Seminars

Seminars for the Fall of 2022

Forever Chocolate City: DC Native Pride, Black Owned Business and Tech Innovation

Monday November 7th, Cramton Auditorium

A panel of African American entrepreneurs from DC presents and discuss with Howard's incoming freshman class to the endless possibilities for creative endeavors. From the district's rich history in connection to Black America, to entrepreneurial lessons learned and advice to the next generation. The panel provides unique perspective and opportunities for students as residents of DC.

Dr. Carla Williams
Associate Professor of Medicine & Public Health, Howard University

Dr. Carla Williams received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Howard University. She is currently Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health and Interim Director of the Howard University Cancer Center. Her work centers around understanding and reducing cancer-related health disparities. Her research activities emphasize engaging communities that have not been adequately represented in research. Dr. Williams works with community health leaders to promote individual adoption of healthy lifestyle behaviors as well as population-level change in the environment, health policies, and health systems.Since 2010, Dr. Williams’ collaborative research efforts have resulted in the expansion of her role to function as an Executive Scientist. In this capacity, she helps to build research teams within and across institutions to promote collaborative research. She has led the development of a regional symposia to equip scientists and community health advocates with the skills to maximize the impact of collaborative research. In her teaching roles, Dr. Williams has developed new training paradigms to enhance students understanding and utilization of evidence-based practice. She has also incorporated the use of reflective exercises to promote learning synthesis and integration. Most recently, she has worked to develop a combined didactic and practice-based course that builds skills for community engagement as a key discipline in public health, health care research, and health policy.

Race After Technology by Dr. Ruha Benjamin
October 28, 2022.

October 28, 2022, 5-7 PM at Cramton Auditorium

Dr. Ruha Benjamin
Professor of African American studies at Princeton University
Personal Website: https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
Department of African American Studies: https://aas.princeton.edu/people/ruha-benjamin

Professor Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and, in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award. Dr. Bnjamin is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab. She is the author of three books, Viral Justice (2022), Race After Technology (2019), and People’s Science (2013), and editor of Captivating Technology (2019).

Ruha Benjamin discusses ‘Race After Technology’

A panel discussion on the African Experience: Kemetic Technology & Scientific Racism
September 19 and 26, 2022.

Dr. Greg Carr

Dr. Mario Beatty

Dr. Jules Harrell

Dr. Greg Carr
Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Chair, Department of Afro-American Studies

Greg Carr is an Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and has served as Department Chair for 12 years. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Howard School of Law. He is First Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and Editor of The Compass: The Journal of ASCAC. A former board member of the National Council for Black Studies, Dr. Carr has twice been named national “HBCU Male Faculty Member of the Year” by HBCU Digest and has been voted "Professor of the Year" several times by Howard students.. He led the team that designed the curriculum framework for the School District of Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course and, during his time as the District's Program Specialist on Race and Culture, co-founded Philadelphia Freedom Schools. His writing has appeared in books, academic and popular journals and he serves as a contributor to and/or commentator in a wide range of media. He is a weekly panelist on the daily digital news show “Roland Martin Unfiltered” and co-hosts Karen Hunter’s weekly Saturday YouTube series, “In Class With Carr.” His commentaries on the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party and the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture appeared in the August and September 2016 issues of Ebony Magazine. Dr. Carr’s chapter, “Re-Literacy and African Power in the Trump Era,” appears in Not Our President, Third World Press’ book-length commentary on the Trump presidency.

