Dr. Manning Marable is one of America's most influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Under Dr. Marable's leadership, the Institute became one of the nation's most prestigious centers of scholarship on the black American experience.

For more than a century, Columbia University has been located near the cultural and political heart of black America, the community of Harlem. At the end of the 19th Century, blacks living in densely populated urban neighborhoods such as San Juan Hill and the Tenderloin began to relocate to Harlem. Black ownership of residential housing was greatly accelerated with the establishment of the Afro-American Realty Company by Philip A. Payton, Jr. in 1904. By World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans from the South had begun to arrive in the city, as Harlem quickly became known as the urban black Mecca. In the golden age of the twenties, Harlem became the center of black literary and cultural life, home to outstanding artists, poets, and novelists. Harlem was a central site for the rise of black nationalism beginning with the popular emergence of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association; and a generation later with the charismatic leadership of Malcolm X. Harlem has continued to serve as the location for the development of a series of influential African-American political figures, including Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Percy Sutton, Congressman Charles Rangel, and David Dinkins, New York Citys first African-American mayor.

The Institute for Research in African-American Studies of Columbia University, founded in July 1993 by Dr. Manning Marable, is an academic resource center that is building a new intellectual tradition upon the rich legacy of Harlem's history. The purposes and activities of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies are grounded within the best scholarship of the black intellectual tradition. The strategic research mission of the Institute is the critical examination of contemporary black politics, social relations, culture and history. Towards that end, the Institute administers the Undergraduate and Master's degree programs in African-American Studies at Columbia University; regularly sponsors academic conferences, lectures and forums on a wide variety of topics; produces the scholarly publication SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, which is distributed throughout the U.S. and internationally.

From the outset, the Institute's motto has been "academic excellence and social responsibility."



Souls is a quarterly interdisciplinary journal published by Taylor & Francis. The Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), founded by Dr. Manning Marable at Columbia University, initiated Souls in January 1999. The journal is directed by IRAAS's research unit, the Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH), created by Dr. Marable in 2002.
Souls was inspired by two academic publication projects initiated by W.E.B. Du Bois: The Atlanta University Series of annual research readers published in the late 19th-early 20th century; and Phylon journal, founded by Du Bois at Atlanta University in 1940. Every Souls issue is prefaced by a quotation by Du Bois, appropriate to the "theme" of that issue.

The strategic objective of Souls is to reground the field of African-American Studies in the living legacy of Du Boisian social and political theory. The principal focus of Souls's inquiry is the critical examination of Black American and the African Diasporal experience since 1945, marked by the emergence of the anticolonial struggles across Africa and the Caribbean, and the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. The journal maps the broad boundaries of scholarship and intellectual debates in the contemporary Black experience: the current studies in recent Black history, politics, socioeconomic research, social theory, and culture. Produced in the spirit of the intellectual activism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls presents creative and challenging interpretations of the key issues now being confronted by scholars of modern Black America, Africa, and the Caribbean.

The Center for Contemporary Black History, founded and directed by Manning Marable, was initiated in July 2002, at Columbia University. The Center's mission is to engage in the critical study of the modern Black experience since 1900, through a wide range of methods and approaches. The central focus of this inquiry is the examination of Black intellectuals, leadership, and the relationship between racism, inequality, and power in modern societies.

The Institute for Research in African-American Studies supervises Columbia University's undergraduate major and Master of Arts programs in African American Studies. The Institute's public conferences, colloquia, and lecture series bring together traditional scholars and representatives of public and private institutions, to engage in critical conversations about the meaning and reality of Black life in the United States and beyond.

Phone: (212) 854-4935
Fax: (212) 854-7060
Email: [email protected]

Mailing Address:
SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Institute for Research in African-American Studies
1200 Amsterdam Avenue, Mail Code 5512
Suite 760 Schermerhorn Ext.
New York, NY 10027


STAFF


Editor
Manning Marable
Columbia University

Dr. Manning Marable is one of America's most influential and widely
read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public
Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at
Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was
founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American
Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Under Dr.
Marable's leadership, the Institute became one of the nation's most
prestigious centers of scholarship on the black American experience.
In 2002, Dr. Marable established the Center for Contemporary Black
History (CCBH) at Columbia University, an advanced research and
publications center that examines black leadership and politics,
culture and society. CCBH produces Souls, a quarterly academic
journal of African-American Studies, which is published and
distributed internationally by Taylor and Francis Publishers.

