Corporate Sponsorship

The Corporate Partners Program seeks to create stronger alliances between the business community and academia in order to:

• Bring together leaders from the business community and from academia to address issues that are of vital concern to our society
• Advance a high-level dialogue on topics related to the black community worldwide to attract national and global attention
• Advance cutting edge research in African and African American studies

We recognize that an increasing number of social issues concern both the academy and the business sector. The Corporate Partners Program creates a forum for collaboration and intellectual exchange about issues that impact society, the economy, culture, communities, and research agendas.

A Partnership with the Du Bois Institute will ensure that programs such as our inner city education outreach programs and many others receive the support necessary to bring about a change that will last well into the future. One of our outreach endeavors is our W. E. B. Du Bois Society which supports the educational success of secondary students of African descent through an academic and cultural enrichment program.

As a member of the Corporate Partners Program, you will be invited to executive weekend retreats especially designed for our corporate sponsors. These annual conferences will set the stage for an atmosphere of open exchange and intellectual probing around topics of national and global significance. We are currently planning for next summer an executive weekend seminar entitled, "Race and Poverty in the U.S. Economy." This conference will be convened on the Harvard campus and will include leading scholars in the fields of the social sciences and public policy as well as members of leading corporations and national foundations.

Corporate Partners will also be invited to all Du Bois Institute sponsored events. They include our weekly colloquia in which Institute Fellows and visiting scholars present and debate their current research; the Institute's four annual lecture series in which internationally renowned scholars present lectures on African American and African topics over a three-day period; and any Institute-sponsored event ranging from readings to full-scale conferences. Previous conferences have included: Bridging the Gaps: African American Art Conference 2004 and a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris on African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches. In April 2005, we presented a historic event A Season of Laureates in celebration of Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka's 70th birthday. Soyinka was joined by three other Nobel Laureates in Literature - Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott - in a historic evening of reading and discussion.

Members of our Corporate Partners Program seeking to recruit Harvard students for long-term career openings as well as summer or other internships will receive personalized recruitment assistance from our staff. We will sponsor an annual career day forum where corporate representatives will have an opportunity to meet our concentrators on the Harvard campus. Corporate members will also be able to post career opportunities on our Web sites at no additional cost. Finally, corporate sponsors will receive complimentary issues of the Institute's award-winning publications, Transition and the Du Bois Review, our annual reports, and a monthly calendar of events related to African and African American studies and research.

Please see Corporate Partner Privileges below to find out more about the benefits of becoming a Corporate Partner. To become a member, click here and kindly fill out our corporate membership application and remit your tax-deductible contribution of $10,000 for one year of membership.

We look forward to a lasting relationship with your company and hope that you will enjoy all of the benefits associated with our program.

CORPORATE PARTNERS

Since the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research came under the leadership of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the following family of Corporate Partners has continued to generously support our ongoing activities:

Aerial Management Corporation
Africana.com
Time Warner
BET Holding Incorporated
Fannie Mae Foundation
Hale & Dorr
Home Box Office (HBO)
Janklow & Nesbit
John Hancock Financial Services
Mead Westvaco
Motorola Foundation
Sony Electronics Incorporated
Sovereign Bank New England
TIAA-CREF
Viacom International

CORPORATE PARTER PRIVILEGES

EXECUTIVE WEEKEND RETREAT
Members of the Corporate Partners Program will be invited to participate in an annual Executive Week-end Retreat. These conferences will set the stage for an atmosphere of open exchange and intellectual probing around topics of national and global import. In these forums, public intellectuals and scholars from the academic community will explore with leaders from the realms of business, government, and public policy, topics that impact the African American community.

WEEKLY COLLOQUIA, LECTURE SERIES, CONFERENCES

CELEBRITY EVENTS
In recent years, the Du Bois Institute has sponsored presentations by such celebrities as Spike Lee screening and discussing his controversial film, Bamboozled; Cornel West offering his "Reflections on Hiphop Culture"; Stedman Graham explaining the empowerment philosophy he detailed in his bestselling book, XS; and, most recently, the historic event mentioned above for Wole Soyinka A Season of Laureates, which featured readings by Soyinka and three other Nobel Prize winning authors.

