| Title: | Associate Professor |
| Dept: | History |
| Office: | RT 1942 |
| Phone: | 216-687-3940 |
| Email: | K.SOTIROPOULOS@csuohio.edu |
| Address: | 2121 Euclid Ave. RT 1942, Cleveland, OH 44115 |
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 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. With Lisa Brock and Robin D. G. Kelley, she co-edited the 2003 collection, Transnational Black Studies, also 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. 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: | ||
| TEACHING SCHEDULE FOR FALL 2009/SPRING 2010
FALL 09 HIS 329/529 BLACK RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW, Tu/Th 10-11:50 COURSE DESCRIPTION: With the election of President Barack Obama, we have heard much about Kennedy, Lincoln and King and how Dr. King's 1963 dream has been fulfilled with the election of this African American president. In light of this monumental achievement and shift in racial politics, the longer movement for civil rights is in danger of being forgotten. In this course, we will look at the many ways African Americans struggled to make freedom a reality for all, long before the modern movement for Civil Rights. From the first years after the Civil War through the decades of America's "heart of darkness" -- an era marked in part by constitutionally upheld segregation from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) black Americans struggled to wrest American democracy from the grip of Jim Crow. Readings will address the fight against lynching and segregation, strategies of self-defense, the impact of rural to urban and southern to northern migration, unionization, communism, internationalism, nationalism, women's rights, the roots of black power, and the many ways that African Americans confronted the rise of a racist commercial culture. HIS 601: Introduction to Graduate Study in History, Tu/Th 6-7:50 SPRING 2010 HIS 318/518 BLACK AMERICA AND AFRICA MWF 9:45-10:50 Course Description: As a nation, we are on the verge of reconsidering the relationship between American identity and global citizenship as the first U.S. President of African descent takes the oath of office. This course historicizes constructions of race in American history and forces us to challenge our assumptions of what it means to be American. It 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 U.S. President Barack Obama. 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. Throughout the course 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. | ||