Yale Celebrates African American Studies with a Tercentennial Lecture

Yale University will host a Tercentennial Lecture by the distinguished cultural theorist Stuart Hall in celebration of African American Studies at Yale, on September 15 at 2 p.m. in the Levinson Auditorium of Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street.

Yale University will host a Tercentennial Lecture by the distinguished cultural theorist Stuart Hall in celebration of African American Studies at Yale, on September 15 at 2 p.m. in the Levinson Auditorium of Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Hall, emeritus professor of sociology at the Open University (United Kingdom), will speak on the topic of “Racisms, Past and Present.” Hall pioneered the field of cultural studies. Born in Jamaica, he left the island in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar to attend Oxford University. He was editor of the New Left Review and served as director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University before joining the faculty of the Open University in 1979. Hall’s writings examine aspects of popular culture, Marxist theory, racial formations and the construction of diasporic identities. Among his books are “The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left” and “Modernity and its Futures.”

The lecture, co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of Yale. It is also part of a reunion conference for the African American Studies Department at Yale. Focusing on “African American Studies and Yale: Revisiting Origins, Imagining Futures,” the conference will bring together the founders, alumni and friends of African American Studies at Yale who have set its course over more than 30 years.

Yale inaugurated an African American Studies Program in 1969-the first undergraduate degree-granting program of its kind in the Ivy League. In 1978, Yale’s program became the first in the United States to offer master’s degrees. In 1994, Ph.D. degrees were offered jointly with other departments and programs at Yale. African American Studies became a full academic department in 2000.

For more information, see www.aya.yale.edu/grad/afram/

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Gila Reinstein: gila.reinstein@yale.edu, 203-432-1325