Diversity Committee

News

new article from dr. adriana novoa

Dr. Adriana Novoa published this piece in a dossier edited by Dr. Madeline Cámara about the torture and killing of George Floyd and the protests that took place over the summer.

 

Congratulations to Dr. Frances Ramos and the Chacra Collective

Dr. Frances Ramos is a member of the Chacra Collective, a group of Latin Americanists who created an on-line lecture collective to help mitigate the pedagogical challenge of the pandemic.  They just won a Teaching Award from RockyMountain Council for Latin American Studies. Here is the citation:

"This group of about 25 scholars teaching at a range of institutions across the United States and Canada responded to the challenge of online teaching during the pandemic by creating about 40 short videos formatted like TED-talks. Instructors could use these videos to give their students access to the expertise of scholars along with accompanying readings and assignments. Student testimony on course evaluations indicated how valuable these videos were in the learning process. CHACRA has provided an invaluable community to help scholars and students cope with the stress we have all faced in teaching and learning online.” 

 

faculty messages

The CAS Diversity and Inclusion Committee has adopted a statement condemning violence and hate against Asian and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In light of the recent series of attacks against these communities, and especially women, we adhere to their call to make our stance of support clear. Our statement is as follows: 

The CAS Diversity Committee stands in solidarity and support with the USF Asian and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, as the country deals with the horrifying and increasing number of violent attacks and murders of people, and especially women, of Asian heritage. There is a long history in the United States of racial discrimination against Asian and AAPI communities, including but not limited to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment camps of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, each with corresponding acts of hate and violence. Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus, attacks against these groups have increased on the premise of racist, biased, and unfounded allegations made by political leaders, media, and social media outlets. We oppose such dangerous rhetoric and subsequent acts of hate and violence. We are committed to aiding in making our College and our University more inclusive, welcoming, kind, and equitable spaces for all. The Asian and AAPI communities at USF have a fully committed ally in each member of the CAS Diversity Committee.   

 

New article from dr. Steve prince

Dr. Steve Prince published an article in the Washington Post based on his recently published new book. 

 

New Book from Dr. Steve Prince

Dr. Steve Prince, associate professor of history, has just published a new book, The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900, with the University of North Carolina Press. As it narrates an extraordinary moment of racial violence in the Jim Crow South, Prince’s book reflects on silences, forgetting, and the limitations of historical inquiry. It is the first book on the 1900 New Orleans riot to be published in more than four decades:

"For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was reported nationwide; years later, fabled jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recalled memorializing Charles in song. Yet today, Charles is almost entirely invisible in the traditional historical record. So who was Robert Charles, really? An outlaw? A black freedom fighter? And how can we reconstruct his story?In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination."

The official publication date is March 1, but copies are already shipping.

 

Dr. David K. Johnson wins the John Boswell Prize

We are pleased to announce that our very own Dr. David K. Johnson has been awarded the 2021 John Boswell Prize for his monograph Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (Columbia University Press, 2019). The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History (CLGBTH) awarded this prize for an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history published in English in 2019 or 2020.

This excellent book argues that commercially-produced physique magazines and related media fostered a nationwide community for queer men in the second-half of the twentieth century. In so doing, Johnson makes a clear case that serious attention should be paid to forms of political activism derived from commercial or capitalist enterprises, pushing us to consider processes of community building that extend far beyond the more familiar activism of homophile and gay liberation groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The book is to be commended for its focus on networks of belonging and community that stretched deep into rural areas and that linked far-flung places into a constellation of queer identities.  Johnson shows how an imagined community of readers helped gay men in the mid-twentieth century come to see themselves as connected, even those far outside of urban centers and nascent “gayborhoods.” The committee was especially impressed by Johnson’s handling of primary sources.  His interpretations of physique magazines and other seemingly superficial texts show that these sources are critical to fully understanding the history of gay community formation and political activism.