Africana Research Center celebrates 25th anniversary with April 1 symposium

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of the Liberal Arts’ Africana Research Center (ARC), a committed home for scholarship devoted to Africa and its diaspora and conversations designed to advance the research, teaching and outreach missions of the University, will celebrate its 25th Anniversary Symposium from 4 to 6 p.m. on April 1 in Heritage Hall of Penn State’s HUB-Robeson Center.

The event, free and open to the public, will feature center alumni, postdoctoral fellows and other special guests who will recognize what ARC Director and Associate Professor of English Sherita L. Johnson called “the vanguard of student activism” that led to its creation.

“A center that’s been here for 25 years is certainly worth noting and celebrating,” Johnson said. “The college and University have been a great supporter of the center for a long time, and to have that full institutional support has been so important to its creation, development and long-term maintenance. We want to emphasize that longevity at the symposium, and what the ARC has done and what it’s capable of doing moving forward through the continuing support of the University.”

Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Shirley Moody-Turner, a 2006 ARC postdoctoral fellow, said she believes the center has played a significant role “in creating an intellectual community and networks of support” for its affiliated scholars.

“For many, it has been an intellectual home where conversations, scholarship and initiatives related to the study, history and culture of people of African descent can find support, encouragement and critical engagement,” Moody-Turner said.

The symposium will include a reflection on ARC’s origins, which go back to the mid-1990s, when the increasing number of students of color enrolling at Penn State began calling for more diversity in terms of faculty and curriculum. In 2001, the University agreed to establish ARC with $900,000 in funding for its first five years.

Since its beginnings, ARC has steadily expanded its reach and programming. Its signature annual events are the Barbara Jordan Lecture Series, which honors an African American civil rights activist, scholar and/or public intellectual, and the Nelson Mandela Lecture Series, which spotlights the scholarship of an African human rights activist.

“We have posters from the lectures hanging in our hallway here, and it’s so impressive to look at who we’ve brought here over the years — people like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Angela Davis, Mahmood Mamdani and Naomi Tutu,” Johnson said. “It’s important to preserve this history and continue bringing this type of programming to the campus moving forward.”

In 2005, ARC established the postdoctoral fellowship program, which has provided a temporary home for numerous scholars who are now teaching at universities around the world, Johnson said.

Moody-Turner said she found a “welcoming and stimulating community” among her interdisciplinary cohort of ARC fellows. As a junior liberal arts faculty member, she completed her first book with three other fellows — Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, of African Studies and of Comparative Literature Gabeba Baderoon, Solsiree Del Moral and Kathryn Sophia Belle.

“The space, funding and encouragement that the ARC provides to engage in critical conversations about the culture, history and intellectual traditions of the African diaspora is indispensable to the ongoing scholarly production of Penn State students and faculty,” Moody-Turner said. “I couldn’t have asked for a more generative, supportive and welcoming space than the one that welcomed me to Penn State as an ARC postdoctoral fellow and couldn’t be happier that the ARC continues its critical work on this 25th anniversary of its founding.”

Johnson said she’s also especially proud of ARC’s interdisciplinary partnerships with other centers and organizations across the University. Last fall, the center collaborated with the Center for Black Digital Research on the symposium, “Frances E. W. Harper at 200: Commemorating Her Life and Legacy.” And, along with the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Humanities Institute and Richards Civil War Era Center, the center co-sponsored Harvard University faculty member Danielle Allen’s March 19 lecture, “250 Years of Our Declaration of Independence: Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now.”

“I really enjoy doing the co-sponsorships because it helps increase the visibility of the ARC — we want people to see the work we’re doing in the field of Africana studies,” Johnson said.

Looking forward, Johnson is intent on maintaining the quality of ARC’s programming, while also adding new elements, including creating opportunities to support undergraduate research in Africana studies.

For now, she said she’s immensely proud of the center’s longevity and continuing relevance.

“I’m thankful to be in a position to do the work that’s necessary to continue emphasizing the importance of higher education, having access to it and producing scholarship around it. The symposium allows me to reflect on that, and hopefully for others who will be in attendance,” Johnson said. “We’re only about a half century removed from when Black people didn’t have equal access to higher education in the U.S. And now we have this center established by student activism that’s resonant of the Civil Rights Movement. That’s very meaningful to me.”