Q&A: Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Dr. Frank Guridy on Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future
A Howard-Columbia Intellectual Partnership
In February 2021, Columbia University Press announced a new partnership with Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Columbia University’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department—the Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future series. Building on Columbia University Press’s history of publications in Black studies and history, sociology, religion, philosophy, and literature, and recognizing the important voice in African American studies and scholarly publishing that was lost with the closure of Howard University’s press over a decade ago, the partnership showcases scholarship and writing that enriches our understanding of Black experiences in the past, present, and future, with the goal of reaching beyond the academy to intervene in urgent national and international conversations about the experiences of people of African descent. Today we meet with series editors Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume, associate professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University, and Dr. Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and professor of history at Columbia University, to learn firsthand about their involvement with and aspirations for the project.
Q: First, I’d like to thank you for your time today. Before we jump into the series, can each of you share a little bit about yourselves?
Dr. Frank Guridy: I’m a professor at Columbia in the department of history and in African American and African Diaspora Studies. I’m a native New Yorker, a product of forces that many of us in the Black Diaspora have experienced—migration and displacement. My family is from the Caribbean—Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Those formative experiences growing up here in New York shaped my scholarly vision, my pedagogy vision, and my thinking about what Blackness means and how Black communities and Latinx, in my case too, have survived all the things we’ve been subjected to since the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
That formed my initial interest in my scholarship, which focused on the diasporic relationships between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. That was the subject of my first book. My most recent work is focused on sports, social justice, and society issues, mostly working on the United States but still with a diasporic sensibility. So I’ve been here at Columbia now for eight years. Before that, I taught at the University of Texas, Austin.
In all of my places of employment. I’ve been blessed to have joint appointments in history and Black studies. They both contributed to my formation as a scholar and as a person. I think that that sort of disciplinary mix has been productive in the field itself.
Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume: I’m also a New Yorker—born and raised in the Bronx. I went to Temple, where I majored in sociology, but the work I was passionate about was in Africana Studies, so I transitioned from sociology to Africana Studies. I wanted to talk about education, women, and history in a diasporic sense.
At Temple, I studied under Dr. Greg Carr, who’s at Howard, and focused on the work that he had done in shaping the discipline and what Black studies is not. That’s what I was trained to think about—the Black world on its own as a discipline, with its own lens and ways of meaning and looking at Black life. With that training, I’ve been able to look at many different angles of the Black experience, from gender studies to education; I do some work in film and am now looking at data science and environmental justice. With the tools I was given from the discipline as a young scholar, I have been able to think about questions differently and grapple with the way in which not only the academy but also the students are thinking about Blackness in their own spaces. Whether it’s an intro course in business, health, or political science, I have them grapple with questions we don’t spend too much time thinking about on this side of the water. I have them consider their own conditions on this side, then the other—on the continent, in the Caribbean from a historical standpoint going back to ancient Kemet, up to today. That’s where my work exists in this young stage of my career.
I’ve been at Howard going into my tenth year. I’m happy to be here, to be a part of the editorial board, to sit with scholars such as Frank, and to listen to the direction we hope the publications will take.
Q: How or when did you first hear about the Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future series, and what were your initial thoughts about the project?
Dr. Guridy: I’m on the Columbia University Faculty Publication Committee, so I was privy to what the Press had in mind. I joined the series editorial board in the summer of 2020—a very momentous summer, a very momentous year. I was excited to join just to get a sense of the editorial side of the scholarly publication enterprise and publication in general. But I was also excited about it because this is an important initiative by our Press and by our university. And I was really excited when I learned it was going to be a partnership with Howard. It gives us an innovative approach and therefore a distinct impact in the field.
Having an intellectual tradition of an HBCU—and not just any HBCU, but a foundational one like Howard University—and scholars in that community in all disciplines, combined with what we have here, gives us a unique mix and a unique vision that is historically rooted in New York and Washington, DC’s diasporic history. Washington, DC, is a city that has a substantial Black population, and that population has come from all over the place. I know those sensibilities are part of our initiative, and that’s what excited me.