Dr. Mario Beatty
Associate Professor of Afro American Studies

Dr. Mario Beatty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University. Dr. Beatty received his B.A. degree in Black World Studies/History at Miami University; his M.A. degree in Black Studies at The Ohio State University; and his Ph.D. degree in African-American Studies at Temple University, where his dissertation, “The Image of Celestial Phenomena in the Book of Coming Forth by Day: An Astronomical and Philological Analysis,” directed by the noted Egyptologist Theophile J. Obenga, remains the only major work to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a document on Pharaonic Egyptian Astronomy. Prior to coming to Howard, Dr. Beatty served as Chairperson of the Department of African-American Studies at Chicago State University and Chair of the Department of African World Studies at Morris Brown College. As an educational consultant to the School District of Philadelphia, Dr. Beatty helped to write curriculum and to train teachers in the district’s novel and mandatory high school course in African-American history. In May 2008, he became the first African American to present a paper at the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists in Rhodes, Greece. One of the foremost American students of Ancient Egyptian Language of his generation, Beatty has also mastered Hieratic, Demiotic and Coptic language, enabling him to conduct translations of texts that stretch between the nearly three thousand years of classical African history. Dr. Beatty is a former recipient of the UNCF/Henry C. McBay Fellowship as well as a former Scholar-In-Residence fellow at New York University. He received the 2010 Carter G. Woodson Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching from the National Council for Black Studies. In December 2010, he was formally invited to deliver a conference paper at the Third World Festival of African Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. He currently serves as a Board Member for The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), and is also an active member of the American Research Center in Egypt, the Egyptological Seminar in New York, the Cheikh Anta Diop Institute of Egyptology and African Civilization and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, among others. Dr. Beatty’s research interests include the Ancient Egyptian language, history, wisdom literature, astronomy in Ancient Egyptian religious texts, comparative analyses of African cultures, the image and use of ancient Africa in the African-American historical imagination, the theory and practice of African-American Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

Dr. Jules Harrell
Professor of Psychology

Dr. Harrell is a leading researcher in the field of of the effects of stress and racism on the health of African Americans. He was recently awarded a 3-year grant by NSF, Developmental Mechanisms of African American Ethnic and Racial Identity During the Transition to Adulthood, to examine the multifaceted ways in which African American ethnic identity and racial identity (ERI) - the personal significance and meaning of race and ethnicity to an individual - shapes the association between racial discrimination experiences and biopsychosocial development during the transition to adulthood.

Introduction: The New Jim Code (September 12, 2022)

Bahiyyah Muhammad

Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology

Ph.D., Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice

MA, Corrections Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice

BS, Administration of Justice, and a Criminology Certificate from Rutgers University

Get to know the Dean (August 29th, 2022)

Rubin Patterson, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Rubin Patterson, Ph.D., is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University after serving as the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology for five years. Throughout his career, Dr. Patterson has established himself as a distinguished scholar, researcher, and educator as well as advocate for environmental justice in underserved communities. Before earning a Ph.D. in Sociology at Howard University, Patterson received a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Physics and Electrical Engineering from Florida State University and a Master of Science in Engineering Management from George Washington University. His expertise is wide-ranging, including environmental inequity, sustainable development, diversification of environmental leadership, clean technology, social change, and environmentally sustainable socioeconomic development in Southern Africa. Patterson has authored, edited and co-edited multiple books, along with being the recipient of externally funded projects supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Park Service. His extensive international experience aligns with several programs within COAS, having served as a research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa and visiting professor at the University of Ghana. Patterson previously served at the University of Toledo in various capacities, including chair of Sociology and Anthropology, Director of Africana Studies, Director of the Institute for the Study and Economic Engagement of Southern Africa and Professor of Sociology. He has also served as a visiting fellow at Morehouse College and the University of Maryland.

2017

HU COAS 2017: The Unique Role of Howard Scholars

The goal of the COAS 2017 Freshman Seminar project is to have student groups examine the unique role Howard scholars have played historically and continue to play contemporarily in pursuing and producing knowledge, exploring especially how Howard scholars have sought to recover and restore the ways people of African descent have accumulated and disseminated knowledge and wisdom.

2003

Howard University COAS Freshman Seminar African Burial Grounds

The African Burial Ground (ABG) in New York City, the nation’s largest national monument dedicated to African people, has been called “the single-most important, historic urban archaeological project undertaken in the United States." Over 20,000 Africans were buried across the five-acre burial ground during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Four hundred and nineteen unearthed remains were sent to Howard University’s Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory, which coordinated a historical, anthropological and biological examination of each body and the world they toiled and died in. The Howard group used this study tour to commemorate the University’s role in the ABG research and to mark the fifth anniversary of the October 2003 re-internment of the remains at the site, a “Rites of Ancestral Return” which began at Howard’s Andrew Rankin Chapel on September 30 and culminated at the Burial Ground on October 3-4, 2003.