WEEKLY COLLOQUIA SERIES
Members of our Corporate Partners Program are invited to attend the Du Bois Institute Colloquia, which are held every Wednesday during the academic year. Chaired by the Institute's Director, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the colloquia offer our corporate sponsors an opportunity to learn first-hand the research work of Du Bois Fellows who present their current research to Harvard faculty, Institute colleagues, students, and other interested parties. The Colloquia Series also allows Harvard faculty and other scholars to present work in progress and, in the past, has included presentations from leading scholars such as Wole Soyinka, A. Leon Higginbotham, Orlando Patterson, Jamaica Kincaid, Ira Berlin, Hazel V. Carby, and William Julius Wilson.

LECTURE SERIES

W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures
The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures were established in 1981 with funding from the Ford Foundation. Now sponsored by Harvard University Press, these lectures recognize persons of outstanding achievement who have contributed to our better understanding of African American life, history, and culture.

Previous W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures include the following:

1982: Sir W. Arthur Lewis, Some Economic Aspects of Race Relations
1983: Mayor Maynard Jackson, Black Ballots and Southern Politics
1984: Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., The Legitimization of Racism
1986: Marian Wright Edelman, American Families in Crisis: What Can Be Done?
1987: Ambassador Donald F. McHenry, The Great Powers and the Third World
1992: Cornel West, Being and Blackness: The Struggle Against Nobodiness
1993: Hazel Carby, Genealogies of Race, Nation, and Manhood
1994: Stuart Hall, Race, Ethnicity, Nation: The Faithful/Fatal Triangle
1995: Barbara Fields, Humane Letters: The Arts and Duty of the Word
1998: Arnold Rampersad, Satan and The Souls of Black Folk
1999: Homi Bhabha, "Quasi-Colonial": Reflections in the Spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois
2000: Glenn Loury, The Economics and Ethics of Racial Classification
2001: Brent Staples, Excavating Race in Mongrel America
2002: John H. McWhorter, African American Experience: Responses to Adversity, Then and Now
2003: Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations
2004: Manning Marable, Living Black History
2005: Paul Gilroy, On The Moral Economy of Blackness in The Twentieth Century

Nathan I. Huggins Lectures
The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures were established by friends and colleagues of Nathan I. Huggins, the distinguished historian and first occupant of the W. E. B. Du Bois Professorship at Harvard University. Professor Huggins served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and as Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research until his untimely death in 1989. The purpose of this series is to bring distinguished scholars from this country or from abroad to deliver a series of three lectures focusing on topics related to African American history. The series is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Press, which publishes a book based on each Huggins lecture series.

Previous Huggins Lectures include the following:

1998: Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary
1999: Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century
2001: Waldo Martin, Black Liberation, Black Culture, and the Making of America: 1945-1980
2002: David Brion Davis, Challenging Boundaries: A Macro, Micro, Macro View of American Slavery
2003: Robin D.G. Kelley, Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa
2004: Leon F. Litwack, Stormy Monday: Black Southerners in the Twentieth Century
2004: Gary Nash, African Americans in the Age of Revolution

McMillan-Stewart Lectures
The McMillan-Stewart Lectures were established in 1996 to honor Ms. Genevieve McMillan of Cambridge and her colleague, Ms. Reba Stewart, who died an untimely death while working as a painter in Liberia and Ghana as a young woman. Ms. McMillan, who has endowed this lecture series as part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship Program, hopes that the lectures will advance knowledge of the field of African studies. The series of three lectures is co-sponsored by the Oxford University Press, which publishes them as books.

Previous McMillan-Stewart Lectures include the following:

1995: Wole Soyinka, Nigeria: The Open Sorrow of a Continent
1998: Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
2000: Ali A. Mazrui, The African Condition and the American Experience
2001: Francis Abiola Irele, Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal
2001: Francis Abiola Irele, Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal
2003: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, New News Out of Africa
2004: Emmanuel Obiechina, Africa in the Soul: What We Should Learn from the Narratives of the African Slaves on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures
The Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures are named after the godfather of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954). These lectures are intended to honor the memory and contributions of this noted Harvard scholar, who became the first and, until 1963, the only African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. Co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Basic/Civitas Books, a member of Perseus Books Group, this series was established to bring a distinguished person to deliver three lectures on a topic related to the field of African American culture and history.

