| Title: | Associate Professor |
| Dept: | History |
| Office: | RT 1328 |
| Phone: | 216-687-3940 |
| Email: | K.SOTIROPOULOS@csuohio.edu |
| Address: | 2121 Euclid Ave. RT 1328, Cleveland, OH 44115 |
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| Education: | ||
| Ph.D., City University of New York | ||
| Brief Bio: | ||
| Karen Sotiropoulos specializes in African American, African Diaspora, and American Cultural History and earned her Ph.D. from the City University of New York where she also taught American History at the CUNY colleges before arriving at CSU in 2000. She lives in Cleveland Heights with her son Lanell.
Her most recent publications are Open Adoption and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Human Rights and Over the Rainbow: African American Stage Artists and Dreams of Home. The first essay appears in the Spring 08 issue of the Radical History Review (http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/rhr.htm) that she co-edited with Rhonda Y. Williams, Associate Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. The second article is a chapter in the book Africa and its Diaspora: History, Memory and Literary Manifestations (Africa World Press, 2008) edited by Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman. Her book, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America, (Harvard University Press, 2006) was released in paperback in Spring 2008. "Our Hokum Hooked Them" is an easily accessible online essay drawn from her book published with PBS as part of the Ken Burns series, JAZZ: A History of America's Music. http://www.pbs.org/jazz/exchange/exchange_minstrel.htm With Amy Chazkel and Melina Pappademos, she has co-edited the 2013 collection, Haitian LIves/Global Perspectives and with Lisa Brock and Robin D. G. Kelley, she co-edited the 2003 collection, Transnational Black Studies, both published with the Radical History Review. She is on the editorial board of this peer-reviewed journal published three times a year by Duke University Press. She has made numerous presentations nationally and internationally discussing her work at such venues as the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the National Association for Ethnic Studies, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. She has also made several presentations at CSU and in greater Cleveland including ones at local universities, high schools and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her teaching repertoire includes survey courses in African American history, the upper level courses Black America and Africa, Black Resistance in the Age of Jim Crow, and The Black World and the Cold War, as well as the Graduate Readings Course in Black History and the Introduction to Graduate Study in History. Her current research project explores the experiences of African students who have studied in the United States (from John Chilembwe to Barack Obama, Sr.) to better understand the relationship between modernity and racial nationalism in the 20th Century Black Atlantic. | ||
| Research Interests: | ||
| African American History, African Diaspora History, Atlantic World History, American Cultural History, Gender and Feminist History | ||
| Teaching Areas: | ||
| 2012-13 TEACHING SCHEDULE
FALL 12 HIS 216: AFRICAN AMERICANS SINCE 1877 (MWF 9:45-10:50) The main purpose of this survey course is to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of FREEDOM by analyzing the historical experiences of African Americans from Reconstruction to the present. We will examine such topics as: Reconstruction and the formation of post-emancipation communities, the origins of legal segregation and white supremacy, migration from South to North, political activism, intellectual and cultural production, African Americans and the labor movement, the modern civil rights movement, and the historical context to understanding the Obama presidency. HIS 329/529 Black Resistance in the Age of Jim Crow (MWF 1:30-2:35) This course focuses on black activism from the years after the Civil War until the dawn of King's leadership and unpacks the ways slave-like conditions persisted long after Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory in 1865. It demonstrates that King's accomplishments, Obama's historic election and our continued fight against racism are part of a long struggle for freedom, one that began when the first Africans resisted their Atlantic captors. To better understand how racism is and has been entwined with US politics and society -- as well as to begin to see what was distinctive about the King years -- this course explores how Black America fought to make the nation a land of liberty and justice for all during the time known as Jim Crow. Often referred to as "slavery by another name," these years were the ones of constitutionally upheld segregation bookended by the Supreme Court rulings Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. the Board of Education (1954). SPRING 2013 HIS 318/518 BLACK AMERICA AND AFRICA, MWF 1:30-2:35 This course explores how African Americans' relationships with Africa have changed over time from the throes of the Atlantic trade in African human beings to the paternal lineage of President Obama. In essence then, we are exploring the relationship between Africa and the United States, given that the U.S. was founded as a republic with riches wrought by the bound labor of African peoples. We will consider the way that black Americans have "imagined home" by looking toward the continent and continental Africans and how these linkages have figured historically in the making of an "African American" identity. We will investigate the transformation of African identities in the new world, the formation and transformation of racial nationalism and its relationship to the continent, as well as the connection between the U.S.-based freedom movement and African struggles for independence. And finally, we will define and redefine what is and has been meant by terms such as the African Diaspora, Afrocentrism, Cultural Nationalism, black transnationalism and Pan-Africanism to historicize the very definition of race in America. | ||