Black Studies Newsletter | Summer 2026

FACULTY NEWS

Dr. Fall Co-Publishes Critical Edition of The Essential Senghor

Congratulations to Dr. Fall on his new publication, The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics this past spring! Dr. Fall, along with his co-editors and translators – Dr. Doyle D. Calhoun of the University of Cambridge and Dr. Cheikh Thiam of Amherst College – are some of the first to translate Senghor’s critical essays and philosophical writings into English. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, author of African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude wrote of The Essential Senhor that “this invaluable reader makes Senghor’s thought directly available to an English-language audience, offering a very good overview of his philosophy, perfectly capturing his original text, and assembling selections with precision and care. It will become a touchstone for those in African studies, philosophy, art, and beyond.” 

To purchase the book, visit Duke University Press below for a paper or hardcover copy.

Duke University Press
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Are you currently working on any projects?
I’m currently working on a book about African American author James Baldwin’s philosophy of love and the conversations that helped foster those ideas. Baldwin was raised in the Black Pentecostal church as a child and became a preacher in his teen years, and while he left the church due to its homophobia, he never let go of the Christian commitment to love and charity. He spent the rest of his life working to celebrate love’s capacity to change the world, and he developed many of his ideas through reflections on his own struggles with love and private and public conversations with other Black thinkers. By the time he died in 1987, he had reflected on love with countless figures including Ralph Ellison, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In my book, I combine biographical, religious, and political analysis to show the depth of Baldwin’s ideas on love and their relevance in our current moment of political distress.

What is one class you’re excited to teach at PC?
This fall I’ll teach BLS 314. Black Feminisms. As sentimental as it sounds, the principles of Black feminisms have helped me overcome a variety of personal and political struggles, including issues with mental health, racism, physical disabilities, and my social position as a queer Black man. While I have a “FEMINIST” tattoo on my arm and find constant excuses to tell non-men about my love of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, I’m so excited to go a step beyond virtue signaling and discuss these ideas with students at Providence. Despite PC’s lack of diversity, the class looks as though there are students from a variety of backgrounds. We will have tremendous fun seeing how “[Black] Feminism is for everyone” (to quote Black feminist bell hooks), and the class will provide a fascinating examination into the politics and particularities of Providence College.

Who is your muse and what about them inspired you to do the work you do?
My muse is my mother, Elanor Cato. She spent more than 40 years teaching Kindergarten and Pre-Kindergarten at an elite private school in Washington, DC. The eldest of six in a very poor family from New Jersey, she spent much of her teenage years helping to raise her siblings after her father passed away when she was sixteen.  It took me years to realize this, but her life mirrored those of many of the Black thinkers I study, especially James Baldwin. After working her way through the University of Pennsylvania and earning a degree from an Ivy League institution, she became one of the first Black teachers at Beauvoir School, one of the wealthiest schools in the DC area. 

Yet rather than accept the privilege and wealth of her school, she spent her career diversifying the curriculum and creating spaces for students of color and those on financial aid. She was at her happiest when teaching, and her pedagogy was grounded in the idea of “learning as play”: she knew students learned best when enjoying themselves, and I will spend my career working to bring this learning style into college classrooms. 

While she wasn’t one for ideology and political debate, she is the archetypal Black feminist and practitioner of love politics, and, as I told her shortly before she passed away, my scholarship is an attempt to translate the love she showed the world into a practical philosophy and lifestyle. When she passed in 2019, her school honored her with a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral—the sixth-largest cathedral in the world—attended by more than 900 people. Clearly the values she embodied made an impact on the world and need to be preserved. My dad is an inspiration as well, but Black boys will always love their moms more than anyone/anything!

What are some of your hobbies?
While I love teaching, my true passion is books, and I spent a large amount of time collecting both rare and readable copies of books. I have over 2200 books stacked in piles around my studio apartment, as well as a large number of rare books by Black authors. Last year I completed my collection of signed, first edition(!) copies of Toni Morrison’s novels (including The Bluest Eye from 1970!!!), and last month I obtained signed copies of Becoming by Michelle Obama and A Promised Land by Barack Obama (of course, Michelle’s book is better). I also love to travel and see concerts featuring classic soul artists like Earth, Wind, and Fire, and contemporary soulstresses like Ella Mai and SZA.

What are your top four movies, books, or songs?
Movies:
1. The Godfather
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Beauty and the Beast
4. Die Hard

Books:
1. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son and/or Go Tell It on the Mountain
2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
3. Plato, Symposium
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Songs:
1. Stevie Wonder, “If It’s Magic”
2. The Beatles, “Hey Jude”
3. Fleetwood Mac, “You Make Loving Fun”
4. Stevie Wonder, “As”

Race, Empire, and Pan-Africanism: Dr. Wheeler’s Summer in the Portuguese Archives

This summer, Dr. Eva Michelle Wheeler spent two months conducting archival research at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP) in Lisbon, supported by a “Short-Term Research Grant” from the Luso-American Development Foundation and an “Interdisciplinary Scholar Award” from the School of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Wheeler, who teaches department courses on Black Europe (a Maymester course co-taught with Dr. Alioune Fall), the Black Diaspora in Providence, and Afro-Latinidad(es), is a sociocultural linguist whose work examines the relationship between language, race, identity, and belonging across the African diaspora. Her research often asks how racial meanings are produced through language—and how Black communities use language to define themselves, contest dominant narratives, and imagine new possibilities.

During her time at the BNP, Dr. Wheeler had the opportunity to examine the full proceedings of the 1884 Berlin Conference (where European countries and the U.S. sat down and divided Africa), as well as press coverage of the conference, and letters sent to the king of Portugal. Navigating between French and Portuguese, Dr. Wheeler drew on her reading knowledge of both languages (and a few technological aids) to trace the colonial ideas embedded in Europe’s claims of entitlement to exploit African territories and resources.

As a counternarrative to Portugal’s colonial propaganda, Dr. Wheeler also examined newspapers published between 1911 and 1935 by members of Lisbon’s transnational Black community—O Negro, Correio de Africa, A Voz d’Africa, and A Mocidade Africana, among others. In the pages of these newspapers, Black writers named and defined themselves and their communities on their own terms, drew attention to struggles facing Black people around the globe (e.g., violent lynchings in the southern U.S., famine and colonial neglect in Cabo Verde, police violence in Guinea-Bissau), debated contemporary political issues, and imagined futures in which liberation and equality might become realities for all people. The archive also offered important evidence of Lusophone participation in early Pan-African networks, including extensive discussion of the Pan-African Congresses and W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1923 visit to Lisbon. Most days, Dr. Wheeler could be found in a dimly lit reading room, scrolling through reel after reel of microfilm—and there was nowhere else she would have rather been. The research offered a powerful reminder that where there is oppression, there is always resistance; that solidarity does not fit neatly within national borders; that movement forward in time does not necessarily correspond to progress; and that, in many ways, the past is prologue. What happens next is up to us.

Fall 2026 Courses

BLS 101 – Intro to Black Studies