Are you interested in obtaining a PhD in the Humanities with an emphasis on African American/Africana Studies? Are you looking for graduate training that emphasizes public scholarship, community outreach, collections-based research, and digital humanities? The African American Public Humanities Initiative (AAPHI) provides stipend support for PhD students in History, English, and Art History in a five-year, 12month, cohort based program.

Graduate student Simone Austin

Benefits of being an AAPHI Scholar:

  • Tuition remission and yearly stipend for five years
  • Professional Development funding of up to $2,000 per academic year to attend conferences and training
  • Summer research/internships funding of up to $4,500 per academic year
  • An internationally recognized faculty engaged in innovative research in digital scholarship, public humanities, and material culture studies.
  • UD’s campus is located mid-way between NYC and DC, close to Philadelphia and about an hour from Baltimore. In other words, it sits in the middle of one of the most important cultural hubs in the world

Ready for more information?  Interest Form

The AAPHI Program welcomes our new director, Dr. Durell M. Callier!

​Dr. Durell M. Callier is an artist-scholar who employs Black feminist and queer methodologies to explore the interconnectivity of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. His research documents, analyzes, and interrogates the lived experiences of Black youth and their comm​​unities. Analyzing these dynamics, Callier’s scholarship illuminates how Black art and creative practices subvert, respond to and reimagine Black life amidst anti-Black and anti-queer violence.

His deep investment in the arts as a way of knowing informs his scholarship, pedagogy, and service to his community. Through his prod​uction of performance and arts-based scholarship he explores what else is imaginatively possible for Black, and queer youth, and how these communities leverage creativity to understand, and envision their own lives. As an extension of this work, Callier along with Dr. Dominique C. Hill co-created an arts-based research collaborative known as Hill L. Waters (HLW). A laboratory for Black queer world making since 2012, HLW’s creative practice and scholarship enacts embodied pedagogy to investigate the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality, within Black communities and as a practice for fashioning Black liberation. Together they have written and performed shows including when the stakes are too high (2018), Bodies on Display (2016), and Love, Funk, & Other Thangs (2013). Callier’s performance and visual work also includes Look now, look again (2023), Staging Blackqueer Possibilities (2018), Tell It! (2016), OUT (2013).

Callier has co-authored two books, Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body with Dominique ​​​C. Hill (Brill, 2019), and Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet: Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture with Bryant Keith Alexander, Mary Weems & Dominique C. Hill (Routledge, 2022), as well as written numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia references. His scholarship has been featured in journals such as American Quarterly, Curriculum Inquiry, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Theatre Topics with his visual art exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois, and The Venue in Dayton, Ohio. He is currently working on two projects, including a book on the queering of Black youth through educultural practices and a series of collages and embodied performances which celebrate and remember Black queer life.​

 

Ready to Apply?:

  • Step 1: Contact the department for which you will be applying to a PhD program to confirm dates & application process.
  • Step 2: Create an account in the UD Slate System to apply to your program of choice.

Please check the department website for application deadlines for the program to which you are applying.

Department of Art History        Deadline for application to program:  January 5, 2025

Department of English             Deadline for application to program:  January 5, 2025

Department of History              Deadline for application to program:  January 5, 2025

Please be sure to select the African American Public Humanities Initiative tab on the departmental application to express your interest and to be considered for this program.  You will also be required to submit a brief, supplemental essay.  You will then be contacted by the AAPHI program.

 

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