Professor secures grant for course based on book exploring Black contributions to European culture

UDC Digital Media Associate Professor Olive Vassell and Dr. Natasha Kelly, founding director of the Institute for Black German Arts and Culture, secured a 50,000-euro grant (approximately $52,900) to develop an online course based on their book, “Mapping Black Europe: Monuments, Markers, Memories.”   

The book, published in 2023, explores the Black community’s contributions to European social and cultural life. 

The grant was awarded by the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE) through its Creative Impact Fund, which is dedicated to empowering people and companies within cultural and creative industries. The fund’s purpose is to address “pressing global challenges such as climate change, demographic shifts and social inequalities.” 

CIRCE is “an interdisciplinary international think tank dedicated to the question of how policy can support the creative economies and their impact in Europe and how to mitigate the effects of Brexit on established structures in these sectors.”

Vassell and Kelly are founding members of the Black European Academic Network (BEAN), which was founded in 2012 “to overcome the challenges of institutional racism in education and beyond.” 

In September 2022, Vassell presented the book to Master of Journalism and Media Technology students at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) while on a Fulbright Specialist assignment at the institution and discussed the African Diaspora in Europe. That same month, she presented data and its use in journalism to Master of Data Science graduate students ther

In May 2023, Vassell and Kelly shared their research findings during a presentation at the College of Arts and Sciences Last Lecture Series.