Dr. Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir graduated from Xavier University of Louisiana in 1999. At the time, the historically Black university in New Orleans offered an African American Studies minor, but no major. When she returned to the university as a faculty member, a civil rights historian, she wanted to give her students the course of study she never had.
Now she’s an associate professor of history, Keller Family Endowed Professor and department chair. And Xavier University is launching a new major program in African American and diasporic cultures studies, with the help of a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sinegal-DeCuir served as the principal investigator on the grant proposal.
As a part of the initiative, the University will hire four new faculty members, two funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for three years and two funded by the university from the start.
While Xavier University already has an African American Diaspora Studies minor and an Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Studies minor, scholars like Sinegal-DeCuir wanted to offer a program that took a holistic, global approach. An interdisciplinary team assembled around the idea: Dr. Shearon Roberts, assistant professor of mass communication; Dr. Elizabeth Manley, associate professor of history; and Dr. Carmen Cosme, assistant professor of Spanish. Together, the committee wrote up their proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The new major program is “going to be different than what we teach now because it’s going to dive deeper into a lot of issues, and not just the issues that we face as African Americans but the issues globally that people of color are facing …” Sinegal-DeCuir said. “Some of [my students] don’t even realize there are Black Mexicans or Black Cubans and so on. We live in an American bubble. We need to be able to see outside of America and bring in all the other experiences.”
The program will focus on four areas of study: new social justice movements, decolonial studies, trans-Atlantic Blackness and Black health disparities.
The latter feels particularly relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.
