Robert Hanserd is among 12 awardees of fellowship that provides opportunities to demonstrate how faculty can creatively incorporate the HistoryMakers’ African American video oral history archive into curricula.

The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive, has awarded its 2023-2024 Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship to Columbia College Chicago Associate Professor Robert Hanserd. Hanserd, a historian and Africanist, is one of twelve awardees.

Hanserd’s course, “The Black Arts Movement,” will use the HistoryMakers’ digital archive to help students investigate filmmakers, dramatists, writers, critics, and others' engagement with the role of the artist in the making of cultural revolution and authenticity and axiology relative to a black aesthetic while examining local, national, and international features of the Black Arts Movement and related historical actors and events.

Now in its fourth year, the HistoryMakers Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship is designed to foster classroom innovation and teaching, and to diversify curricula while furthering student learning and research skills during the upcoming academic year. Award recipients will receive a $7,500 award and the opportunity to demonstrate how faculty can creatively incorporate the HistoryMakers’ digital archive into a 2023 semester course and syllabus.

The HistoryMakers collection represents the only massive attempt to record the black experience since the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s. In 2014, it was announced that the Library of Congress would serve as the permanent repository for the HistoryMakers Collection. To date, the organization has interviewed over 3,300 African American leaders in the U.S. including poets Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez; actors James Earl Jones and Whoopi Goldberg; sports Hall of Fame inductee Hank Aaron; and General Colin Powell.

Congratulations to Robert Hanserd for this honor!

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