How UBC Arts Scholars Are Advancing Black Studies

From left to right: Dr. Jemima Pierre (Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice), Dr. Peter James Hudson (Department of Geography) and Dr. Crystal Sheffield (Department of History).

UBC Arts faculty reflect on their research, the history of Black Studies, and its relevance today.

For more than half a century, Black Studies has provided a framework for understanding history, power, and the making of the modern world. In the Black History and the History of Black Studies speaker series, three UBC Arts faculty members reflect on how the field continues to shape their scholarship today.

In this Q&A, they reflect on their current work and on what Black Studies offers students and scholars in 2026.

Participants

Jemima Pierre is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ). Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, her research examines the relationship between political economy and race, migration and diaspora, and the ethics and politics of Western knowledge production, with a particular focus on Africa and the African diaspora.

Peter James Hudson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography. His research draws on Black Studies, political economy, and history to examine the long histories of Black dispossession under capitalism, as well as traditions of Black resistance to capitalist exploitation. Hudson is the author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago, 2007).

Crystal Sheffield is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and an award-winning historian of African American history. Her research focuses on Black children in early America. She is the author of Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2021) and is currently completing her second book, Condemned.

Jemima Pierre is a Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Her work explores race, political economy, migration, and the politics of knowledge in Africa and the African diaspora.

What are you working on right now, and how does it connect to your thinking about Black Studies?

Jemima Pierre: I’m currently completing a book titled Of Natives and Ethnics: A Counter History of Anthropology. The book is a work of intellectual history that emerges directly from my historical, ethnographic, and theoretical engagement with the anthropology of race, the study of Africa, and the relationship of African diaspora theorization to African history.

It has two provocations: First, I argue that the world’s ways of knowing about “Africa” – as idea, social, cultural, and political construct, as intellectual project, and as geopolitical space – depend on the dissemination and naturalization of generalized anthropological theoretical, linguistic, and ethnographic models that emerge from the discipline’s imperial confrontations with the African continent. Second, I argue that anthropological ways of knowing depend on constructs of race and Africa. In other words, race is central to the making of the discipline of anthropology, while the continent of Africa and its peoples have been the key sites of extraction for anthropology’s foundational racialized theoretical development and ethnographic deployment. There is, in fact, no anthropology without Africa and no Africa without anthropology. And without anthropology and Africa, there is also no modern concept of race. 

This project, like my entire intellectual oeuvre, is structured through the understanding that Africa and African phenomena are at the heart of Black Studies. Early Black scholars saw the European trade in Africans, the institution of slavery, and formal colonialism of the African continent as part of the same historical arc that established the modern political, racial, and economic hierarchy with Black people as a group, anywhere and everywhere, at the bottom of every scale.

Peter James Hudson: I’ve been working on a project on the status of Haiti within the history of capitalism. Haiti is often negatively cast as “the poorest country in the hemisphere” but it was, at one time, one of the richest places on earth. This wealth, as the great C.L.R. James once observed, was built on the back of half-a-million enslaved Africans, their labor bolstering the coffers of Europe’s mercantile elite and fueling the economic and ideological transformations that gave rise to capitalism. I want to return to that story, and the annuities it generated over time in the context of the Americas. Only Black Studies offers both the methodology and the historiography to do this work; interdisciplinary in its origins and internationalist in its scope, Black Studies at its best engages with history, geography, and political economy while centering the experiences and texts of African peoples. 

Crystal Sheffield: I’m finishing a book titled, Condemned, on the origins of the criminal injustice system in America. The book tells the story of the emergence of the criminal justice system from the perspective of Black children who were especially vulnerable to unjust overcriminalization. Ultimately, it argues one crucial truth: the history of racism in American criminal justice grew out of the ruthless punishment of Black children.

After this book is published in 2026, I’ll begin writing my next book, Encoded in Love. This book project recovers the remarkable diary of Edwin Howard, an African American man who sailed from Boston to Monrovia to pursue medical training at Liberia College. Written in an original code, Howard’s manuscript has remained for over a century in a research archive. Howard’s observations—on travel, science, and forbidden love—expand understandings of nineteenth century Black life politics and protest to include the power of interior self-reflection and romantic desire, bringing to life rare depictions of Black masculinity.