Previous Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures include the following:

2001: Darryl Pinckney, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature
2002: Manthia Diawara, Bamako
2003: Gerald. L. Early, The Next Level of the Game: Cultural Observations on Three African-American Athletes
2004: Dwight Andrews, Giant Steps: Formations of a Black Music Aesthetic
2005: Melvin Van Peebles, Connecting the Dots/A La Barbershop

CONFERENCES AND OTHER EVENTS
Members of our Corporate Partners Program will receive complimentary invitations to all major events hosted by the Department and the Institute. In the spring of 2000, the Department and the Institute celebrated the 30th and 25th anniversary of their founding, respectively. The event was staged over a full weekend and began with a kickoff dinner in which Quincy Jones and Gerald Levin celebrated the announcement of the Quincy Jones Time Warner Professorship in African American Music. The more than 800 guests who attended the 30th Anniversary Celebration could select among eight stimulating panels that featured, for example, William Julius Wilson leading a discussion on "Race, Class, and the Economy" and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham moderating an exchange on "African American Women: Shaping the Past and the Future."

Among the conferences mounted by the Du Bois Institute in the past are the following:

Ethiopian AIDS Conference
The founders of the African AIDS Initiative organized the highly effective First International Conference on AIDS in Ethiopia that took place in Addis Ababa. The conference opened public dialogue on the disease, spawned numerous anti-AIDS clubs, and sparked or renewed anti-AIDS initiatives by individuals, organizations, religious groups, and government. The African AIDS Initiative is working to make its Ethiopian operations the hub of an information and programmatic network that can contribute to the fight against HIV/AIDS in a significant manner. The African AIDS Initiative is a continuation of this work and of the commitment of its founders to battling HIV/AIDS in Africa.

African Americans in Europe
An extraordinary international event held in Paris, this conference included a film festival and art exhibition, a jazz and blues concert, and readings by distinguished African American writers. The conference, which inaugurated a three-part series of conferences on the experience of African Americans in Europe, was attended by more than 800 people.

African American Music in Europe

Trans-Atlantic Passages
Focused on the meaning of transatlantic passages for the African pioneers and their African American descendants, this conference marked the first official conference co-sponsored by the Du Bois Institute as part of its organizational efforts to establish an International Association of African Studies. Held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain the conference featured more than 200 participants and 75 papers, as well as readings from such special guests as Paule Marshall and John Wideman.

An American Dilemma: Revisited
To honor the fiftieth anniversary of Gunnar Myrdal's epoch study of race relations and American life - the most important effort sponsored by a private foundation to examine the interaction of blacks and whites in America in the twentieth century - a conference was organized in an effort to attract a diverse group of the most distinguished scholars in the country in order to examine the issue of race in America today. Held at Harvard University, the conference included speakers such as Kenneth Clark, Sisela Bok, William Julius Wilson, Charles Ogletree, Adelaide Cromwell, Lani Guinier, and Cornel West.

Separate but (Un)Equal: Plessy v. Ferguson
This conference re-enacted the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) as a way of framing a contemporary discussion of the true meaning of America's inclusive creed as well as the choice between an identity based solely on race and an identity that involves assimilation to a degree where race disappears. Intended also to mark the centennial of this landmark Supreme Court decision, the conference traced historical responses to this dilemma and suggested directions for future responses. The event was co-sponsored by the Du Bois Institute with the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School.

35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages & Linguistics in Broad Perspective
Held over a three-day period at Harvard, this conference focused on exploring the revolutionary impact of Africanist scholarship on the field of Linguistics. The framework of the conference invited presenters and participants to go beyond traditional linguistic theorizing and discuss issues relating to African Languages external to the African continent. A particularly well-attended event, the conference attracted more than one hundred and fifty papers.

African Art: Roots & Routes: 13th Triennial Symposium on African Art
Organized by the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) and hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies and the Du Bois Institute, the theme of the conference encouraged participants to explore how African visual practices have moved across cultures, places and time and how the exchange of ideas has fostered vibrant new forms of expression and interpretations in a global world. Through panels, keynote addresses, roundtables, book exhibits, and film screenings, all aspects of African art from ancient bronze casting, through village masquerades, to contemporary art in a globalized world were presented and discussed.

Bridging the Gaps: African American Art Conference 2004
This two-day symposium, which took place at Harvard, was co-sponsored by the Harvard University Art Museums and hosted by the Fogg Art Museum. Presenters explored the generational, methodological, and ideological gaps that exist within the field of African American art, and examine such gaps that arise from differing definitions of the field of African American art and art of the African diaspora. Panel participants included David Driskell, Distinguished University Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Professor Kellie Jones of Yale University served as moderator.

