“Of the Wings of Atalanta”: The Struggle for African American Studies at the University of Virginia, 1969–1995

Anything but peripheral to the institutional and political struggles of African American Studies in the post-Black Power era, the University of Virginia (UVA) occupies an important place in the field’s history. Combined with its role as a major funding source for graduate students and advanced scholars with research interests in the history, culture, and politics of the African diaspora, the University has been the site of passionate debates over the field’s transformative potential in both the academy and the larger world. It has also been an institution with a rather complicated relationship to the Black Studies project, due in no small part to internal divisions over the best way to advance the field’s pedagogical goals, research agenda, and political objectives. Consequently, UVA’s African American and African Studies program, particularly its “institute model” of scholarly advancement, provides an excellent case study for examining the regional breadth of the Black Studies movement and its broad impact on knowledge production within and beyond the academy.