In 2020, there was a supposed racial awakening in our country, including in the publication world. Some scholars of color and people of color like myself were a little skeptical. This new series struck me as something more than just a reaction to criticism of the publishing industry being racially exclusive and predominantly white. This seemed to be more substantial than that. That was what excited me.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I was recommended to join the series editorial board. Knowing how it was convened made it feel as if it was a reaction to political protest. But it was a good reaction that had a strong sense of sustainability. Those things were possible with those who had been included, not just on the Press side but on the department side from both universities. Also, the commitment to continue to meet and for writers to submit made it “real” alongside the excitement.
The editorial board that was convened to have the conversation made it authentic. Knowing that we were going to bring forth these works that would speak to a nontraditional reader, in and outside the classroom, was exciting.
Dr. Guridy: I think the thing that made our initiative forward-thinking is, we live in the United States, and we’re more attuned to the upheavals that took shape after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020, but we saw the extraordinary outburst of protest energy all over the world—outside the United States in Europe and other parts of the African Diaspora. And to me, it spoke to the ways the questions of structural racism and violence against Black people—take your pick of the issue—have always had a transnational, global resonance. And we saw that in 2020. So it made sense to me. I think it made sense to all of us that this series tries to capture, document, and expand upon our global understanding of the Black experience.
Q: From your perspective, how does the series contribute to the discourse surrounding the Black lived experience? What themes does it address, and why are they essential to today’s conversation?
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: That’s a great follow-up. Thinking about the question of the Black experience and its global context, I think the series puts that in context for people, for instance understanding how the death of George Floyd is felt everywhere. That’s just one iteration of something that may be happening in Brazil and then maybe happening on the continent. The series allows people to think about the same questions in a different culture or a different space; that connects us. It’s not a constant one-sided conversation, it’s a global conversation. People are interested in ways to teach and talk about the global Black experience. This series provides a different pathway.
Some texts deal with individuals and culture, some deal with infrastructure and culture, and some deal with events and culture. People are able to select what they feel strongly and want to read more about from a global perspective. And we’re asking the writers to think about their topic from different vantage points. Have you thought about what it means in a different language? Does this mean something for someone else at a different time who may be of African descent?
Dr. Guridy: To add on to what Amy’s already said, I think our series is going to remind us and encourage readers to appreciate the particularities of racism in different contexts. Especially for us in the United States. We tend to think about what we now call structural racism or anti-Black racism in very legible ways associated with police violence, associated with certain kinds of racial discrimination in this country. But those conditions are similar in Brazil or in Europe. There are also some real differences. There’s a real difference in the ways the Black experience is understood in a Brazilian case or European context and here. There are also different self-understandings that Black people have.
And this series demonstrates that in order to understand how structural racism works, you can’t simply take a U.S. model and apply it elsewhere. You really have to understand the particularities of a certain context, whether it’s Italy, London, Rio de Janeiro, Port-au-Prince, or Washington, DC. The books in our series demonstrate the ways those kinds of racism intersect with other types of domination, whether it’s gentrification, immigration, or the experience of immigration—which we don’t often associate with Black people in this country, but it certainly is the central theme of the diasporic experience—as are questions of gender and sexuality too.
I think we’re bringing home this goal of pushing beyond the notion that we understand racism in a very particular way, that’s legible to a U.S. reader only. And the task is to convey that to readers who are interested in a more global transnational context. That’s the spirit of a lot of the books that we already have in the pipeline. I think that’s going to continue, and it’s true to the traditions in our field as well.
Q: How does the series approach the intersectionality of race and other identities, such as gender and class, in the experiences of Black people in the Diaspora?
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: It’s an open door for an author to tell us what they think. Then it’s our job to say, “You know what? I see what you see.” We’ve had authors who have presented their view of Black life, and we disagreed and said, “We don’t see it that way.” But then there are authors who can look at an instance of an individual’s life and present the gender aspect, the politics aspect, the economic aspect, the changes over time, and then we say, “Okay. We see it.” So there is no set formula, but an agreed-upon understanding that there is no monolith that we’re promoting in the conversation about the Black Diaspora. There’s an intention to allow authors to push themselves to see a more complex, nuanced sense of Blackness that doesn’t exist in the publishing field. In some spaces it does, but in those places, there was resistance. In this space, there’s no resistance to you thinking differently about Black life.
