This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.
Today's conversation is with Aja Marie Lans, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Sh is an archaeologist of the African Diaspora who integrates Black feminism and Black study into bioarchaeological investigations. A major area of focus is the objectification of human remains contained within universities and museum collections. She argues for the repatriation of Black Ancestors who are “owned” by such institutions.
Dr. Lans serves as the site bioarchaeologist at the Harlem African Burial Ground (HABG), a project coordinated by the New York City Economic Development Council and the Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative. Originally established as a segregated cemetery when the Dutch colonized Manhattan, the HABG was in use for over two centuries. After the land was sold in the mid-1800s, the section of the cemetery reserved for people of African descent was developed multiple times, most recently as a bus depot for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Before arriving at Hopkins, Dr. Lans was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. There, she performed provenance research on Black Ancestors who are curated in Harvard’s Peabody Museum with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.