USC is on the verge of hiring its first ever professor of Sub-Saharan African history, taking a step to address what professors and students felt was a gap in their curriculum.
“It’s an extreme gap in our curriculum not to have someone covering most of the African continent,” Jay Rubenstein, chair of the USC Dornsife Department of History, said in an emailed statement. While the history department currently has two professors specializing in Northern African Studies, professor Wolf Gruner, who is leading the search committee, said the move is long overdue.
While no final decisions have been made yet, the committee has already identified a final candidate and had them approved by the history department. Gruner said it is now up to USC to “act quickly” and approve the candidate so that an offer can be made.
Gruner, a Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies professor of history at Dornsife, said he is looking for “somebody who can really do research and teach African history from the bottom up.”
“That means not with an outside view from Europe or from somewhere else, but really looking into how kind of history in Africa itself developed and how it was driven forward by people in Africa and not by foreigners,” Gruner said.
Gruner said he was surprised to discover the absence of a professor focused on this area.
“Especially given the history of the U.S. with slavery and everything, I thought this is actually a must,” he said.
Rubenstein echoed Gruner, addressing the importance of studying African history in addition to the department’s existing focus on the global movement of African people.
“We’ve begun to build real strengths in African Diaspora studies, which is to say the movements — often forced — of African people around the globe, in particular to the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean,” Rubenstein said. “Those strengths would be incomplete without a specialist focusing on African history itself.”
Tommy Nguyen, a senior history major and president of the history department’s student association, CLIO USC, said he was disappointed by the lack of diversity in courses that steered toward U.S. and European history. However, he saw this as a fault of the university as a whole rather than the history department itself.
“[The history department is] just so limited by the constraints that this university provides them and one of them is hiring a diverse array of faculty that specializes in a lot of fields,” Nguyen said. “I’m sure there’s only so much money that can go toward a department that doesn’t have a lot of donors.”
Rubenstein said recent events have made it possible — even crucial — for the class to finally get approved.
“In the midst of the pandemic, the country was also going through a time of reckoning with its history of racism, particularly of anti-Black culture and politics and its tragic ongoing legacy,” Rubenstein said.
Rubenstein said that the search is a timely decision for the history department to facilitate deeper engagements with African history.
“[The school] and the wider world all need to enter into a deeper engagement with African history and its contributions to our city, country and world,” Rubenstein said. “Hiring an African historian is a small, overdue step in that direction.”
The committee members recruiting for this position have sought contenders from top programs in the U.S., Europe and Africa, according to Gruner.
Gruner said the department has received more than 120 applications thus far, and they hope to finalize their selection in the next few weeks.
Nataly Joseph contributed to this report.