Dr. Guridy: I think Amy is absolutely right. There’s a tendency, even in academia sometimes, but certainly in the popular realm, to have a set sense of how we understand racism or how we understand oppression, and we just slot Black people into that sort of framework. And it often doesn’t apply. I think—because we have this complementary knowledge on our editorial board—we’ve been able to see what the authors bring to us.
For example, they teach us to think about Blackness and indigeneity in a New York context, and to really account for the ways queer, Black, and indigenous people experience life in the New York City context or in Central America, distinct from somebody who’s straight. We have at least one book that addresses both Blackness and indigeneity and how they relate to queerness. If you’re not attentive to ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality at the same time, then you lose these particularities.
Q: The series description states that the goal is to go “beyond the academy and become part of urgent national and international conversations.” Are there plans to address the underrepresentation and marginalization of Black voices and perspectives in academic and scholarly research?
Dr. Guridy: The latter part of the question has a straightforward answer. That’s what our series is doing—it’s trying to address the underrepresentation of Black scholars, Black authors in academia and in scholarly research. Particularly at a moment when higher education is in crisis—when higher education, the humanities, and the social sciences are under attack—and university presses are not publishing in this field the way they did before. University presses are in a financial crisis.
I’ve been at this now for twenty-two years or so, and I feel that the questions coming up in Black studies are narrowing. They are important questions, but they seem to be the ones that resonate more frequently than others. So obviously, mass incarceration and police violence are extremely important, but there is a rush to publish on those subjects. Or, to think about systemic racism in a 2020 context instead of looking at the ways that cultural traditions have allowed Black people to survive in Jamaica, in the United States, France, or wherever.
To go back to what Amy was saying about her training at Temple, Black communities have their own intellectual traditions. They have their own ways of understanding issues. And so much of the publishing that I see out there is addressing white liberal conceptions of what racism is. In some ways, we see that in some of the popular discourse in this country around race, around the 1619 Project, for example. Certainly, as important as the work is, it was responding to a very particular way Blackness in America is understood. And the Black intellectual tradition is far richer than that. That’s what we’re seeing in the books we’re trying to publish.
Just by publishing a book on the history of HBCUs, that’s certainly a question about racism and higher education, but it’s also about the history of Black institution building, and those were central questions in our field. Some of that focus has been lost, and I see our series as reviving those questions about what it means to actually look at Black cultural survival strategies—not just the ways Black people are locked up or massacred or killed. What are the circumstances that allow Black life to flourish? That’s the sort of thing that I see in our series that is going to be an enormous contribution beyond the scholarship itself. But we also have to accept the fact that we just have to produce really good scholarly books, because those are becoming rare commodities in our world, where our fields in the social sciences and the humanities are under attack.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I agree. I have one thing to add: with the series, those who are writing and doing research in this way who haven’t had access to these types of avenues can submit. The people who are doing this work, who are on the tenure track, will find avenues whereby at an Ivy League school, they will be given consideration by a diverse set of editors. It’s addressing access at a structural level of the global conversation.
Q: How do you envision the future of the series, and how will it continue to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape of Black diasporic experiences?
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I hope the future will be, one, the books sell. That people really want to know about and have these conversations, and that the numbers support that.
And two, I hope that the goal of the project will be something that other publications are open to. There are few series that do this on a global scale in the publishing world, so for it to have a ripple effect in the publishing world and also in the classroom.
Dr. Guridy: I think the way it’s been perceived so far is as fulfilling a huge need, which is to provide another platform for scholars working on and publishing about the African Diaspora experience in a period when resources in that realm are shrinking.
