Steven Gregory

Anthropologist Steven Gregory has joined Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies and will lead the new interdisciplinary M.A. program in African-American Studies.

Gregory comes to Columbia from New York University, where he focused on African-American politics, urban social movements, globalization, feminist theory, race and class. He is the author of Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community and Santería in New York City: A Study in Cultural Resistance.

Before joining NYU, Gregory was an assistant professor at Wesleyan. He has a B.F.A. in film, an M.S. in art education from Pratt Institute, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research.

The new M.A. program, administered by Columbia's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, provides graduate-level training in African-American studies to scholars, teachers, and professionals for whom intensive scholarly engagement serves their career or professional needs. Designed to provide students with a thorough grounding in the literature and research of African-American studies, the program enables students to produce critical analysis and research about the complex and historically specific experiences of Africans in the Americas. Students are also expected to demonstrate how those experiences have contributed to, and been shaped by, political, cultural, and economic forces both nationally and globally.

Faculty in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies include Marcellus Blount, Gina Dent, Eric Foner, Lynette Jackson, Anthony Marx, Mignon Moore, Robert O'Meally, Phillip J. Thompson, Sudhir Venkatesh and Ben Vincent. Professor Manning Marable, the historian, activist and author, is the Institute's director.

More information about the M.A. program and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/iraas/.