Managing Editor
Vanessa Agard-Jones

Vanessa Agard-Jones is a graduate student in Anthropology and French
Studies at New York University. She earned her Master of Arts degree
from Columbia's Institute for Research in African American Studies and
her Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University. She has worked as both the director of a prison abolitionist nonprofit in California and as a teacher in elementary and middle
schools in Georgia and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of
New York's Audre Lorde Project: a Community Organizing Center for
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Two Spirit, and Gender
Non-Conforming People of Color.

Assistant Editor
Ian Steinberg

Ian Steinberg is a doctoral student in Communication at the School of
Journalism. Steinberg's research interests include the political
economy of information and knowledge production. Specifically, he is
interested in the roles knowledge and information play in creating,
maintaining, and challenging systems of social stratification. His
current research is focused on the library as a place and agent of
social change. Steinberg earned his BA ('97) at Penn State and MA
('01) at the University of Oregon. Prior to Columbia he was a
production manager at an academic press.

Editorial Assistant
Marti Newland

Marti Newland, from Cincinnati, Ohio, is a M.A. student in the
Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia
University. She holds a Certificate of Graduate Study from Duke
University in Musicology, a B.A. (high honors) from Oberlin College
in African American Studies and a B.M. from Oberlin Conservatory of
Music in Voice Performance. She is an opera singer and adjunct
faculty member at Seton Hall University in the Department of Art
and Music.

Editorial Working Group

Hishaam Aidi
Columbia University

Hishaam Aidi's research interests include the politics of
globalization, North-South relations, and social movements. As a
journalist, he has written for Africana.com, The New African, and
Middle East Report. He holds a PhD in political economy of
development from Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia's
School of International and Public Affairs, and the David C. Driskell
Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of
Maryland. He is currently researching black internationalism in North
Africa and the Middle East.

Zaheer Ali
Columbia University

Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University,
where he is focusing his research on twentieth-century
African-American history and religion. He is currently conducting an
oral history of the Nation of Islam's community in Harlem for his
dissertation on the history and development of its Temple/Mosque No.
7. He also serves as the Associate Editor of the Malcolm X Project at
Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History, under the direction
of Dr. Manning Marable, which produced an online annotated multimedia
version of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and an e-seminar entitled
"Life After Death: Malcolm X and American Culture." He is a multi-year
recipient of the Mellon Mays Pre-Doctoral Research Grant from the
Social Science Research Council, and most recently wrote "Return to
Roots: The History of Islam in Black America," the cover story for the
July/August issue of Islamic Horizons magazine.

Asale Angel-Ajani
New York University

Asale Angel-Ajani is a professor in the Gallatin School at New York
University. She is the author of numerous articles on the
transnational traffic in African women and women's roles in
trafficking drugs. Angel-Ajani has also published widely on human
rights, migration, displacement, conflict and post-conflict. Most
recently, she is co-editor of the book, Engaged Observer:
Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism with Victoria Sanford.
Angel-Ajani earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford
University.

Dana-Ain Davis
State University of New York, Purchase

Dana-Ain Davis, MPH Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
Purchase College and Coordinator of the Global Black Studies Program.
She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City
University of New York. Davis conducts research in the United States
and in Namibia, primarily in the area of domestic violence, HIV/AIDS,
reproductive justice, welfare reform policy and activism. Davis has
written several articles on the impact of welfare including:
"Manufacturing Mammies: The Burdens of Service Work and Welfare Reform
Among Battered Black Women," "What Did You Do Today: Notes From a
Politically Engaged Anthropologist," and the book Battered Black Women
and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, published by SUNY
Press. Within her discipline, Davis is an active participant in the
Association of Feminist Anthropologists, the Association of Black
Anthropologists and the Society for the Anthropology of North
America. In addition to her academic endeavors, Davis is also the
consulting executive director of the Adco Foundation, a grant making
foundation that supports community activism in New York City. She
serves on the board of the New York Foundation.

Peniel E. Joseph
State University of New York, Stony Brook

Peniel E. Joseph teaches history and Africana Studies at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been awarded fellowships
from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford
Foundation. He received his B.A. in history and Africana Studies from
Stony Brook and his Ph.D. in history from Temple University. His work
has appeared in Souls, New Formations, and The Black Scholar and he is
author of Waiting Till the Midnight Hour: The Black Power Movement,
1955-1975 (New York: Henry Holt) and editor of Black Power Studies:
Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge).

