Griot Newsletter: August 1, 2025

August 1, 2025

Dear Griot Friends and Family,
Considering how hot the weather has been, I hope you all have had a reasonably lazy summer doing what you enjoy. The spring semester ended with goodbyes to a few important people. Many thanks to Dr. Jaye Austin Williams who provided steadfast support to the Griot Institute along with critical insights on every question. While we are incredibly excited for Dr. Jaye’s new appointment, we will miss the word-craft and thoughtfulness she gave to each issue put before her. Our graduate intern completed her Master’s thesis and landed the job she really wanted teaching in the Carolinas. While we will miss Ryleigh Roberts, we wish her well in all of her new classroom experiences. We are certain she will eventually head back to graduate school for a PhD focused on paracosms in novels, poems, and films. We expect both will share updates occasionally.

Over the summer at The Griot Institute we have been busy teaching the Bucknell in the Caribbean course; organizing archive records (thank you Michelle!); engaging in research and writing; and putting together a Juneteenth series of events with community members. As summer winds down and we gear up for a new academic year, we are finalizing a range of scholarly and artistic programs that have a social component for faculty, students, staff, and the broader community. I want to share preliminary information about programming we have organized to guide the community to reflect, with intentionality, on the challenging world with which youth—our students and beyond—are grappling with as they struggle to make the best of these imposed circumstances. They are managing, with varied outcomes, through their vision and innovation as knowers, artists, entrepreneurs, and everyday people. The 2025-2026 Griot Institute theme is Youth from Africa and the Diasporas: Knowers, Innovators, Visionaries, and Everyday People. The year will kick off with several September and continue with October and November events:

Lunch event for faculty and staff at noon on Friday September 5
Opening event with drummers and youth gumboot dancers from 12-2 on Saturday September 6
Drumming lessons Mondays at 4:30 pm starting September 8
Student Leadership Lunch Wednesday September 17
The Dancing Mind Challenge Saturday & Sunday, September 27 and 28 (you choose the hours)
Charlotte Hill O’Neal music and talk at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, October 1, Hildreth-Mirza Great Room
Book Group luncheon to discuss Richard Wright’s Black Boy 12:00 pm Wednesday, October 8, Hildreth-Mirza Great Room
Film Group to watch and discuss Sinners 4:30 – 6:30 pm on Wednesday, October 29, Hildreth-Mirza Great Room
Book Group luncheon to discuss Edda Fields-Black’s Combee, a Pulitzer Prize Winner at 12:00 pm Wednesday, November 5, Hildreth-Mirza Great Room (Fields-Black will be on campus in the spring semester.)

Please make plans to join us, we welcome you at as many events as your schedule and life responsibility allows. Aria Halliday reminds us that Black girls are rewarded for making their needs and complaints secondary to those of others. This is a year to make the experiences, needs, and views of youth generations central to our thinking and actions. I look forward to the conversations we will develop as we think through Youth from Africa and the Diasporas: Knowers, Innovators, Visionaries, and Everyday People.

Sincerely,
Cymone Fourshey
Professor of History and International Relations, Director of The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures

The Griot Intern Blog

For insights, reactions and detailed information on past Griot Institute events, please read our intern-authored blogs throughout the academic year. The blogs also include many updates and reports on what is happening around campus in connection to Black lives and cultures.

Newest Blog Posts:

Dear Dr. Jones by Mercy Ifiegbu ’26
Leadership Lessons by Dr. Monica Cox by Mercy Ifiegbu ’26

See all intern blog posts

2024-25 Griot intern contributors: Jeremiah Charles ’27, Athaliah Elvis ’26, Mercy Ifiegbu ’26, Holiness Kerandi ’26, Jesse Leon ’28, Ryleigh Roberts ’25 (graduate student and editor), Da’Mirah Vinson ’26 and Barbara Wankollie ’25.