Peter James Hudson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography. His research draws on Black Studies, political economy, and history to examine the long histories of Black dispossession under capitalism, as well as traditions of Black resistance to capitalist exploitation.

Why does studying Black Studies matter in 2026—for understanding the world and for what students go on to do after university?

Peter James Hudson: Black Studies emerged in part as a response to political-economic inequalities that were a consequences of racial hierarchy, to the terrible impact of the enslavement of one group by another, and to the histories of colonial extractivism and dispossession that have transferred wealth and resources from one part of the world to another.

In my mind, Black Studies at its best asks: how did these inequalities emerge? What institutional forces promoted these inequalities? How do we understand those inequalities in the context of a world that appears to be changing at a pace faster than any time in human history? At the same time, Black Studies has never been simply an academic project, locked in the ivory tower. Its mission has always been to understand the world in order to change it for the better, and to examine the past so we may live in a better future. Mere study is not enough, but it is a necessary beginning.

What questions or conversations do you hope this series will open by focusing on the history of Black Studies?

Peter James Hudson:  I hope the series can do two things. First, promote a conversation around the history of Black History Month by returning us its origins in Negro History Week — a week-long exploration of the Black past launched by the imminent African American historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson on February 7, 1926. Woodson’s event was certainly about Black achievement and what we now term “Black Excellence,” but it was also about understanding the critical power of history. 

Second, I hope to emphasize the intellectual and political connections between Africa and the Americas. We sometimes get caught up in a paralyzing fragmentation in the Black World, often characterized as the “Diaspora Wars.” But the earliest Black Studies scholars did not see fragmentation, and did not think in terms of conflict. Even Dr. Woodson, in 1926, stressed the importance of what he called “the African background,” as did pioneering scholars including Arturo Schomburg and W.E.B. Du Bois. 

With presentations from UBC’s Dr. Jemima Pierre and Dr. Crystal Sheffield, alongside that of Dr. Scot Brown of UCLA, we have the great fortune to hear from three of the most important contemporary figures in the field, all of whom have been trained in Black Studies and whose work is pushing Black Studies into the future. 

What’s one idea you hope people take away from your talk for the Black History Month speaker series?

Jemima Pierre: My talk focused on what seems to be a recent conceptual split between what is known as “Black Studies” and what is known as “African Studies.” I provided a historical context for this split. I suggest that after 1945 a set of realities emerged on the African continent and in the Black diaspora in which: 1) the political demands of the time – anticolonial movements in Africa and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the US – meant rising nationalism was embraced over transnational connections; and 2) the rise of the U.S. as a global hegemon and the emergence of “area studies” in the west transformed what the study of Africa into a discrete entity called “African Studies.”

But this new “African Studies,” flush with US State Department funds, actually displaced a long history of African Studies housed in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It also shifted the theoretical and conceptual framework of the earlier intellectual work of Black scholars that linked Africa and the African diaspora in their analysis and whose work focused on Black liberation. I advocated the recovery of the radical international anti-imperialist vision of early Pan-Africanism.

Dr. Crystal Sheffield is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and an award-winning historian of African American history. Her research focuses on Black children in early America.

What themes from the early history of Black Studies continue to shape the field today?

Crystal Sheffield: I’m interested in new directions in Black Studies that critically embrace the ways African Americans participated in radical traditions and violent resistance in far earlier historical moments than previously acknowledged. For this historiographical turn, I am influenced by scholars like Kellie Carter Jackson’s Force and Freedom and We Refuse, as well as Kali Gross’s Vengeance Feminism, in addition to scholars who continue to think about long roots of Black feminist radical thought like Nneka Dennie. I am thinking through this trend in my own work by examining Black children’s behavior, ranging from the play to their law-breaking, as radical rejections of the racialization of American childhood. 

Support for the Black History Month speaker series was provided by the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, the UBC Black Caucus and the UBC Equity & Inclusion Office.