Callie House Research Center
The Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics supports the research, teaching, and public/civic engagement activities of the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies. The intellectual thrust of the center includes projects relating to internationalism, gender, sexuality, race, academia, leadership, and mentoring.
The Callie House Research Center also serves as a funding source for AADS faculty initiatives, as well as for initiatives proposed by faculty external to AADS Vanderbilt that dovetail with the intellectual focus of the center.
About
Callie House was born a slave in Rutherford County, Tennessee in 1861. Post-emancipation, she worked as a seamstress and washerwoman in Nashville, Tennessee. House received a primary school education. Her evolving understanding of her rights as a citizen led to an interest in social justice and politics.
In 1898, House helped found the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. The association, which eventually claimed 300,000 members, represents “the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans.”
Launched as the AADS Research Center in the summer of 2012 with annual seed funding from the College of Arts & Science Dean’s Office, the research center was renamed the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics in 2015. In March 2015, the Callie House Lecture was inaugurated by Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, former U.S. civil rights commissioner, and native Nashvillian who wrote My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations.
Our Activities
The Callie House Research Center sponsors lectures, conferences, working groups, professional development and academic seminars, and activities associated with Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International.
Programming
- Annual Callie House Center Lecture
- Funding for undergraduates to participation in the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History or the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
- An annual writing retreat for “The Fugitives,” a writing group “For Black Women…Who Keep Writing…Because Tenure Isn’t Enough”
- Chair At the Table (CHAT) Research Collective, an annual working symposium for women academic leaders
- Annual Newport Seminar for Works in Progress
Newport Seminar for Works in Progress
Our five-year initiative (2016-2022), Newport Seminar for Works in Progress, offers a space for Vanderbilt faculty and invited scholars to write and present their work and receive feedback. Taking place in Newport, Rhode Island, the seminar has seen the publication of Black Bottom Saints, My Black Country, Africana Tea, and other completed works by its participants.
- Michael Eric Dyson – Vanderbilt University
- Stephanie Y. Evans – Georgia State University
- Tara T. Green – University of Houston
- Carol Henderson – Emory University
- Brandon McCormick – University of Louisville
- Caroline Randall Williams – Vanderbilt University
- Charles I. Nero – Bates College
Hiatus due to the COVID pandemic.
- Fred Bonner – Prairie View University
- William Hart – Macalester College
- Eric Darnell Pritchard – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Michael West – Pennsylvania State University
- Isabel Molina Guzman – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Simone Drake – The Ohio State University
- Tanisha Ford – University of Delaware
- Rhonda Williams – Vanderbilt University
- Victor Anderson – Vanderbilt University
- Terrance Dean – Vanderbilt University (Callie House Center Fellow)
- Claire Oberon Garcia – Colorado College
- Tara T. Green - University of North Carolina, Greensboro
- Minkah Makalani – University of Texas at Austin
- Michael Brandon McCormack – University of Louisville
- Kennetta Perry – East Carolina University
- Claudine Taaffe Vanderbilt University
- Thea Autry – Vanderbilt University
- Scot Brown – University of California, Los Angeles
- Terrance Dean – Vanderbilt University (Callie House Center Fellow)
- Felix Germain – University of Pittsburgh
- Carol Henderson – University of Delaware
- Erik McDuffie – University of Illinois
- Chad Williams – Brandeis University
Journal
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work by and about women of the African diaspora and their communities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
A partnership between the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies and the State University of New York Press, the goal of Palimpsest is to engender further explorations of the Black International as a liberation narrative and Black Internationalism as an insurgent consciousness formed over and against retrogressive practices embodied in slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, from the early modern period to the present. Drawing on the traditions of African diasporic studies and feminist/womanist thought, the journal features analyses of Black women’s histories, experiences, and cultural productions, as well as work that considers the intersections of race, class, gender, color, and sexuality in the histories, social and political movements, expressive cultures, spiritual formations, and philosophical thoughts of women as well as the ways in which women locate themselves, and have been located, on the map of human geography.
Contact
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Director, Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
t.sharpley-whiting@vanderbilt.edu