By Sian Wilkerson

Virginia Commonwealth University author Adam Ewing has been named a fellow of the National Humanities Center for the upcoming academic year.

Ewing, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies in the College of Humanities and Sciences, will spend the year in residence at the center in North Carolina, joining more than 30 other scholars as he works on his new book, a history of popular pan-Africanism in the 20th century.

Tentatively titled “Blacklands: The Global Fight for African Freedom,” the book “looks beyond the more visible story of great men such as Kwame Nkrumah or W.E.B. Du Bois to examine how pan-Africanism became a meaningful politics for Black community building, organizing and resistance to white supremacy,” Ewing said.

Through stories that traverse the Atlantic, Ewing explores how lawyer-activists in colonial Ghana, urban rebels in Detroit, Black Power organizers in Guyana and booksellers in London participated in what he calls “a conjoined revolutionary project that sought to challenge the assimilationist pressures of Western society and to build African-centered communities that could withstand those pressures.”

Since 1978, the National Humanities Center has been a hub for humanistic scholarship, providing scholars with resources to pursue projects that further understanding of all forms of cultural expression, social interaction and human thought. Every year, leading scholars come to the center in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park to both work on their individual research projects and share ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences.

Ewing’s upcoming book expands on the work he did for 2014’s “The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics,” which examines the ideas of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and the movement he launched.

“I’ve been thinking about the ideas at the heart of this project for a very long time,” Ewing said. “As much as I will miss teaching and my work in the Department of African American Studies, I am thrilled to be able to devote all of my energy and attention to finally bringing these ideas to life.”