Bronx History Project Awarded New York Council Grant
BAAHP staff members Mark Naison, Ph.D., Oneka LaBennett, Ph.D., and Brian Purnell, Ph.D.
Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) has received an $18,000 grant from the New York Council for the Humanities to support a series of public programs on the history of New York’s most underrepresented borough.
The funding represents the first major outside grant for BAAHP, which began in 2003 as a joint project with the Bronx County Historical Society to document the rich history of the borough’s 500,000 residents of African descent.
During the 2008-2009 academic year, Fordham’s Rose Hill campus will be the site of “The Bronx is Building: The Bronx as a Site for Political Mobilization and Cultural Creativity,” a series of 10 public programs featuring research, discussion and analysis of BAAHP’s work.
Programs will cover these topics: Jazz in the Bronx; Civil Rights Activism; Women and Bronx Hip Hop; African Americans in Bronx Politics; When Every Gym and Schoolyard Was Open; and The South Bronx: Crucible of Black-Latino Cultural Interchange; among others.
Among the featured program speakers are poet-rapper Caridad de La Luz, known as “La Bruja,” jazz scholar Maxine Gordon (wife of jazz legend Dexter Gordon) and Susanne Stemmler, Ph.D., from the Center for Metropolitan Studies of Technical University in Berlin. Stemmler will discuss hip hop cultures in the Bronx, Berlin and Paris.
“This grant provides us with a chance to showcase the types of research that we’ve been doing for the past five years,” said Brian Purnell, Ph.D. (FCRH ’00) co-research director of BAAHP and assistant professor of African and African American studies. “Nobody has really ever studied the black community in the Bronx in any systematic scholarly way. This project helps correct that omission and adds to the historic understanding of African Americans in New York City in general.”
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Email This Post