Academia & Research

For African and African-diaspora women researchers, lecturers, and faculty. PhDs, postdocs, lecturers, tenure-track and tenured faculty across STEM, social sciences, humanities, professional schools, and interdisciplinary fields. The long road to and through tenure. The slow politics. The intellectual life inside and alongside the institution.

Membership includes graduate students from the qualifying-exam stage through dissertation defense. Postdocs in years one through five. Lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors across disciplines. Faculty at research universities, teaching-intensive institutions, liberal-arts colleges, HBCUs, and universities on the African continent and across the diaspora. Faculty who have moved into administration. Faculty who have left the academy and are now in industry, government, or independent research.

What we talk about. Graduate-student survival. The qualifying exams. The dissertation-prospectus stage. The advisor relationship — the generous advisor, the extractive advisor, the absent advisor, the advisor who showed up late but showed up. The dissertation-committee politics. The decision to change advisors mid-program. The decision to leave a program.

Writing. The slow discipline of dissertation writing. The writing-group structures members have built. The retreats. The accountability practices. The first-book work after the dissertation, with the radical revisions it requires. The second-book work, which is different. The article writing, the conference-paper writing, the chapter contributions to edited volumes.

Grants. The NIH cycle for biomedical members. The NSF cycle for STEM and social-science members. The NEH cycle for humanities members. The Mellon and Spencer and Ford and Wenner-Gren and Russell Sage and the long list of private foundations whose deadlines we time our years to. The internal university grants. The international funders for members working on the continent.

Peer review. The reviews we have received that landed well. The reviews that landed badly. The journals that have been fair and the journals that have been hostile. The decision about whether to revise and resubmit. The decision about whether to escalate to the editor. The slow accumulation of a publication record that supports tenure.

Tenure. The packet preparation. The internal mentorship that has helped. The external letters. The promotion-and-tenure committee politics in members' departments and universities. The denial cases and the appeals. The tenure cases that came down to the wire. The tenure cases that were unanimous and what made them so.

Department politics. The colleagues who have been allies and the colleagues who have not. The chair who supported you and the chair who did not. The hiring committees you served on and what you saw inside them. The slow learning of departmental and university culture.

Teaching. The undergraduate courses you have taught and the ones you would teach again. The graduate seminars. The thesis advising. The undergraduate research-mentee work, which is invisible labor in many promotion structures and which we do anyway. The teaching evaluations and the specific bias literature on teaching evaluations for women of color faculty.

Service. The committees that are useful and the committees that are not. The diversity-and-inclusion committees that have absorbed members' time without producing institutional change. The slow learning of how to say no, say yes strategically, and let some service requests slide without explanation.

The two-body problem. Partnered members navigating dual-academic careers. The job searches that have required geographic compromise. The partner hires that have happened. The decisions to live separately for a few years while waiting for a second hire. The decision to leave academia because the geographic constraints were not workable.

Public scholarship. The members who are writing op-eds, doing podcast and TV appearances, building Substack and social-media followings around their research. The way public visibility helps and hurts in different academic contexts. The risk of being typed as a public intellectual in ways that affect promotion. The reward of reaching audiences beyond the discipline.

International careers. Members at universities on the continent and the specific structural challenges and advantages there. The funding landscape. The mentorship infrastructure. The way diaspora members have collaborated with continental colleagues. The fellowships that move between contexts.

The decision to leave academia. The members who have moved into industry research, into government research, into independent research and writing, into administration. The way that decision has played out across their lives.

Cadence: a monthly writing-accountability circle. A monthly long-form thread on a structural topic. A quarterly virtual session, often a senior-faculty member discussing her own tenure case in depth. Subgroups by discipline cluster. An annual in-person convening, often timed alongside a major disciplinary conference for travel efficiency.

Rules. Confidentiality on tenure cases, search committees, and unpublished research. Respect across disciplinary frameworks. No academic gatekeeping based on institution-prestige hierarchies. We meet each member where her scholarship lives.

What we are: the senior peer group African and diaspora women in academia have rarely had before, organized to actually support the writing, the politics, and the long arc of academic life. We help each other survive graduate school. We help each other through the tenure-track years. We hold each other through promotion to full professor. We mentor the next cohort. The academy has not historically centered us. We are centering each other.