I think writing itself is an important intervention that will entail publishing very specific studies of certain communities and certain contexts, but at some point we’re going to have to start publishing more synthetic books—books that are more geared to a popular audience. That’s certainly something we’re going to do. I was thinking earlier today about Michael A. Gomez’s synthetic history of the African Diaspora, Reversing Sail, which was published in 2004. We’re overdue for another synthetic book on the Black experience that shows, one, the question of enslavement precedes 1619 in the Americas. When we’re looking at Black migration, we’re not just talking about the Great Migration from the South to the North, we’re also talking about Caribbean migrants going to London, African migrants going to France, and Brazilian migrants coming to this country. So it’s this bigger history of migration that Gomez’s book did very well. We’re going to be publishing big synthetic works like that so that the reader in the classroom and a general reader who has an interest in these questions will stop and think, “Oh wow, I didn’t think about Black people in that way. I always thought everything started in Virginia, in 1619.” Well, no, it started well before then. Not to mention the need to produce good histories of Africa again.
I think we’re proceeding in the right way, building up in the right way, which is to build on the new scholarship that our scholars are producing. We need to provide platforms for this generation of knowledge producers. I use the term “knowledge producers” intentionally, because a lot of times we think of knowledge producers as the scientists who work in labs, but in fact, humanistic scholars are knowledge producers. This series is giving a platform to scholars who have been around, but usually young scholars who are looking for places to publish their work.
Q: Can you speak to the process of selecting authors and works for the series and the criteria used to determine inclusion?
Dr. Guridy: Our process is similar to other university press processes in terms of evaluating scholarship on that level. But I think what makes our series unique is that we have this board that has complementary knowledge. That’s very much part of the conversation when we meet to consider proposals for books. It helps us to think expansively about what we’re looking for.
It’s been easy because there’s such a need. There are so many talented authors out there. We haven’t had problems receiving submissions at all. We’re doing our promotion work and everything else. We’re getting a sense of what the field is offering us. I think that’s what Amy was also saying. So by the time we receive proposals, we are able to have the conversation among ourselves, and then they go to the Faculty Publication Committee. So there are vigorous steps along the way to make it happen. But we have an array of knowledge in different disciplines of African American studies and African Diaspora studies prior to the conversation. And I think that really helps us select wisely.
Q: Is there a work in the pipeline that you feel particularly passionate about at the moment?
Dr. Guridy: A lot of books are in the earlier phases. At the risk of sounding absurd, I’m very excited about our first book, Vital and Valuable. I think it’s great that we’re starting with a book about HBCUs. That signals to the reading public that those are the kinds of things we’re going to foreground in our series. Especially as somebody who’s on the Columbia side of things, where there’s an expectation to publish a certain kind of author who has Ivy League training and a certain kind of pedigree, I’m very excited because this book comes from a different intellectual tradition.
Q: This is the first partnership of its kind between an Ivy League and its press and an HBCU. What are some benefits of having Howard and Columbia partner together on this project?
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: It comes off as an Ivy League-HBCU partnership, but it’s literally an intellectual partnership. The different minds in the room are what make it work. Our training is what’s being partnered. I value what the senior scholars in the field bring to me as a junior scholar. As people with diverse academic experiences, we’re coming together to think about what’s in the classroom for students. That’s the dynamic sense of who we are in our intellectual journeys in addition to the institutions we come from—that’s what adds value to the partnership. In this convening, we’re giving space to produce knowledge that we want in our classrooms and for our disciplines in the spaces we’re in. That is unique.
Dr. Guridy: Howard University Press was a long-standing press that published important books on the Black diaspora. I think Amy’s exactly right: what we have here are intellectuals coming together, looking to see what’s in the field, and trying to publish things that we think are valuable. So it’s an intellectual partnership, first and foremost. I think it’s fabulous that this newly created African American and African Diaspora Studies Department here at Columbia is partnering with scholars and an HBCU, with that institution’s tradition. As a partnership between these historically important institutions in Black studies at the university level, that’s exciting to me, as a brand, to put it in marketing terms. I think it’s an important way to demonstrate that we’re coming at this from historically significant institutions in this field. In the case of Columbia, we go back to the 1960s, and Howard longer than that. Columbia’s had significant figures here, including our founding director of the Institute for Research and African American Studies, Dr. Manning Marable. So, in addition to the intellectual merits, it’s a nice partnership between these historically significant institutions in the field.
