Brandeis University in Waltham, Masssachusetts. has announced plans to beef up its Black studies program. The university, where only 4 percent of the undergraduate student body is Black, has announced that it will hire two faculty members in African diaspora studies in the first phase of a multi-year cluster hire in the discipline.
Chad Williams, associate professor and chair of the department of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis, stated, “The field of African diaspora studies has allowed scholars to understand the connections as well as differences between dispersed peoples of African descent in exciting new ways — by grappling with issues related to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, language and religion in an interdisciplinary manner.”
Dr. Williams is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He said that the new faculty hires will establish “Brandeis as a premier institution for the study of how diasporas have and continue to shape our everyday lives.”
