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Hutchins Center announces first class of Du Bois Research Institute fellows

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Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the newly launched Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, has welcomed 16 fellows for the 2013-14 academic year.

“We are delighted to welcome one of our most prestigious, exciting, and diverse classes of fellows of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center,” said Gates. “A Nobel Prize-winning writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a scholar of science education and hip-hop, an expert in both African-American studies and twitter,  an eminent scholar of the history of photography who is also an artist, and a distinguished philosopher of African politics and society are only a few of the 16 fellows in residence this year. Mining in Ghana, democracy in the age of animism, academic law in South Africa, the Indian Ocean and postcolonial Africa, and feminism in West Africa are some of the topics which are being pursued,” added Gates. The Hutchins Center remains at the forefront of the discovery and expansion of scholarship in African, African-American, and African diasporic cultures. Our incoming fellows—from the U.S., Europe, and Africa—reflect our commitment to exploring the vast reach of research in the field.

Originally created in 1975 as the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Du Bois Research Institute has annually appointed scholars who conduct individual research for a period of up to one academic year in a variety of fields within African and African-American studies. The institute accepts established and emerging scholars from both the humanities and social sciences and occasionally from fields such as engineering and the medical sciences.