Leith Mullings
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Leith Mullings is Presidential Professor of Anthropology at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her
Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her books
include: Therapy, Ideology and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban
Ghana (1984); Cities of the United States (editor, 1987); On Our Own
Terms: Race, Class and Gender in the Lives of African American Women
(1997); Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and
Renewal, An African America Anthology (2000, co-edited with Manning
Marable); Stress and Resilience: The Social Context of Reproduction in
Central Harlem (2001, with Alaka Wali); Freedom: A Photohistory of the
African American Struggle (2002, with Manning Marable). She has
written articles on such subjects as stratification, ethnicity, race,
gender, health, globalization, participatory research and public
policy. In 1993 Professor Mullings was awarded the Chair in American
Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in
Paris, France and in 1997 she received the Prize for Distinguished
Achievement in the Critical Study of North America from the Society
for the Anthropology of North America.

Premilla Nadasen
Queens College

Premilla Nadasen is an associate professor of African American history
at Queens College (City University of New York). Born in South Africa
and raised in the United States, she received her Ph.D. from Columbia
University in 1999 and her B.A. from the University of Michigan. Her
dissertation on the welfare rights movement was nominated for the
Bancroft Award. Her book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights
Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), outlines the ways in
which African American women on welfare forged a feminism of their own
out of the political and cultural circumstances of the late 1960s and
1970s. It won the 2005 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize awarded
by the American Studies Association for best book in American studies.
A longtime community activist and scholar, she has written for
Feminist Studies, the Women's Review of Books and Race and Reason, and
has given numerous public talks about African-American women's
history. Her article, "Expanding the Boundaries of the Women's
Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,"
(Feminist Studies) won the 2002 Berkshire Conference of Women
Historians Article Prize for best article by a woman historian. She is
currently co-writing a textbook with documents on welfare reform in
the 20th century and is also working on a book-length project on the
history of domestic worker organizing in the United States.

Priya Parmar
Brooklyn College

Priya Parmar is an Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at
Brooklyn College - CUNY. She teaches language and literacy
acquisition at the elementary and secondary levels to both
undergraduate and graduate students. Professor Parmar earned her
doctorate in 2002 in Curriculum & Instruction from The Pennsylvania
State University. Her scholarly interests include critical, multiple
literacies, multicultural education, youth and hip hop culture, and
other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which
economic, political, and social justice issues are addressed.
Professor Parmar also writes and researches about popular culture
within cultural studies, and has just completed Contemporary Youth
Culture: An International Encyclopedia, Volumes I & II with co-editors
Shirley Steinberg and Birgit Richard. Professor Parmar is in the
process of completing her next book project, Knowledge Reigns Supreme:
The Critical Pedagogy of Hiphop Activist KRS-ONE (Sense Publishers).

Dorian Warren
Columbia University

Dorian T. Warren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs
at Columbia University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the
Institute for Research in African-American Studies. His research and
teaching interests include race and ethnic politics, labor politics,
urban politics, American political development, social movements and
social science methodology. Warren received his B.A. from the
University of Illinois and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He
has been a Post-Doctoral Scholar and Visiting Faculty at the Harris
School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and has received
research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Joseph S. Murphy
Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies and the University of
Notre Dame.


Editorial Advisory Board

Lee D. Baker, Duke University
Amiri Baraka, Artist/Activist
Lynne Bolles, University of Maryland
Rose Brewer, University of Minnesota
Dennis Brutus, University of Pittsburgh
Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Emory University
Clayborne Carson, Stanford University
Johnnetta B. Cole, President of Bennett College for Women
Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Michael Dawson, University of Chicago
Ruby Dee, Artist/Activist
Michael Eric Dyson, University of Pennsylvania
Grant Farred, Duke University
Bill Fletcher, Jr., TransAfrica Forum
Eric Foner, Columbia University
Murray Forman, Northeastern University
George Fredrickson, Stanford University
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman University
Steven Gregory, Columbia University
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
Faye Harrison, University of Florida
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
Gerald Horne, University of North Carolina
F. Abiola Irele, Harvard University
John Jackson, Duke University
Joy James, Williams College
James Jennings, Tufts University
Martha Jones, University of Michigan
Robin D. G. Kelley, Columbia University
Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University
Anthony Marx, Amherst College
Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Harvard University
Brian Meeks, The University of the West Indies, Mona
Keesha Middlemass, Vera Institute of Justice
Mignon R. Moore, Columbia University
Robert O'Meally, Columbia University
john powell, Ohio State University
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spelman University
Don Robotham, The Graduate Center, CUNY
David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sonia Sanchez, Temple University
Mark Q. Sawyer, UCLA
Nikhil P. Singh, University of Washington
Julia Sudbury, University of Toronto
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia University
Michele Wallace, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Geoff Ward, Northeastern University
Cornel West, Princeton University
Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara
Vershawn Ashanti Young, University of Iowa