Black Studies

In 2021, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill approved the establishment of graduate programs in its African American and diaspora studies department. The department is now developing the curriculum and searching for graduate faculty. The first students will enroll in these new graduate programs in the fall of 2025.

The University of Pittsburgh’s graduate program in Africana Studies has announced that it will enroll its first cohort of students in its Ph.D. program this coming fall. The new Ph.D. program will offer students the choice of three different concentrations: Race & Equity, Migration & Community Transformation, and Culture & Creative Production.

On February 11, the College Board issued a statement that said, "we are proud of this course. But we have made mistakes in the rollout that are being exploited. We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander." On February 13, Governor Ron DeSantis said that Florida may reevaluate Florida's entire relationship with The College Board.

Ron DeSantis, the newly re-elected governor of Florida, has notified all state-operated universities in Florida that they are required to “provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory,” as well as an accounting of all state funds used to fund such efforts.

The new Black studies department will work in close collaboration with the university’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, which was established in 1986.

Last fall, Pennsylvania State University announced plans for the center that it said would be dedicated to research and scholarship around racism and racial bias. Now, after installing a new president, the university's plans for the new center have been abandoned.

Emory University states that the doctoral program is the first of its kind in the southeastern United States and the first at a private university in the entire South. Each student in the program will receive specialized training in one of three fields: gender and sexuality; social justice and social movements; or expressive arts and cultures. The first students will enroll in the fall of 2023.

This fall for the first time, there is an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. The course is being offered in 60 high schools throughout the United States. The new offering makes a total of 40 Advanced Placement tests and it is the first new subject added since 2014.

Who was the first African American student at Harvard? This question is not as easy to answer as one might think – and, with the recent discovery of a name buried in an 1841 Harvard catalogue, a new possible answer has come to light.

The law school’s CRT Forward Tracking Project is the first in the United States to precisely identify, catalog, and contextualize these efforts at the local, state, and federal levels.

Meredith McGill, chair of the department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Jacqueline Goldsby, a professor of English, African American studies, and American studies at Yale, are developing a digital database dedicated to the study of Black-authored and Black-published books, magazines, and newspapers.

Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of the African American studies department at Emory University in Atlanta, has announced that the first cohort of Ph.D. students in African American studies will begin the program in the fall of 2023. It will be the first doctoral program in the field in the southeastern United States.

Oxford University Press has announced that it is embarking on a project to create the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been named editor-in-chief of the project.