Q: I know the goal is to publish twenty books per year in the series. Have you had discussions about how to ensure they are on wide-ranging topics that will appeal to different audiences?
Dr. Guridy: I don’t see publishing the number of books we’re going to publish as being a problem. Our challenge has been funding for the other parts of the initiative, which is about the editorial aspect, finding funding to be able to hire a Black editor, and for our fellowship program. That’s been challenging because foundations are not supporting higher education like they were. We’re still committed to doing it, but that’s going to require a bit more work than we anticipated because the landscape of funding has changed dramatically just in the last year and a half to two years. Foundations are moving away from these initiatives. Here we are in this interesting position to provide a platform for innovative scholars—not all of them are Black, but many of them certainly are underrepresented authors—in a context when resources are shrinking for these initiatives. That’s the struggle we’re undertaking. That’s where we’re at right now.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I agree. I think in the traditional sense of the printed text, now we’re continuing the conversation, and the funding dollars are going in a different direction. So how do we make sure we keep twenty books? That’s the goal. If we stick with twenty and can commit to doing that, it will happen. But then, at some level, we have to think about how we encourage the funding dollars to follow our thinking. Because right now, if funders are looking at tech and we’re still doing print, do we have to shift some of this curriculum? We can’t jump over the traditional foundation that the discipline is growing. Many disciplines have this substantial foundation of paper scholarship, so we’re going to have to do both at once: commit to our goal to have that foundational print and then also pivot to meet our goals as we fund and grow.
Q: In addition to publishing twenty books per year, the full vision for the series includes hiring a full-time editor and two graduate-level fellows from diverse backgrounds, one from Columbia and one from Howard, who are interested in pursuing careers in publishing. How does the fellowship program tie into the larger goals of the Howard-Columbia partnership and this initiative? How are you working toward the goal of securing funding so the full vision can be realized?
Dr. Guridy: I think we have an outstanding editorial team right now. Eric Schwartz and Philip Leventhal have done amazing work already. But a major part of the initiative is to provide talented Black editors. We’re going to have to figure out how we’re going to do that. Other presses have done it. I was just at the American Historical Association meetings and was pleased to see more diversity among editors than I remember seeing before. I think this is an industry-wide phenomenon right now. And that has to be something we figure out how we’re going to do. And we’re very intentional about it because it is so important to our vision of the series. At the same time, we’ve been focusing on doing what we could do best right now, which is to help turn out some books. That’s been our first goal while we’ve been working on fundraising for the editorial position. There are younger talented editors out there looking for jobs, some of them coming from PhD programs and pursuing a career in academia. We just have to widen the frame a bit more and make sure we’re more inclusive in hiring on that level.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I agree. To add, I’m thinking of the person who’s reading this. If you feel that what happened in 2020 has been addressed, realistically, there is still work that needs to be done. We’re still dealing with some fundamental core numbers. Just because you see some places have changed, doesn’t mean it’s changed everywhere. Just because you see some books by authors that talk about the experience of Black lives doesn’t mean that all presses across the United States or across the globe have addressed it. We’re trying to stick to a goal not just to be reactionary but to be committed to a consistent vision. That may mean us missing out on some dollars because funding has gone in a different direction, but we feel that not everyone has agreed that these voices need to be heard. So the goal is to keep to the twenty books. Hopefully things will continue to grow, and we’ll get more writers. Hopefully scholars will look at the Press as a place to publish for tenure. We want to stick to paper. We want our stories in hands. We want people to write reviews of these books. We want the traditional route to be saturated before we go another route. And that route has not been saturated yet at this level with these voices.
Dr. Guridy: This isn’t an initiative to just bring in diverse bodies. It’s interested in diverse expertise. It’s about showcasing diverse learning and skills, on the editorial side and from the authors’ perspective. This editor is going to come with different expertise, and that fellowship program is going to facilitate the creation of new expertise, and that’s what scholarship is—it’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And too often, those kinds of expertise have been marginalized in the publishing world. Diverse bodies don’t just bring diverse biographies and different colored faces to an organization; they bring diverse experiences and knowledge, often from subjugated communities where those were not valued.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: And to those who think that maybe just the books matter, we don’t need the editorial part: NO, all those parts matter. When we think about creating consistency, the editors become the gatekeepers. We need more gatekeepers. So we’re publishing more books, but we also need the fellowship component because training matters, mentorship matters, having something written down as a position matters, in the long run. So that’s a goal we’re going to commit to for sustainability and knowledge production. That level of production takes time and consistency, and hopefully more than twenty books per year.
