The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Department of African American Studies welcomed its major and minor students at the annual fall welcome event for the 2025 academic year!  Each year the event affords the...

Professor Helen Neville of Educational Psychology and African American studies has been selected to participate in the 2025-2026 Department Executive Officers Seminar.  She will also be...

Congratulations to Professor Alexia Williams of the Department of Religion and African American Studies on being afforded the opportunity of being awarded a Louisville Institute First Book Grant for her...

The Department of African American Studies is pleased to announce that we have another Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr. Kevin Rigby Jr, joining the team for the new 2025-2026 academic year!  We wanted to learn a bit about Dr. Rigby to gain some insight on what drew him to the U of I...

Professor Bobby J. Smith II was featured on the Peoria (25News Now) newscast on July 30, 2025.  The topic of food insecurity is an ongoing issue, relevant to much of society—but exceptionally pervasive in disenfranchised communities.  Peoria (25News Now) sheds light on the decrease of...

Two of the Department of African American Studies' very own, Professors Mary Phillips and Bobby J Smith II, have been selected as part of the cohort for The OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship 2025-26!  The program is in its seventh year.  "The ...

AFRO is very pleased to share that Professor Leonard McKinnis of the department of African American Studies and the department of Religion has been named General Editor of the Religion, Race, and Ethnicity Series with NYU Press. He is the second editor of this Series, following Peter Paris who...

The Department of African American Studies (AFRO) hosted its annual Awards Ceremony on May 2nd, 2025, to recognize the accomplishments of faculty and 1 graduate student from the 2024-2025 academic year.  Each year, the ceremony aims to fulfill AFRO's mission statement, "celebrating academic...

In recognition of Father's Day, professor Esther Ngumbi was featured in another NPR, Goats and Soda, opinion piece.  In the article, she discusses the importance of her father, Harrison Ngumbi's defiance of a Kenyan cultural belief systems about educating daughters and its importance...

Accolades go to Dr. Erik S. McDuffie, associate professor for both the Department of African American Studies and History, who has been recognized for several faculty honors: received 2025 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award; named Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar for the 2025-2026...