UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In 1994, Barbara Christian presciently outlined the many institutional challenges faced by Black feminism as a field in her essay “Diminishing Returns:  Can Black Feminism Survive the Academy?”  In this essay, Christian imagined a grim future marked by the abolishment of affirmative action and by deep cuts to funding and support for ethnic studies and gender studies programs and projects, a future that in many ways has come to pass.  Yet a new generation of scholarship is evidence that Black feminist studies has not only survived but is producing some of the most intellectually innovative, politically imperative scholarship being done today. New Directions in Black Feminist Studies lecture series, organized by Grace Kyungwon Hong, Associate Professor, Department of Asian American Studies and Department of Gender Studies, brings together three scholars working across a number of fields and conversations in order to showcase the best of contemporary Black feminist scholarship, including Amber Jamilla Musser, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis; Talitha Leflouria, Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University; and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, UC Irvine.