The department organizes an annual summer school on racial politics, attended by graduates in the DMV area.
APPLY TO THE SUMMER SCHOOL NOW / Tuition and Housing covered for succesful applicants
Beginning in 2023, the department began to organize an annual summer school addressing the study of race within political science, inviting scholars whose innovative research has reframed our understanding of the relationship between race and the study of politics. In the late nineteenth century, the original Hopkins Seminary of History and Politics played a meaningful role in formulating political science as an independent area of study. As recent disciplinary histories have demonstrated, questions of racial hierarchy, reconstruction, and mores were never far from the minds of the men, many hailing from the immediately postbellum South, who assembled in Baltimore under the tutelage of Herbert Baxter Adams. For them, as the wall of the Seminary meeting room declared, “History [was] past Politics and Politics present History.” Just as the politics of the day took place among races, so, inevitably, must the history that politics produced record those races’ struggles.
The question that today confronts scholars of political science is not whether racist concepts have influenced the development of the discipline but, instead, how to think differently in ways that eliminate racism’s remaining effects. Such is the task the Summer School presents for itself, working better to understand the roles race plays in politics, and racism in political science, by treating race as central rather than marginal to our understanding of political life. Through the summer school, we are working to train a cadre of young scholars who will be equipped with the historical knowledge and conceptual-methodological sensitivity necessary to confront the ongoing influence of race in domestic and international political life.
Summer School 2024
The second Hopkins graduate summer school on racial politics will be held on the Homewood campus 10-14 June 2024. Limited travel bursaries are availabe.
This year’s keynote address will be given by Prof Deva Woodly (Brown University).
Seminars will be run by Consuelo Amat, Clive Gabay, Frederick C. Harris, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Keisha-Khan Perry, Desirée Poets, Robbie Shilliam, Lester Spence, and Inés Valdez.
APPLY TO THE SUMMER SCHOOL NOW / Tuition and Housing covered for succesful applicants
Summer School 2023
The inaugural Hopkins graduate summer school on racial politics was held on the Homewood campus in June 2023 and lasted a week. The keynote address was given by Prof Tiffany Willoughby Herard, and seminars were run by Profs Jessica Blatt, Shatema Threadcraft, Lilliana Mason, Robbie Shilliam, Lester Spence, and Minkah Makalani.
Topics covered included:
- The history of Political Science as a discipline
- Black Feminist praxis and politics
- Political psychology of racist attitudes
- Methods of political science
- Black studies as a political intervention
- Theorizing black organizing and urban politics
