Delco Community College Professor Earns $150K Humanities Grant

Press release from Delaware County Community College:

(Delaware and Chester Counties, PA - February 20, 2024) — Ife Williams, Ph.D., professor of Political Science at Delaware County Community College, has received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her project, “Mapping Resistance of Africans and African Descendants to Colonialism and Segregation, 1945-1990.”

The grant will fund a 15-month project to create curricular materials on the resistance of Africans and African descendants to segregation and colonialism in the late 20th century.

While much is known about the inhumane African transatlantic slave trade that saw thousands of individuals abducted and forcibly relocated to America and South America over several centuries, less is understood about the hundreds of slave uprisings emblematic of the indelible spirit of those captured and sold into servitude.

The 15-month digital humanities project will build upon the digital mapping of global slave revolts project which she conducted as the recipient of a $40,000 faculty research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Foundation. That project provided information about nearly 400 slave revolts worldwide by Africans and African descendants against the transatlantic slave trade and slave owners. It was integrated into four courses at DCCC. The completed digital map can be found at blackslaverevolts.org.

“This Pan-African approach to resistance is novel. Flat maps and timelines exist on colonialism, some anti-colonial revolts, and the Civil Rights movement in America and the Caribbean; however, they are absent of relational and contextual analysis, nor do they capture the global nature of the political struggles chronologically or comparatively,” Dr. Williams says. “Through its portrayal of a systematic Pan-African collective, this effort aims to counter the separatist narrative of Africans and African descendants.”

An accomplished scholar and political scientist, Dr. Williams is the author of Police Brutality: A Philadelphia Story (Lexington Press, 2023). She received her doctorate in Political Science and Government from Clark Atlanta University.

This press release was produced by Delaware County Community College. The views expressed here are the author’s own.