty, I look forward to meeting many of you on The Hill!