Dr. Jules Harrell
Professor of Psychology

Memory, Restoration, and the African Renaissance by Dr. Camara Jules P. Harrell

Dr. Greg Carr
Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Chair, Department of Afro-American Studies

Greg Carr is an Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and has served as Department Chair for 12 years. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Howard School of Law. He is First Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and Editor of The Compass: The Journal of ASCAC. A former board member of the National Council for Black Studies, Dr. Carr has twice been named national “HBCU Male Faculty Member of the Year” by HBCU Digest and has been voted "Professor of the Year" several times by Howard students.. He led the team that designed the curriculum framework for the School District of Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course and, during his time as the District's Program Specialist on Race and Culture, co-founded Philadelphia Freedom Schools. His writing has appeared in books, academic and popular journals and he serves as a contributor to and/or commentator in a wide range of media. He is a weekly panelist on the daily digital news show “Roland Martin Unfiltered” and co-hosts Karen Hunter’s weekly Saturday YouTube series, “In Class With Carr.” His commentaries on the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party and the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture appeared in the August and September 2016 issues of Ebony Magazine. Dr. Carr’s chapter, “Re-Literacy and African Power in the Trump Era,” appears in Not Our President, Third World Press’ book-length commentary on the Trump presidency.

The American tapestry: unsung heroes | Dr. Greg Carr | TEDxHowardUniversity

Dr. Mario Beatty
Associate Professor of Afro American Studies

Dr. Mario Beatty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University. Dr. Beatty received his B.A. degree in Black World Studies/History at Miami University; his M.A. degree in Black Studies at The Ohio State University; and his Ph.D. degree in African-American Studies at Temple University, where his dissertation, “The Image of Celestial Phenomena in the Book of Coming Forth by Day: An Astronomical and Philological Analysis,” directed by the noted Egyptologist Theophile J. Obenga, remains the only major work to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a document on Pharaonic Egyptian Astronomy. Prior to coming to Howard, Dr. Beatty served as Chairperson of the Department of African-American Studies at Chicago State University and Chair of the Department of African World Studies at Morris Brown College. As an educational consultant to the School District of Philadelphia, Dr. Beatty helped to write curriculum and to train teachers in the district’s novel and mandatory high school course in African-American history. In May 2008, he became the first African American to present a paper at the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists in Rhodes, Greece. One of the foremost American students of Ancient Egyptian Language of his generation, Beatty has also mastered Hieratic, Demiotic and Coptic language, enabling him to conduct translations of texts that stretch between the nearly three thousand years of classical African history. Dr. Beatty is a former recipient of the UNCF/Henry C. McBay Fellowship as well as a former Scholar-In-Residence fellow at New York University. He received the 2010 Carter G. Woodson Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching from the National Council for Black Studies. In December 2010, he was formally invited to deliver a conference paper at the Third World Festival of African Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. He currently serves as a Board Member for The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), and is also an active member of the American Research Center in Egypt, the Egyptological Seminar in New York, the Cheikh Anta Diop Institute of Egyptology and African Civilization and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, among others. Dr. Beatty’s research interests include the Ancient Egyptian language, history, wisdom literature, astronomy in Ancient Egyptian religious texts, comparative analyses of African cultures, the image and use of ancient Africa in the African-American historical imagination, the theory and practice of African-American Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

Abandonment and Dismemberment: “Something Torn and New” By Dr. Mario Beatty

Coming Up

Dr. Kayla Lee
Product Manager - Community Partnerships, IBM Quantum & Qiskit - Growth & Identity, IBM Quantum

Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Springer Lab in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Lee is leading collaboration with IBM to provide students and faculty at 23 HBCUs with an opportunity to develop research and education capabilities in quantum computing. Howard University is a member of IBM-HBCU Quantum Center.

Quantum Computing in 60 seconds.

College of Arts and Sciences
Washington, D.C. 20059
Contact us if you have any questions by email: HU.FRSM@gmail.com.