Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre

On the Porch: A Book Party

Faculty Books

“ Integrated: Longlist, 2026 Pen America Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. NYPL Best Books 2025. Best Books of 2025, Fresh Air Reads.
Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review; Lit Hub, spring 2025 Most Anticipated; San Francisco Chronicle, Must Read Books 2025; Kirkus Review, Booklist Review; Read Between the Spines, Most Anticipated 2025.
Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

One of Essence's "7 Political Books By Black Women Authors To Read Now" • A Library Journal Best Book of the Year • One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025 • One of the African American Intellectual History Society's Best Black History Books of 2025
Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress.
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it.

Coming Soon!

Graduate Student Works

This special issue offers a glimpse into the rich discourse that took place at the week-long Witch Institute in the Summer of 2021. Part documentation and part intervention, this edition of PUBLIC presents multiple perspectives from those grappling with the complicated histories and current instantiations of the witch, tied together by themes such as invisible forces, the more-than-human, and the magic of images.