The new director of the Africana Studies Program is redesigning the major and drumming up student interest to support his vision of transforming the program into a department.
Three months into his tenure as director, Quito Swan — a professor of history and Africana studies and a scholar of Black internationalism — said he is focused on engaging affiliate faculty and seeking additional financial support from the University to hire Africana studies professors to the department, which has no full-time faculty. Officials hired Swan in August, nearly two years after a faculty petition called for increased funding for the program and a transition to department status with a permanent director.
“We are thrilled to attract a leader of Dr. Swan’s caliber, experience and expertise in Africana studies, and look forward to working with him in the years ahead to strengthen the Africana Studies program,” CCAS Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs John Philbeck said in an email.
Officials launched the Inclusive Excellence Initiative in the Columbian College of Arts & Science in 2021 to create a “diverse, equitable and inclusive environment” after more than 1,000 faculty and students signed the spring 2021 petition asking officials to “cluster hire” underrepresented faculty and bolster the Africana Studies Program. Philbeck said GW is committed to the initiative, which allocated funds to hire 12 faculty from underrepresented backgrounds to teach subjects like criminology, race and African American studies in summer 2021.
Philbeck said a committee of faculty across departments oversaw a national search to select a new program director and chose Swan for his expertise in Africana studies. He said Swan’s “disciplinary home” is in the history department and that those administrators will support the program.
“We will work with department chairs to develop new hires in departments affiliated with Africana studies, and we will continue to provide the necessary funds to support Africana programming,” Philbeck said.
Swan said he eventually wants the program to become its own department but that the process requires significant resources like the hiring of full-time and tenure-track faculty members for Africana studies. He said he intends to ask the University and potentially look for an endowment because it is his responsibility as the head of the program to advocate for additional funding.
Aside from Swan, the program employs no professors of Africana studies, according to the faculty page. Introduction to Africana Studies is the only class currently offered under the Africana studies subject, and all other requirements for the major and minor are housed in different departments like history, anthropology and sociology, per the course bulletin. Students pursuing a major or minor in Africana studies take the introductory course and explore major areas’ current issues and historical contexts through classes in African American studies, African studies, Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, according to the bulletin.
“Leaders of programs should ask for more,” Swan said. “That’s kind of the charge.”
Swan said he is planning events for the fall and spring that will increase the program’s visibility to attract students who are interested in the studies but don’t know about the offerings at GW because the classes are housed under different departments. He said he wants to bring more Africana scholars to the University for Africana-related research and create a graduate school track for students interested in earning a doctorate in the studies.
“A professor working on a book or project from here who teaches one course, that gives students a chance to meet Africana-related folks from other spaces doing innovative research-based work,” Swan said.
Swan said the program owes much of its success to affiliated faculty, a group of rotating professors who teach classes for the program through their assigned departments. He said because of their commitment to Africana studies, these faculty remained committed to the program when it lacked “resource support.”
“A lot of it’s been the support of faculty who really care about not just Africana studies as a discipline, but the mission of Africana studies, which is really about Black self-determination and addressing issues of systemic racism that has on but also off-campus implications,” Swan said.
Yvonne Captain, an associate professor of Latin American film and literature and international affairs and an Africana studies-affiliated faculty member who has been involved with the program since before it was founded, said previous Africana Studies Program directors — active before Swan’s hiring — were internal hires already teaching full course loads, leading to burnout because they had to take on the leadership position in addition to their regular work.
The Africana Studies Program was founded in 1989 in response to students’ requests for more Black studies course offerings, according to the program’s website. In 1998, James Miller became the program’s first permanent director, and after his departure in 2006, several in-house faculty members served in the position.
“There were three directors of the program and they just got burned out because imagine doing this with your full-time schedule,” Captain said. “It should not be on the side, but it ended up being like a second job.”
Captain said the program has received little funding from the University, which makes it difficult to teach classes in Africana studies because professors also need to teach classes for their own departments. She said faculty can’t just volunteer to teach classes for a department that lacks funding for professors’ compensation.
“You can sort of get a sense of how the administration feels about adding new components to the University by putting their money where their mouths are,” Captain said. “And the program never really had any money.”
Captain said the program opened its first office on the sixth floor of Phillips Hall this year, allowing interested students to visit.
Elisa Valero, the academic supervisor for the program, said the level of engagement from faculty and students will determine whether Africana studies becomes a department.
“The only way that will happen is if the community continues to channel the energy we’ve seen recently by taking classes offered by the program, attending events and generally sustaining the enthusiasm for this kind of scholarship,” Valero said in an email.
Violet Radmacher-Willis, a senior studying anthropology and Africana studies, said she would like to see the program become a department because it would provide consistency with classes. She said taking classes in all different departments can be detrimental because the structures of courses housed in different departments vary.
“When I take international affairs classes about Africa, the way they speak is a lot different to my anthropology or my history classes about Africa.”