African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Organized by the Du Bois Institute in collaboration with the Cercle d'Etudes Afro-Américaines, this conference was held at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. The conference focused on African American art and was in honor of Michel and Geneviève Fabre, two leading European scholars who have long made important contributions to the field and to the Diaspora. Presentations included topics such as: W. E. B. Du Bois, the American Negro Exhibit, and the Paris Exposition of 1900; The Influence of the Harlem Renaissance in France and Russia in Comparative Perspective; and Perceiving Josephine Baker through the Archives of French Art Cinema.

Into All the World: Black Pentecostalism in Global Contexts II
This groundbreaking conference was co-sponsored by Harvard's Divinity School, the Department of African and African American Studies, and the Du Bois Institute. About 140 participants from throughout the country engaged with 16 leading academics in the fields of history, religious studies, and sociology, who shared their expertise on three panels: "Global Pentecostalism," "African American Pentecostalism," and "Re-imagining Pentecostalism." Wallace Best, a former Du Bois Institute Fellow, and Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at the Divinity School, and Marla Frederick, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of the Study of Religion, were co-organizers of the conference.

Gender and Sexuality in African American Communities
This special panel event explored issues as far-ranging as AIDS/HIV infection rates, black men on the “down-low,” homophobia and the myth of African heterosexuality, intimacy and silence. Panelists discussed the deleterious nature of silence on sexuality and gender within African American communities and the legacy of its deep historical roots. Panelists also drew parallels between the intimate issues raised in oral histories and the larger framework of social justice. Evelynn M. Hammonds, Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies, served as moderator.

RECRUITMENT OPPORTUNITIES
The Department of African and African American Studies will host an annual "Career Day" fair especially for members of our Corporate Partners Program. This forum will allow companies to send corporate representatives to visit the Harvard campus to meet our undergraduate and graduate students and to develop lasting relationships. Our staff will facilitate these events and will work directly with companies to understand their business needs in order to identify students who best meet these requirements. In addition, the Institute and Department will publish summer internship and other student opportunities on their Web sites to attract Harvard graduate and undergraduate students who may be interested in career opportunities or summer internships.

PUBLICATIONS

Members of the Corporate Partners Program will receive the following publications:

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
The Du Bois Review edited by professors Lawrence D. Bobo (Stanford University) and Michael C. Dawson (University of Chicago) and published by Cambridge University Press for the Du Bois Institute, is a new peer-reviewed journal devoted to research and criticism on race in the social sciences. It provides a forum for discussion and increased understanding of race and society from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, communications, public policy, psychology, and history. Each issue of the Du Bois Review contains between 200 and 225 pages and has major sections. The first is a Statement from the Editors that usually provides a commentary on the state and the study of race as well as an overview of the issue. The second section, State of the Discipline, presents two lead essays that synthetically critique broad areas of research in race and the social sciences. The next section, State of the Art, contains three to five major research articles. These articles are peer-reviewed and are of the quality of the best journals in the social sciences such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Historical Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and American Economic Review. The fourth section of the review, State of the Discourse, comprises major review essays, each of which will comment on two to four major current books, controversies, and strands of research in the study of race. The essays exploring "controversies" will present the various sides of critical debate within race and society as well as the study of race. The Review appears semiannually. The first issue appeared in the spring of 2004.

Transition Magazine
Corporate sponsors are entitled to a complimentary annual subscription to Transition Magazine, the organ of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. It is an international review of politics, culture, and ethnicity from Beijing to Bujumbura. While other magazines routinely send journalists around the world, Transition invites the world to write back. Four times a year, its far-flung writers fill the magazine's pages with unusual dispatches, unforgettable memoirs, unorthodox polemics, unlikely conversations, and unsurpassed original fiction. Comic-book heroes in India, pop stars in Nigeria, white slaves in America, witches in South Africa, heart transplants in Japan: Transition tells complicated stories with elegant prose and beautiful images.

Founded in Africa in 1961 by a young Ugandan of Indian descent, Transition quickly gained an international reputation for eloquent but tough-minded commentary. Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, and Nobel Prize-winners Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka. In 1968 the New York Times called Transition "Africa's slickest, sprightliest, and occasionally sexiest magazine." Transition attacked Africa's dictators, and the dictators responded in kind: the editor was imprisoned, and the magazine was forced to move several times. Throughout the 1960s, Transition articles tracked the fate of free speech and free association on the continent. Countless journalists from around the world-from the U.S. to Sri Lanka to Sweden to Somalia-made their mark on the magazine.

