"Charleston Syllabus"—co-edited by History Prof Keisha Blain—gains national notice

Compendium of works about African American life reviewed by Publisher's Weekly, School Library Journal
Friday, May 13, 2016

Keisha BlainAssistant Professor of History Keisha Blain is one of three co-editors of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence, published by the University of Georgia Press in May 2016.

Based on a crowdsourced syllabus that emerged on Twitter (using the hashtag #CharlestonSyllabus) after the June 2015 mass shootings in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the book offers a resource for those who seek a collection of varied writings about race in the United States. 

Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence has garnered national attention, including reviews in Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.

Keisha N. Blain is an historian of the 20th century United States with broad interdisciplinary interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include black internationalism, radical politics, and global feminisms. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2014. She is currently completing her first book, Contesting the Global Color Line: Black Women, Nationalist Politics, and Internationalism. The book analyzes an array of primary sources to uncover the crucial role women played in building black nationalist and internationalist protest movements in the United States and other parts of the African Diaspora from the early twentieth century to the 1950s.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.