The Black Studies Program at Queen’s was founded to examine the systems, geographies, and ways of knowing that shape Black life.
Four years later, its Undergraduate Chair, Jennifer S. Leath, is working to ensure the discipline itself isn’t diminished within the institution. For Leath, her job involves imagining what the discipline can become and confronting the realities that threaten to limit it.
Along with being the undergraduate chair, she’s also an associate professor of Black Religion in the School of Religion, cross-appointed in the Gender Studies Department and one of three Co-Chairs of BLCK Collective, which includes faculty chairs responsible for partnerships, organizing, events, and communications.
The Black Studies program launched in 2021. It’s an interdisciplinary undergraduate program that engages connections between the arts, social justice, and practices of anti-oppression. The program brings together faculty across units to examine Black life through multiple methodologies and intellectual traditions.
For Leath, Black Studies isn’t synonymous with including “Black content” in other disciplines. It’s concerned with the architectures, the geographies, the pedagogies, the technologies, ways of knowing, and the systems of Black life.
“Course readings by Black scholars neither accomplish the objectives of Black Studies, nor, alone, make a Black Studies course,” she said in a statement to The Journal.
Leath describes working in the program as a joy because of the students and colleagues. The program is led collaboratively through the BLCK Collective.
Still, the program faces structural challenges, as she stated Queen’s has signed the Scarborough Charter, an agreement regarding post-secondary schools upholding black inclusion and anti-black racism.
Particularly, she spoke to Queen’s failing to sustain an “explicit commitment to Black flourishing, inclusive excellence, mutuality, accountability, and resistance against anti-Black racism,” claiming the Black Studies Program has faced funding cuts, retracted provisions, higher enrolment minimums, and reduced staffing since its launch in 2021, due to austerity measures.
Austerity measures are economic policies meant to reduce budget deficits, typically involving cuts to services, staff and operations.
Leath added that these austerity measures “disproportionately and inequitably impact smaller, younger programs like ours,” raising concerns about whether Queen’s will sustain its commitments to dismantling anti-Black racism and protect Black Studies’ disciplinary autonomy.
Despite those pressures, she calls the program “one of the University’s best kept secrets.” Students receive close mentorship from world-renowned faculty with roots across Canada, the African diaspora, and the African continent.
A major priority is launching BLCK 100, an introductory course designed to offer a variety of responses to the question “What is Black Studies?” and help students apply the discipline in their professional lives. Leath didn’t provide a timeline for when this course might be introduced.
Ultimately, Leath hopes students leave Black Studies with an understanding of how Blackness has been constructed through slavery, colonization, and imperialism; how to use anti-racist and anti-colonial tools to transform the world.
Her scholarship and leadership remain rooted in what she describes as a spiritual and social commitment to Black life, the flourishing of Black people and communities in the diaspora and in Africa, and the flourishing of Africa itself.
Before she became a professor, Leath was a high school student reading Alice Walker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauli Murray, and Richard Wright in an independent study with her teacher, Mrs. Chery Irving.
“I could say: the rest is history,” Leath wrote.
That experience, she said, changed her life. It came as she was beginning to understand herself as both a Black queer person and as a fifth-generation minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The denomination is one of six historically Black church traditions founded in the United States and is now present in roughly 40 countries across five continents.
“I understood the church as a critical social and spiritual institution of Black life, a vehicle for liberation—in desperate need for repair,” she said. “Recognizing ecclesial limitations, but maintaining my commitments to Black liberation and flourishing, I found a home in Black studies.”
Alongside teaching, research, grading, and writing letters of recommendation, Leath develops curricula, supports programming, and connects with students and staff to “promote the flourishing of Black Studies and its objectives.”
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black history month, black studies
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