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 Marcia Chatelain, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of
Africana Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she was a Professor of History and African American Studies at
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and African American Studies at the
University of Oklahoma in Norman.
She is a proud native of Chicago, Illinois, and I'm an even prouder graduate of the following schools: St. Ignatius College Prep, the University of Missouri-Columbia (B.A. Journalism/Religious Studies), and
Brown University (A.M. and Ph.D., American Civilization). She has been honored to be named a Harry S. Truman Scholar (2000), Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life Amethyst Award recipient (2009), German Marshall Fund of the U.S. American Fellow (2011), Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow (2012), French American Foundation Young Leader (2015), and National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow (2017-2018). Her teaching has been recognized with Georgetown University's Dorothy M. Brown Teaching Award (2014), the Edward Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence (2015), and the College Academic Council's Faculty Award (2016). In 2016, the
Chronicle of Higher Education named me a
Top Influencer in Higher Education in recognition of my curation of
#FergusonSyllabus, a response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. She is a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.