About the Department
WELCOME from the Chair
Welcome to the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University.
It is an extraordinary honor to serve as the current Chair of a department whose legacy is not only distinguished within the academy, but also forged through the transformative power of struggle, vision, and community. Our department was born from student protest and principled commitment to democratic transformation—catalyzed in 1968 by demands for racial justice and the creation of spaces for Black thought, expression, and liberation. That founding moment gave rise to one of the first departments of its kind in the nation, and it continues to shape the soul of our work today.
We inherit a tradition that insists on the highest standards of intellectual rigor while remaining deeply attuned to the urgent concerns of the world around us. Our faculty are leading scholars across fields—historians, theorists, cultural critics, social scientists, artists, and more—whose research brings clarity to the enduring and evolving structures that shape Black life globally. Our teaching is dynamic, challenging, and evocative, creating learning spaces where students engage thoughtfully with the world and their place in it. And our commitments extend beyond the university, through public-facing scholarship and community engagement that honors the spirit of the department’s founding.
In this moment of global uncertainty and transformation, Black Studies is more vital than ever. We examine the afterlives of slavery, the complexity of diasporic experiences, the cultural forms that sustain resistance, and the social movements that envision new futures. Our department is a home for those who believe that deep knowledge of Black histories, cultures, and struggles is indispensable to understanding the world and contributing to positive change.
As Chair, I am committed to sustaining and advancing this vision. I invite you to explore our work, join our events, engage with our students and faculty, and partner with us in imagining what Black Studies can be in this time—and for the future.
Sylvester Johnson
Chair, Department of Black Studies
Northwestern University
Mission Statement
Our mission is to advance critical understandings of the central role that race plays in structuring lives, spaces, relations of power, and subjectivities within modern social formations. The department considers different manifestations of blackness as well as other forms of racialized identity across the globe from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. We analyze and theorize the ways that blackness and black subjects have been produced as signifiers of exploitability, criminality, deficiency, expendability, and sub-humanity over time.
We believe that this perspective provides a useful lens for understanding the destructive effects of racial subjugation and Eurocentrism the world over, effects that have always intersected with gender, class, sexuality, and geopolitics. We do more than scrutinize oppression, however, by also calling critical attention to how black subjects and other persons of color have responded to and resisted these conditions via their activism, expressive cultures, and intellectual work. In so doing, black people have contributed substantially to the formation of global freedom struggles and international political debates about social inequality.
In honor of the diverse, transnational, anti-racist, and anti-colonial movements that helped to create a space for Black Studies within the academy and that have inspired the faculty’s scholarly and political visions, we do not limit ourselves to analyzing black-white tensions or spaces that exist only within the geo-political boundaries of the United States.
The members of the faculty, therefore, find it imperative to examine the black experience within complex global processes of racial ordering in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia. This requires dedicating critical attention to the complex relationship between anti-black racism, xenophobia, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and, in the U.S., to the experiences of other non-white and non-European groups such as Native Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Arab Americans. Thus, the department views Black Studies as both a significant critique of western modernity and as offering essential social, political, and cultural alternatives to our current order.
Our core faculty and affiliates come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences. By placing these scholars in conversation with one another, we aim to encourage an understanding of how, where, and when traditional disciplinary boundaries begin to blur. This process generates critical conversations regarding the social meanings of race and blackness across the globe, while a commitment to working across--and often against-- traditional disciplinary assumptions illuminates new terrains through which our intellectual and political mission can be advanced.