Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life

The Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life is a research center rooted in the study of the Black diaspora. Building on the strengths of Dartmouth's current Black faculty and staff, the Institute hosts visiting scholars, artists, activists, and postdocs and provides grants for Dartmouth faculty who are undertaking major research and creative projects related to the Institute's research themes.

We offer opportunities for collaborations that include lectures, symposia, performances, and/or working groups focused on different thematic areas. The centralized core of the Institute serves as the epicenter of knowledge production and creative output for Black diasporic subjects at Dartmouth and beyond.

With colloquia, seminars, and college-wide collaborations, the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life sustains an ecosystem through which the ideas of faculty, students and staff from across disciplinary boundaries are supported and resourced. The Institute serves as a creative collective for Black communities at Dartmouth invested in pursuits that align with the center's core mission.

The Institute sponsors initiatives, projects, and programming that anticipate and shape trends in the pursuit of knowledge production and social justice.

The Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life highlights the expansive scholarship and artistry of the Black diaspora, making Dartmouth a focal point for explorations of Black culture in all of its iterations and permutations.

We advance the creative, cultural, and scholarly expression of the Black community at Dartmouth and beyond, illuminating and preserving its centrality to the American experience while also exploring the inter-connectedness of the Black diaspora.

The Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life is structured around a small number of research pillars that focus activities on a multiyear basis (Slavery and the Law; Performing Arts; Race, Geography and Climate Change; Black Visual Culture, Black Public Health; Religion and Public Life; Black immigrant communities in New England, etc).

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Kimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life.

Kimberly Juanita Brown serves as the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the Black diaspora and visual culture studies. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015), and the forthcoming book Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024). Brown is currently completing her third book, Black Elegies, about the art of mourning in contemporary cultural productions.

She is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color scholars, artists, and curators whose work examines critical race theory and visual culture studies. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing.

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David W. Robinson-Morris is the inaugural executive director for the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life.

David W. Robinson-Morris, Ph.D. is the inaugural executive director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life. He joined Dartmouth in January 2024 with a background in higher education leadership, fund development, intellectual and community engagement initiatives, and institutional transformation.  

Dr. Robinson-Morris is a scholar-activist, author, philosopher, social justice and human rights advocate, educator, philanthropist, community organizer, DEI practitioner, and administrator. In the vein of Fred Moten and other Black scholars, he understands that to be Black is to be limitless—it is the perpetual practice of an onto-epistemological refusal of limits imposed from elsewhere. For him, Black being, intellectual life, and culture are a brilliant (r)evolution always already in the making—propelling toward justice and the infinite.

Get in touch with us at the.black.institute@dartmouth.edu.