Conseula Francis
Emerging Scholar Lecture Series

Every academic year, the African American Studies Program invites a junior scholar to share new and exciting research with the campus community. The late Professor Conseula Francis (1973–2016), the former director of the African American Studies Program, established the series to support the work of emerging scholars in the field of African American Studies. As our director, Professor Francis not only advocated for her students, but remained deeply committed to mentoring and supporting junior faculty, and we have named this lecture series in her memory to commemorate her unflagging commitment to our program and the work of junior scholars.

• 2022-2023 Dr. Tara Bynum "Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America"
• 2020-2021 Dr. Jason E. Shelton
  "The Death of the Black Church"
• 2019-2020 Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
  "The Issue of Females"
• 2018-2019 Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey
  "Hip-Hop as Social Justice"
• 2018-2019 Sami Schalk
  "Black Women's Speculative Fiction and the Deconstruction of Able-Mindedness"
• 2017-2018 Clifton Granby
  "Resilient Injustices, Unyielding Resolve"
• 2017-2018 Deirdre Cooper Owens
  "Medical Bondage: How Slavery Advanced American Gynecology"
• 2016-2017 Vanessa Agard-Jones
  "After the End of the World: A Black Feminist Analytic for the Anthropocene"
• 2015–2016 Sarah Haley
  The Carceral Life of Gender: Convict Labor, Jim Crow Modernity, and Black Feminist Refusal”
• 2014–2015 Ibram X. Kendi
  Black Students and Black Studies: A Founding History, 1966–1970”
• 2013–2014 Jason Shelton
  Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions”

Artist Lecture Series

The Artist Lecture Series celebrates the value of artistic expression by inviting artists of all types to share their art and their insights into how art itself is a form of social discourse. The lectures in this series, then, follow in the spirit of what the novelist Ralph Ellison said of music, namely that “it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are…reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspire.”

• 2017-2018 Lyle Ashton Harris
• 2016-2017 Dexter Thomas
• 2015–2016 Amaud Jamaul Johnson
• 2014–2015 9th Wonder
• 2013–2014 Alfred Conteh

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African American Studies Film Series

The African American Studies Program sponsors a film series every semester that is open to the public. Each series explores a particular theme such as mass incarceration and cultural connections between African Americans and Asians.

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African American Studies Book Discussion Series

The African American Studies Book Discussion Series brings together College of Charleston faculty, staff, and students to have informal discussions about significant texts in the field of African American Studies. We select one book to discuss each semester and provide a limited number of copies of the books to participants.

Previous Book Selections:

• Fran Ross, Oreo (Spring 2019)
• Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (Fall 2018)
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Spring 2018)
• Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy (Fall 2017)
• Octavia Butler, Kindred (Spring 2017)
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Fall 2016)

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