Chair Christy Clark-Pujara and UW African American Studies: New Name, Same Mission
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara joined the UW-Madison African American Studies Department in 2009 and became its chair last fall.
Part 2 of 2
by Jonathan Gramling
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara is grateful to the UW-Madison Department of African American Studies for giving her the opportunity to complete her doctorate — which became her first book “ Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island” — through a fellowship and then beginning immediately as an assistant professor on a tenure track in the department. Clark-Pujara was happy to give back when she became chair last fall.
In some ways, being the chair can almost be a full-time position as the chair is the chief academic and administrative person in the department, a job where “you’re learning on your feet,” according to Clark-Pujara. While new chairs receive a few days of training, being chair is a departure from the duties that most professors assume at a university.
“The chair has the authority and the responsibility for the delivery of academic programs in accordance with the department, college and university strategic plan, the hiring and evaluation of department personnel — that includes faculty and staff — budgeting and resource management and as a member of the college administration, the chair coordinates departmental activities of the unit, the college and the university in collaboration with other members of the administration,” Clark-Pujara said. “So I am often in meetings with the dean, the provost thinking about hiring initiatives. I also do evaluations of probationary faculty. That’s faculty who are no tenured. I also conduct the annual reviews and the management of staff in the department. We have a department administrator and we have a student services coordinator and instructors. We are in the process of hiring a communications specialist who is in contact with donors. If there are any issues between faculty, it comes to me. You’re the first stop for student complaints. It’s a management job and am administrative job. It comes with a salary bump to reflect those duties. It also comes with a course release because you just have less time to teach. Instead of teaching two courses, I teach one because my other time is spent on administrative duties.”
One of the most important responsibilities that Clark-Pujara has is maintaining the legacy of the 1969 Black student strikers at UW-Madison. It was their sacrifice that led to the establishment of the department. And Clark-Pujara wants the department to stay true to its roots.
“We were literally born of protest,” Clark-Pujara said. “And I feel the weight and responsibility of that. We exist because of the 1969 Black Student Strike. And those students put a lot on the line and many of them paid way too heavy a price. Many of them were never able to complete their education. I often think about that. What can I do? What should we be doing as a department to honor that legacy in a real way. I felt the weight of it because for me being chair of this department holds a lot of responsibility. And it is something that I take very seriously.”
While the department was initially named Afro-American Studies, a name that fell in line with the times in the 1960s, the department changed its name to African American Studies a couple of years ago.
“It’s to reflect more modern language,” Clark-Pujara said. “The term Afro-American is kind of 20th Century and we’re in the 21st Century. We want to signal to prospective students as well as prospective faculty that we recognize that we are in the 21st Century. We held onto the name, Afro-American Studies, for so long out of respect and loyalty to the students who gave us that name. But we also weighed that against we found it really outmoded and outdated. The language is changing. If you go back in a time machine to the 1950s, the term Negro was perfectly respectable. But that’s not a term we use today. Very few people of African descent would refer to themselves as Afro-American. People call themselves Black or African American or Black American. We wanted to reflect that. And so that’s why we changed our name.”
But it’s mission remains the same.
“We developed a strategic plan two years ago,” Clark-Pujara said. “Our mission is as an interdisciplinary department, we foster effective teaching, scholarship and community engagement focused on the experiences and perspective of Black people. And our vision is to expand the size, scope and impact of the department, incorporating those time-tested and new research methods, teaching and learning processes.”
The scholarship of the university impacts students’ views of the world around them in often times profound ways.
“One of the things that I am most proud of being a part of our department is we widen people’s lens of understanding, not of the Black experience, but of the American experience,” Clark-Pujara emphasized. “You can leave the Department of African American Studies with a better understanding of the history, the literature, the culture of America. That’s something that I think we do incredibly well. And the fact that we are interdisciplinary allows students to experience that in many different ways.”
And Clark-Pujara is proud of the scholarship that comes from the faculty and its national impact. Among the recent developments, Clark-Pujara pointed out:
- We have welcomed two new faculty members, Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall who received her PhD from Stanford University in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education, Curriculum and Teacher Education and Dr. Andrene Wright who received her PhD in Political Science and African American Studies from Northwestern University
- Associate Professor Thulani Davis’s book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, published in June 2022, won the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award
- Professor Christina Greene was awarded the 2023 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for Best Book on Southern Women’s History for her book Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment, published in November 2022
- Professor Christy Clark-Pujara received the prestigious Romnes Fellowship, funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- Assistant Professor Brittney Edmonds received the Career Enhancement Fellows award from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, funded by the prestigious Mellon Foundation
- Assistant Professor Mosi Ifatunji was awarded a National Institute of Health Diversity Supplement grant to study health and mortality disparities of native- and foreign-born Blacks in the United States.
The Department of African American Studies remains true to the sacrifice that led to its creation; a department dedicated to finding the truth of the African American experience and beyond through rigorous scholarship and relaying that knowledge to students at UW-Madison. The 1969 Black student strikers would be proud.