Research That Connects Histories, Cultures, and Communities
Faculty in the Department of Africana Studies explore Africa, the Black experience in the United States, and the broader African diaspora through interdisciplinary research that spans the humanities and social sciences.
Their scholarship examines the histories, cultures, languages, politics, and lived experiences that shape our interconnected world while contributing new perspectives to conversations taking place on campus and around the globe.
Publications
Our faculty conduct research across a wide range of disciplines and topics. Discover recent books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications by Africana Studies faculty.
Centers, Institutes, and Initiatives
Africana Research Center
The Africana Research Center (ARC) supports student and faculty research on Africa and its Diaspora and serve as a catalyst for promoting an enabling environment where cultural production and discourse on diversity can be nurtured to advance the research, teaching, and outreach missions of Penn State.
Center for Black Digital Research
The Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk is a public-facing research center committed to bringing the histories of early Black life through innovative scholarship and collaborative partnerships. The Center is home to the award-winning Colored Conventions Project, Douglass Day, and The Liberatory Tech Project.
Colored Conventions Project
The Colored Conventions Project is devoted to digitally preserving civil rights documents for scholarly and public consumption. The project has been housed at Penn State‘s Center for Black Digital Research since 2019.
Women, Gender, and Families of Color
Women, Gender, and Families of Color is a multidisciplinary journal that centers the study of Вlack, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American women, genders, and families encouraging theoretical and empirical research from the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and from new and established scholars.
Podcasts and Digital Scholarship
Research doesn’t end with academic publications. Africana Studies faculty also share their scholarship through podcasts, digital projects, and other public-facing work that brings research to broader audiences.
Global Virtual Forum
The African Studies Global Virtual Forum seeks to decenter hegemonic epistemologies and to decolonize the Western canon to facilitate other ways/waves of knowing through a series of online conversations with experts in decolonization.
Afro-Applied Linguistics Reading Group
What can African and African American Studies do for Applied Linguistics and vice versa? This is the question we explore in our Afro-Applied Linguistics reading group, thereby extending into a specific direction the work done in the Africana Global Virtual Forum and the publications produced in the Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies Series. We seek to conceptually enlarge Applied Linguistics through engaging with African and African American Studies scholarship and philosophies.
Featured Podcast
Decolonizing Education
How do language, culture, and history shape what—and who—we value in education?
Hosted by Africana Studies faculty, Decolonizing Education explores questions of knowledge, power, language, and belonging through conversations with scholars, educators, and storytellers. The series examines how colonial histories continue to influence education while highlighting new perspectives on language, identity, and learning across Africa and the broader African diaspora.
Research in the News
See how Africana Studies faculty are advancing knowledge through research, publications, grants, public scholarship, and media engagement.