D’Weston Haywood
Ph.D., Northwestern University 2013
D’Weston Haywood is an historian of twentieth century American History with research and teaching interests in Black protest and protest thought, Black masculinity, Black Power, and intersections of Black culture, Black politics, and Black public spheres. His first book, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (UNC 2018), reinterprets the Black press as a tool of Black men’s leadership, public vocalization, gender and identity formation, and space for the construction of ideas of ‘proper’ Black masculinity that shaped the 20th Century Black freedom struggle to wage a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the rise of the modern Black press at the dawn of the 20th Century to the emergence of Black Power, the book reveals the crucial but complicated role Black male newspaper publishers played in presenting certain pivotal moments in the Black freedom struggle as opportunities for Black men to stand up and be ‘men.’ Research for the project was supported by the 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Race and Gender History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Haywood’s work also includes forays into an innovative scholarly and pedagogical praxis he calls “Sonic Scholarship.” This strategy works to generate new ways to analyze history, test Hip Hop as an analytical framework and scholarly methodology, and bridge academic and popular discourses. His first project in this regard, “The [Ferguson] Files: A Sonic Study of Racial Violence in America,” is a musical compilation of poetry, rap, and research that examines episodes of racial violence involving police killings of unarmed Black people that took place between 2014 and 2015.
Email: dh2036@hunter.cuny.edu
Phone: 212-772-5490