Introduction to the Black Lit Network by Drs. Kenton and Howard Rambsy (BBIP Webinar, 9/13/2024)

The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) - part of the University of Kansas's History of Black Writing project (HBW) - is a digital archive of over 7,000 Black-authored texts. It launched in 2010 and has received funding from KU, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. PhiloLogic, a searchable online metadata platform from the Textual Optics Lab at the University of Chicago, powers BBIP's HBW Novel Corpus.
Dr. Howard Rambsy II is a Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville, where he teaches African American and American literature and coordinates programs related to African American cultural history and experience. He received his PhD (May 2004) in Philosophy and African American Literature at Penn State University, and has published articles about black poetry, Richard Wright, Colson Whitehead, and Aaron McGruder. His book, "The Black Arts Enterprise," about the defining African American literary and cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011.
Dr. Kenton Rambsy is an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of Texas-Arlington and an Associate Professor of African-American Literature at Howard University. He received his PhD (May 2015) and Masters in English (May 2012) from the University of Kansas. He is a 2010 Magna Cum-Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College. He finished Morehouse as the top-ranking scholar in the English department and received the distinction of being named the 2010 William Pickens Scholar. He received the UNCF/Mellon-Mays Fellowship in 2008 and the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellowship in 2009. From 2012- 2014, Kenton served as the Program Academic Committee chair for the Association for the Study of Life and African American History (ASALH). He specializes in African American short stories, social geographies, and digital humanities text-mining, topic modeling, and mapping software.
DISCLAIMER: This video's contents were recorded before the recent allegations against Jay Z. HBW does not condone sexual assault in any way, shape or form.