Sunday, February 5, 2012

The Black Studies Blog


The black studies @ siue blog was launched on August 31, 2008. The online site “was our venue for extending conversations about African American studies and providing reports on the progress of our projects.” I had a main goal of “modifying black studies” at SIUE, and moving into the blogosphere was one way approach that my crew of contributors and I decided to take.

The black studies blog has become one of our program’s most distinct features, and the blog has assisted us in giving our program national visibility. The site makes it possible for us to report on our various public humanities projects and share a range of ideas related to artistic culture, politics, current events, and black studies in general. Our blog also serves as a tremendous archive of the work that we have done.

Over the last few years, the black studies blog has become especially well known as a site for the discussion of African American poetry. In 2011, we produced more than 200 blog entries on black poets and poetry. We regularly published entries about the public humanities poetry projects that we coordinated, and we published entries about the Eugene B. Redmond Collection.

Emily Phillips, Cindy Lyles, and Danielle Hall have served as core contributing writers for the site. They have published entries about major historical figures, poetry, music, and the arts in general. Taken together, their writings provide an important possibility for how graduate students can participate in public conversations about black studies and African American literature.

At the moment, our site is one of the relatively few highly active black studies blogs in the country. That distinction has given us an important sense of purpose, but we also hope to see more blogs that regularly address black studies issues in the coming years.

Related:
28 Ways of Thinking about Black Studies & Afrofuturism

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