Q: Lastly, what books are you currently reading or do you recommend for readers of this interview?
Dr. Guridy: I mentioned Michael Gomez’s Reversing Sail that was published by Cambridge University Press. I think it really exemplifies the way an author can tell the story of the Black experience throughout the Diaspora, at least certainly in the Atlantic world, in 200 to 250 pages. If we’re interested in these questions on a more general level that demonstrates the value of the diasporic work approach to understanding the Black experience through a broad period of time, Michael Gomez’s Reversing Sail does that very well.
Another book, which I’m teaching in my sports society in the Americas class, is Cuban Star: How One Negro League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball by Adrian Burgos Jr. This is the story of Alejandro Pompez, an Afro-Cuban from Florida who became a baseball scout entrepreneur and then the owner of the New York Cubans Negro league baseball team in the 1940s. What Burgos does with this book is through the life of Pompez, shows how this Latino of African descent becomes a big player in the Negro leagues by providing opportunities for aspiring Black and Latinx players, because most dark-skinned Latinos played in the Negro Leagues at the time of segregation, before Jackie Robinson broke the color line. At the same time, Pompez pioneered the signing of many Afro-Latino ball players after integration. So by looking at the story of a scout entrepreneur, Burgos tells the story of migration, he tells the story of Harlem baseball in the 1930s and ’40s, and he helps us understand how Latinx people became a prominent part of American culture through the sport of baseball. That’s a book that demonstrates the value of a diasporic approach to tell the story of baseball across the color line.
Dr. Yeboah Quarkume: I’m not in the classroom right now, so I’m doing leisure reading. Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin. It talks about tech and the ways we’re dealing with such a monstrous issue from a global standpoint, to galvanize, to get together, and to resist. She gives us her personal story as she threads this conversation that’s a global issue. And then one of our editorial board members, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand, a beautifully written personal story that intertwines a global Black conversation around a Black family. For me, whether you’re interested in the series or coming to the series or the question of Black diasporic studies for the first time, you should see yourself. And that’s what I think these two books offer with their personal stories.
In the books we select for our series, like the first book about HBCUs—the author teaches at an HBCU—you get some of the personal sense of “What I’m talking about still exists.” These are real things that exist in people’s lives that connect to different parts of the globe. To be Black in this world, you think globally. We’re thinking in multiple languages; we’re communicating in different currencies because of our family background; we’re dealing with transgenerational experiences because of the oppression we’ve had on this side of the water. So a lot of what we live is dynamic. From a personal to a micro to a macro level, a reader should be able to understand the fluidity of that lived experience. In many places, we hope to allow people to understand, to help support, to help see our humanity, to help push for the change that is needed. The series provides a platform for people to hear different stories and hear different ways the movement, in its many facets, continues.
Wow. I’m feeling very inspired now. This has been a fascinating and enlightening conversation! Thank you again for your time today and for your wonderful work with the series.
Those interested in learning about the books in the series can visit the series page. If you’re interested in learning more about the series and supporting the initiative, please visit the series initiative page on the Columbia University Press website.
Amy Yeboah Quarkume is associate professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University.
Frank Guridy is Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and History at Columbia University.
Maritza I. Herrera-Diaz, interviewer, is Metadata and Social Media Manager at Columbia University Press.
Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future Editorial Board
Howard University
Clarence Lusane, Professor of Political Science, and former Chair, Department of Political Science
Rubin Patterson, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Sociology
Nikki Taylor, Chair, Department of History, and Professor of History
Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies
Columbia University
Kevin Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music and African American and African Diaspora Studies
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Chair, African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, and William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies
Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and History
Josef Sorett, Dean, Columbia College; Vice President of Undergraduate Education; Professor, Departments of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies
