Black Studies Newsletter | Spring 2025

A Message from Dr. Affigne, Interim Chair
Moving Forward with Confidence

Our 30-Year Anniversary
Thirty years ago this spring, PC’s Black students and faculty, college President Philip Smith, and Provost Thomas McGonigle, asked me to serve as interim, founding director of the newly-established Program in Black Studies. After those first three years, when our curriculum, partnerships, and student enrollments were established, program directors including Drs. Cyril Daddieh, Julia Jordan-Zachery, Zophia Edwards, and Eric Hirsch, brought Black Studies through periods of success, and years of challenge, finally gaining full department status in the spring of 2023.

The Black Studies Department
Later that year, I was asked to again take on leadership, as interim chair of the new Department of Black Studies, following the loss of several faculty, a failed outside search for a permanent chair, and concerns about whether Black Studies would survive. Instead, we have moved forward with confidence. We’ve hired our very first tenure-track faculty member, Dr. Alannah Caisey, and with support from the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, our very first postdoctoral teaching fellow, Dr. Paul Cato. (Read more on page 4). Last spring we graduated 13 Black Studies minors and currently have 14 students in the classes of 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028—including our first two declared majors, one of whom will graduate in May. Our hard-working administrative coordinator, Katherine Lynch, has hired five students to work as research and program assistants, developed campus-wide information and publicity, and furnished a Black Studies Community Room where students and faculty can meet, study, and work. Our public programming has included high-profile guest lecturers, video presentations, and co-sponsorship of events hosted by academic departments, the career center, and student groups such as Afro-Am Society, Women Empowered, and the BELIEVE Club. Most importantly, since the fall of 2023 nearly 500 students have enrolled in our Black Studies classes, and more than 1,150 overall, in our own courses and others we cross-list with twelve affiliated departments.

A Look Ahead
In the coming year, the administration has committed to renewing our outside search for a department chair, an esteemed scholar to be hired at senior rank with tenure. In July, Dr. Eric Hirsch will again step in as interim Black Studies chair, and I will return to full time duties in the Department of Political Science. For the coming year we will offer more than 40 courses, many satisfying core proficiencies for diversity, civic engagement, and social science, and others which are new or re-imagined including, for example Black Radical Thought; Black Feminisms; Racial Health Disparities; Challenges of Black Education; Black Diaspora in Providence; Black Love and Black Politics; African Politics; African American Women; Culture and Society in the Francophone Black World; and Afro-Latinidad(es).

A Challenging Environment
As an academic field, Black Studies everywhere has faced resistance and in some cases, outright attacks. Apparently for many people, even peers in higher education, rigorous study of the Black experience, in the U.S. and around the world, threatens a worldview in which irrational discrimination, racial violence, and social marginalization either don’t exist, or are somehow natural or inevitable. Likewise, when we foreground and celebrate Black resistance, creativity, and success, in spheres where resistance can be personally and professionally risky, we have come to expect indifference or hostility. Yet, we persist, even as the national climate turns against Blackness once again.
The First Reconstruction in the 19th century came to an end when the de jure and de facto imposition of Jim Crow unraveled progress made after the Civil War. The Second Reconstruction following the Civil Rights Movement is now, without doubt, facing a similar unraveling. Against this backdrop, campus-wide support for Black Studies will be critical, to protect what we’ve accomplished and to continue our core project: preparing our students for a world in which, as President Sicard recently wrote, the “Catholic vision of justice, truth, and human flourishing,” will remain central to the Mission of Providence College. With your support for our students, our faculty, and our public events, the Department of Black Studies will continue to grow and thrive.

– Prof. Tony Affigne, Interim Chair

Fall 2025 Courses

BLS 101 – Intro to Black Studies