ROAAR
In 2016, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded “Reading the Oral Archive as an Act of Recovery” (ROAAR) as part of the ongoing work at Howard University of documenting and elevating key moments and figures in contemporary African American arts and letters, especially as they emerged at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
ROAAR has three primary objectives:
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reformatting/digitizing audio/visual recordings of the National Black Writers Conferences to make them available to researchers/scholars in viewable form
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creating critical commentary for each major conference and the contexts out of which the conferences and the writers who participated in them emerge
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generating a ROAAR “Preview” video along with six “Fireside Chats,” which involve interviewing key figures who played important roles in IAH’s history and beyond.
ROAAR makes unique new primary source material on contemporary African American writers available and engages HBCU faculty to produce new critical sources related to that material.
The ROAAR Team
Dana A. Williams
Project Co-Director
Chair of English and Professor of African American Literature at Howard University
Greg K. Carr
Project Co-Director
Chair of Afro-American Studies, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, and Acting Director of the Afro-American Studies Resource Center
Catherine Adams
Researcher
Assistant Professor of English at Allen University
Valethia Watkins
Researcher
Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and Director of Women’s Studies at Howard University
David F. Green
Researcher
Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Howard University.
Nathaniel Norment
Researcher
Professor emeritus in African American Studies at Temple University and Adjunct Professor at Morehouse College
Daniel Black
Researcher
Professor of English, Africana Women’s Studies, African-American Studies and History at Clark Atlanta University
Corey D. B. Walker
Researcher
Vice President and Dean of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University
Mario Beatty
Researcher
Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University
Amy Yeboah
Researcher
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University
Shauna Morgan
Researcher
Assistant Professor of English at Howard University
Samuel Livingston
Researcher
Associate Professor and Director of the African American Studies Program at Morehouse College
Amirah Heath
Assistant Researcher
Doctoral Student in English at Howard University
Rachel Jones
Assistant Media Researcher
Howard University Alumnae