Contact:	Suzanne Trimel					For immediate release
		(212) 854-5573					October 1, 1997
		smt4@columbia.edu



Columbia University Appoints Four New Faculty
In African-American Studies


	Columbia University has appointed four new faculty members at its 
Institute for Research in African-American Studies to expand research and 
teaching in African-American studies.
	Michael Eric Dyson, senior research scholar and visiting professor 
of African-American studies; Lee Baker, assistant professor of 
anthropology and African-American studies; Gina Dent, assistant professor of 
English and comparative literature and research fellow in African-American 
studies; and Mary Pattillo, assistant professor of sociology and African-American 
studies, will form the core faculty group at the Institute under the direction of 
Manning Marable, professor of history.
	As founding director of the Institute, Dr. Marable has sought to broaden the 
focus of African-American studies at the University to address critical issues in 
black America today.  At the same time, he has encouraged a more proactive role 
for the Institute beyond the academy through its public programs, lectures, 
conferences and its journal, Race and Reason.
	"These outstanding young scholars represent the very best among the next 
generation in African-American scholarship," Dr. Marable said.  "Their 
research and writings on the cultural, social and political forces at work in black 
America today have reached a broad audience. I think it's fair to say that as a 
group, their work is increasingly essential to an understanding of the African-
American community."
	Michael Eric Dyson, 38, is widely known as a charismatic and articulate 
interpreter of African-American culture.  An ordained Baptist minister with a 
Ph.D. in religion from Princeton Unviersity, he is a frequent commentator in the 
media.  His books, including Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to 
Black Culture, have earned wide acclaim in academia and the popular press.  
He is currently working on a new books about the generational divide in black 
America,What Have We Come To?  and a collection of essays Race/Theory: 
Conversations.
	Professor Dyson sought the move to Columbia and New York City because 
he sees it as a "veritable live laboratory for testing all sorts of ideas on culture and
 race.  There's the wonderful academic side of Columbia, with so many people on 
the faculty who I've been reading all these years, and then there's the broader 
mix beyond in the city, which is fascinating and inspiring."
	 Gina Dent, 30, earned the Ph.D. at Columbia last year and is editor of the 
influential anthology, Black Popular Culture.  Her writings on race, 
feminism and popular culture led Ebony magazine to name her one of the black 
leaders of the future in 1996.   
 	Lee Baker, 30, is an anthropologist whose research has focused on the role 
anthropology has played in the development of ideas about race.  Because the 
discipline of anthropology developed at Columbia under scholars like Franz Boas 
and Ruth Benedict, Baker's work has focused on Columbia's integral role in 
interpreting race.  His book, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology  and the 
Construction of Race, 1896-1954   will be published in the fall of 1998.  "My 
appointment here could not be more of a perfect fit," Professor Baker said.  In 
addition, he has examined the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance 
intellectuals and the scholars of Columbia and more broadly, the contradiction 
between the ideals of equallity, justice and freedom in democratic societies and the 
persistence of racial inequality.  A Ph.D. from Temple University, he developed 
one of the nation's leading online discussion groups on African-American issues, 
"Afroam-L".
	Mary Pattillo, 28, who holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from the 
University of Chicago, is working on a book about raising children in a black 
middle class neighborhood in Chicago. An article on her research, titled "Sweet 
Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime in a Black Middle Class 
Neighborhood" is forthcoming in the journal Social Forces .  She has 
studied inter- and intra- racial segregation among the black middle class and has 
written about hip-hop and rap in Source magazine.  Her future research will 
include the role of the black church in community organizing.
  	Professor Baker, who will develop a master's degree program in African-
American Studies at Columbia, is teaching courses this academic year on race,
 racism and democracy, African-American intellectual history and the history of 
anthropology.  Professor Dent is currently teaching an introductory survey course 
on African-American studies, and another on African-American popular culture 
and black intellectuals.  Professor Dyson will offer courses on race in America 
and hip-hop culture when he begins teaching in the spring semester. Pattillo, 
currently a Research Fellow at the Poverty Research and Training Center at the 
University of Michigan, will begin teaching next fall.

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