The Griot Institute MediaSpace Channel

Do you know that many of the Griot speaker lectures are available on MediaSpace? If you missed a Griot event or want to relisten to a speaker’s lecture, check out the available recordings! Anyone with Bucknell credentials can access The Griot Institute MediaSpace Channel.

Most recently, from the 2025 Series on Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning, we’ve added the following:

Dr. Stephanie Jones – Ending Curriculum Violence and Racial Trauma in the Classroom
Coco Fusco – Illicit Incursions in the Cuban Public Sphere
Black California Gold Book Launch with Poet Wendy Thompson
Conference Panel One: Marronage, Exclusion, and Marginalization in Art and Politics
Michael Sawyer – Ramifications of Ramifications: Toni Morrison’s Third World
Conference Workshop on Black Ecologies
Conference Panel Three: Teaching and Learning through Decolonial Approaches

**Special thanks to the following people for making these recordings possible: Ryleigh
Roberts ’25 (graduate student and editor), Holiness Kerandi (editor), Wes Bernstein (Digital Media Specialist), Jeff Campbell (Event Tech) and Jesse Greenawalt (Event Tech), as well as all of the individuals featured in the recordings!

Congratulations

Congratulations to
The Griot Institute’s graduated intern,
Ryleigh Roberts!

Ryleigh graduated May 18, 2025 with an MA in English. While she will miss fellow interns she has grown close with at the Griot and Bucknell, she is fulfilling a dream teaching high school literature, which she will begin doing this fall!

Photo Credit: Duc Thanh Nguyen

Special Thanks

Special thanks to
Dr. Jaye Austin Williams who
served on The Griot Institute Advisory Board since joining the Bucknell faculty in 2018. The Griot Institute has greatly benefited from her long-term engagement, and we are immensely appreciative of her many contributions. We wish her a smooth transition and deeply engaging new Intellectual community as she moves to the Department of Black Study at UC Riverside. We will miss you Dr. Jaye, and we hope you find the bits of wisdom cards that we all have written for you to be a small reminder of how meaningful you and your work have been to all of us!

Past Events

Bucknell in the Caribbean 2025

May 18 – June 7

Antigua and Puerto Rico

Dean Terri Norton and Professor Cymone Fourshey taught a group of eight students in the course UNIV 200-CB: Disasters in Paradise: History, Literature, and Engineering. While learning about the economic and social impacts of slavery and colonialism on one British and one Spanish colony from the 15th-19th centuries, students also analyzed the contemporary impacts on people’s lives of natural disasters on places where extractive economic impositions have dominated the landscape. By meeting with Antiguan and Puerto Rican students, artists, museum staff, government entities (NODS), and local folks around town, the students not only moved beyond “the Bucknell bubble,” they also made new connections and learned from their acquaintances’ entirely different life experiences. Students conducted research and completed research papers while also maintaining blogs along the way. Click this link to read their blogs.

Bucknell in the Caribbean provides first-hand information about the languages, literatures, histories and cultures of the Caribbean through readings, lectures, field trips, group projects, attendance and participation in cultural performances, ethnographic interviews, as well as analytic reflections. Students explore the cultural and environmental impacts of slavery, colonialism, independence, and tourism. The islands of Puerto Rico and Antigua are the classroom.

Juneteenth 2025

Thursday, June 19, 5 – 8 p.m. at Hufnagle Park. With support from FCFP and Williamsport community members, the Lewisburg Community and Bucknell University co-created our second annual Juneteenth event. This was designed for all ages to mark 160 years since Black people — in all U.S. states —could say the abolishment of slavery was enforced. Jubilee, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day are all terms used for Juneteenth, a celebration Black communities in Texas set in motion on June 19, 1865 when they were finally informed, 2.5 years after slavery was officially abolished on paper in other U.S. states, that slavery was no longer legal.

Approximately 200 people from Lewisburg and neighboring communities came out for friends, food, festivities, powerful poetry, music, games, book giveaways, and community building. If you are interested in joining the 2026 Juneteenth committee, please reach out to us at The Griot Institute at griot@bucknell.edu.