Transition was reborn in 1991 in the United States under the editorship of K. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as chair of its distinguished editorial board. In its reincarnation, Transition has been called "the only decent forum for black intellectuals" (the Village Voice), "a cheeky journal of culture and politics" (the New York Times), and "tremendously impressive . . . [home to] some of the smartest cultural criticism available anywhere" (the Nation). Recently, Transition won the Alternative Press Award for International Reporting for the fourth time. In 2001, the magazine was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in General Excellence. Essays from Transition have been reprinted in Best American Essays, The Beacon Best, Harper's, and the Utne Reader, while its fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and has been shortlisted for the O. Henry prize. Contributors include Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, Kofi Annan, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Richard Rorty, Paul Beatty, Maryse Condé, Christopher Hitchens, and Russell Banks.

For more information, go to: http://www.transitionmagazine.com

JOINING THE CORPORATE PARTNERS PROGRAM

Companies interested in joining our Corporate Partners Program should make a tax-deductible contribution of $10,000 for one year of membership. Your company's participation in this program will provide access to leading scholars in the academy as well as key networking and strategic alliances with other major corporations. Financial support from the Corporate Partners Program will enable the Du Bois Institute to support its research and programmatic efforts.

DU BOIS INSTITUTE PROGRAMS & RESEARCH PROJECTS

Martin Luther King, Jr. After-School Program
The aims of this initiative are to:

• Bridge the technological gap between blacks and whites in the United States
• Provide content about the history and culture of Africa and of people of African descent to African American youths

The plan is relatively simple. The Martin Luther King After-School Program places computers equipped with Internet access and Encarta Africana in black churches and community centers. In the After-School Program, our young people are acquiring knowledge about people of African descent worldwide from Africana, and at the same time they learning the cyberskills they will need to navigate to success in the 21st century.

W. E. B. Du Bois Society
The Institute has also created the W. E. B. Du Bois Society, an academic and cultural enrichment program designed to engage secondary students of African descent who attend academically competitive public, parochial, and independent schools. Specifically, the purpose of the Du Bois Society is to build a social and intellectual support system for bright African American youths so they will understand that:

1. They have peers who are smart and want to achieve; and
2. They have elders (e.g., professors at Harvard) who have succeeded and who also believe in their ability to succeed.

It provides young people with an opportunity to develop study skills and teamwork as they reflect on and discuss readings with Harvard professors and undergraduates.

Image of the Black in Western Art
Spanning nearly 5,000 years and documenting virtually all forms of media, the Image of the Black in Western Art Photo Archive is an unprecedented research project devoted to the systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived and represented in art.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
This project gathered detailed information on some 27,000 voyages in the Atlantic slave trade from 1650 to 1867 into a single database which will be the largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind in the world.

African AIDS Initiative International, Inc.
The African AIDS Initiative International (AAII) is a non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting HIV/AIDS awareness in Africa by scaling up nation-wide HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and to improving the lives of persons infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS. To this end, the AAI will use education, outreach, testing, counseling, and support services to control the spread of the disease and foster behavioral change. It also seeks to promote the integration of the growing number of AIDS orphans into their communities, and to reduce the stigma attached to the disease.

The Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue
Begun in 1997, the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the American Repertory Theatre. The mission of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was to cultivate the development of professional artists representing a broad range of disciplines including theatre, music, dance, the visual and literary arts, film and video, whose work addresses issues of race, identity, diversity and community. The Institute also explored how these works can engage new audiences whose members cross traditional social, economic, and ethnic boundaries.

The Institute was a three-year, inclusive, multi-disciplinary program to create new artistic works that tackle the key social concerns of our time. At its heart was a six-week summer residency program that brought artists together with scholars, civic leaders and diverse new audiences. Challenging work on contemporary social issues by artists of the highest caliber was enriched by these intense interactions with intellectuals and community leaders whose work grappled with the same issues. Among the artists who participated in the IACD were Donald Byrd, Dread Scott, Art Spiegelman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Patricia Williams. By fusing the intellectual and artistic resources of Harvard University with the resources of Boston's cultural and community organizations, the Institute aimed to create art that breaks new ground in engaging the citizens of our democracy in vital civic discourse.

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
Since 1995, the National Endowment for the Humanities has supported a summer institute at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute to teach teachers the history of the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The primary goals of the institute are to introduce the participants to the major scholarly works and developments related to this subject and to facilitate the development of teaching strategies and resources for introducing this history to a broad range of students.

