Institute for Research in African-American Studies — IRAAS

The Institute for Research in African American Studies — IRAAS — founded in 1993 by the late Manning Marable, is the founding research and community engagement arm of Columbia University’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. IRAAS is where sponsored and collaborative research; fellowships and visiting appointments; public programming; and community partnerships are found. IRAAS shaped the intellectual and public life of Black Study(ies) at Columbia before it had a departmental home at the University. It continues to serve as its fulcrum. 

IRAAS is interdisciplinary by constitution and publicly engaged by design. Following the Black study(ies) tradition, IRAAS not only supports individual research, but more broadly pursues collaborative and convened critical discussions, research, and public research and dissemination. This includes questions worked through by a cohort of scholars, artists, archivists, and practitioners, with the findings returned to communities from which they were drawn. Signature research initiatives include “Black Atlantic Ecologies,” “Lessons of the Long Black 1980s,” “Evidence: Black Lives / Black Archives,” and “Black Studies Futures and the ‘Ends’ of Social Science.”

Transnational in practice, IRAAS is involved in fieldwork and sustained institutional relationships extending to the Caribbean, Brazil, West Africa, and southern Africa, including the University of the Witwatersrand and the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami. 

IRAAS is equally anchored locally, for example, through our longstanding partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library.

Black Study(ies) at Columbia 

AAADS, IRAAS, and Souls recently conceptualized the nomenclature Black Study(ies) at Columbia to refer to two traditions of study:

1. The academic project of Black studies in the academy at home in Harlem and around the world, a more than 100-year-old tradition of humanistic, social-cultural, and political-economic study and engagement with Black communities;
2. The wide-ranging, transnational, long Black intellectual tradition beyond institutions that has come to be understood as ‘Black Study’. 

Black Study(ies) at Columbia is unique because of the symbiosis of the Department; IRAAS, the founding research and community engagement arm; our free open-access platform and scholarly journal, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture; the Institute for Jazz Studies; and numerous partnerships with our neighbors and colleagues.