Just over a year after a high-profile flap with the University’s top administration and the subsequent defections of two star professors left Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department badly shaken, the department is back on its feet and has hired several new faculty, according to its chair.

Several new hires will shore up the department’s offerings in fields ranging from African languages to hip hop. And the department is gearing up for a major broadening of its scope, embodied by its new name—the African and African-American Studies Department. Concentrators will have the choice of a new track in African studies, offered in partnership with the Committee for African Studies.

Department chair Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.—who spent the 90s building up the department with support from former University President Neil L. Rudenstine—said that time and effort has healed the department’s wounds.

An anxious climate that grew in the wake of the flap between former professor Cornel R. West ’74 and University President Lawrence H. Summers and the departures of West and colleague K. Anthony Appiah has dissipated.

“The faculty began with a great deal of sadness at the departures of Anthony Appiah and Cornel West, and a great deal of apprehension about our capacity to rebuild, as well as about the administration’s support for the department,” he says. “I’m pleased to be able to report that those fears are all allayed.”

He says the integration of African studies and African-American studies has been a “dream” of his and Appiah’s since they arrived at Harvard in 1991.

According to Emmanuel Akyeampong, chair of the Committee for African Studies, Summers’ interest in development economics and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby’s appreciation of international studies have fostered an intellectual kinship between the two and the department.

“It gives both Dean Kirby and President Summers an opportunity to put their stamp on black studies in the academy as dramatically as Dean Knowles and President Rudenstine did in the 1990s,” Gates says.

Gates says that he has no doubts about the department’s standing in academia—and high hopes for the new combined programs in African and African-American studies.

“Are you kidding?” he exclaimed. “We are number one by all accounts. And I expect that in five years, Harvard will have a leadership position in African studies similar to its dominance in the field of African-American studies.”

New Faces

Hip-hop expert Marcyliena Morgan, who was a visiting lecturer last semester, has been hired as an associate professor.

In addition to teaching her popular hip-hop course, she will manage the hip-hop archives that she brought with her from the University of California at Los Angeles.

The archives, located in the Barker Center, consist of various collections of materials that illustrate ways in which hip-hop culture has impacted youth culture. These include records and hip-hop gear as well as academic and journalistic writings and documents of political organizations formed by artists and members of the hip-hop community.

Morgan, who is one of the nation’s leading academic scholars on hip-hop, says she hopes Harvard’s department will lead the maturation of hip-hop studies.