The NEH Summer Institute of the year 2003 was titled "African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1865 to 1965." The 2003 Institute introduced college teachers to new and recent scholarship on this topic and aided in developing curriculum and teaching strategies for integrating African American history into American history curriculum and related areas of instruction. It was organized chronologically and topically into four major parts: Reconstruction; the Age of Jim Crow; the Civil Rights Struggles, World War I to the 1950s; The Civil Rights Years. As in the past, the Institute included leading scholars and writers in the fields of African American history, literature, music, and religion. Among the scholars who have participated in the NEH Summer Institutes are Leon Litwack, Eric Foner, Julian Bond, Barbara Savage, Cornel West, Peter Guralnick, Suzanne Smith, Gerald Early, Deborah McDowell, John Dittmer, and Raymond Gavins.

Languages of Africa's Islamic Regions (LAIR) Project
The LAIR project aims to develop much-needed African language instructional materials for the field in both print and electronic form. At the same time, it will make language courses ubiquitously available using workable, efficient, and time-tested methods and approaches.  The project will provide concrete solutions to problems associated with how to offer language instruction under conditions of meager and often nonexistent resources. The LAIR project will put the user of the product into a resource-rich environment permitting human interaction in the development of cultural awareness and the performance of mundane to intricate issues. These resources will include materials for beginners of Kikuyu, Somali, and Sudanese Arabic language, dedicated language coaches available online, and expert instructors and examiners in these languages to evaluate the learner's progress. The LAIR project will also make materials available in Swahili on matters of health and nutrition.

Timbuktu Library Project
In 1998, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute launched the Timbuktu Library Project whose purpose is the preservation and restoration of the lost Library of Timbuktu. The approximately 50,000 volumes contained in that library have been held and protected by approximately fifteen families since the late sixteenth century. Under the auspices of the Timbuktu Library Project, those manuscripts are being catalogued. As that work progresses, the Institute is seeking funding to photograph and digitize the contents of the 50,000 titles, and, in the case of especially important works, to have them translated.

Top Down, Bottoms Up: U. S. Television
The purpose of the Top Down, Bottoms Up Project was to develop a catalogue of people and media resources that can be harnessed to create a television network committed to socially responsible programming. In order to ensure that such programming is relevant to as broad an audience as possible, the project identified the elements necessary to effectuate real change in the media environment of the United States, not only at the national television network level (Top Down), but also in the communities across the country (Bottoms Up).

Among Top Down, Bottoms Up's aims were the following:

• To integrate new and old media to address social concerns respecting the strengths of different media.
• To brand a network of programs with a Universal Needs philosophy so that viewers know where to find more information and broader social perspectives.
• To add choices of research-based information to the entertaining opinions that dominate talk television, radio, and Internet chat rooms.
• To create a grassroots community-based advertising model that brings people together around common interests.

Top Down, Bottoms Up uses entertainment as a catalyst to more information. It links individual and community know-how, television, the Internet, and whatever emerging technologies that work to address common social concerns. It is an infrastructure that:

• Links programs on the Together Media network to social action in communities.
• Links niche markets to a broad Universal Needs program philosophy.
• Delivers life-changing information and data to individuals.
• Mobilizes communities to act on issues such as education, childcare, and the environment.

Harvard Guide to African American History
This project completed a comprehensive guide to primary and secondary sources for African American Studies to provide a basic research tool for students at all levels by providing access to the whole spectrum of African American history. Modeled on the classic, The Harvard Guide to American History, which appeared more than forty years ago and has influenced research in American history ever since, this project has helped to define the field of African American history itself.

African Art Database
A collection of more than 20,000 slides of African art has been assembled on a campus-wide network under the direction of Professor Suzanne Blier. Used to provide research and teaching support for faculty and students, the database collection is also designed to investigate the relationship of artistic production to larger cultural changes through the use of interactive maps (GIS).

Black Periodical Literature Project
Started at Yale University in 1980, this project has collected an annotated all of the short stories, poems, and literary criticism that appeared in African American periodicals from 1827 - the publication date of the first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal - until 1940.

If you have any questions, please contact:

Nancy Brigham Cyr
Institute Administrator
104 Mount Auburn Street
Phone: 617.496.1315
Email: nbcyr@fas.harvard.edu
Web: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/