Just Futures–HBCU Humanities Project: Festival of Louisiana Creole Futures

Dear Colleagues,

You are warmly invited to participate in the opening gathering of the Just Futures–HBCU Humanities Project, a multi-campus initiative launched by Professor Anupama Rao, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Professor of History at Columbia University, in collaboration with Professor Kim Vaz-Deville at Dillard University.

This project aims to deepen collaborations among HBCU faculty, students, and public humanities scholars by integrating humanities-based research with global justice frameworks. Through a focus on art activism, data justice, archives and public memory, and performative practices of the South, the initiative seeks to build robust networks of inquiry grounded in place, memory, and community knowledge. It prioritizes sustained faculty and student exchange and public pedagogy rooted in African diasporic and southern traditions.

The first gathering of this initiative will take place at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 15–16, 2025, under the theme:

Festival of Louisiana Creole Futures: The Baby Dolls’ Legacy in Song, Dance, and Dress

This day-and-a-half convening will engage the long history and contemporary power of Black performative resistance. The Baby Dolls are a more-than-100-year-old African American carnival masking tradition born in New Orleans, an embodied form of walking, dancing, singing, and chanting that animates community, critique, and joy. The festival explores how Afro-diasporic communities use ritual, performance, language, and movement not only to celebrate identity but also to contest erasure, transmit memory, and imagine otherwise.

Programming will include:

• Embodied Knowledge Workshops by Baby Doll maskers
• Faculty-led presentations on southern performative and archival traditions -- Professor Phyllis Hale, Jackson State University/Kim Vaz-Deville, Dillard University
• Lecture on the endangered cultural form - Louisiana Creole (Kouri-Vini) -- Linguist Lawson Ota
• Discussion on speculative worldmaking and embodied historiography -- Professor Anupama Rao

The themes of this event, diasporic creolization, intergenerational memory, and cultural reclamation, will guide a full year of gatherings throughout the 2025–2026 academic year across the Columbia–HBCU network.

If you or someone from your institution is interested in attending, please reach out directly to Professor Anupama Rao: arao@barnard.edu

This convening is sponsored by the New Orleans Tourism and Culture Fund and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and hosted by Dillard University. CHCI has offered funding under the project: Global Justice and Humanities Practices mobilizes the humanities to address urgent social justice issues, from historical injustices to contemporary struggles for equality and human rights. This initiative calls for research projects and programs that apply humanistic methods to critical global issues such as migration, environmental justice, and the legacies of colonialism.

If you have ideas about topics, please feel free to contact Kim and Anu.

We look forward to launching this collaborative year with you in New Orleans.

Sincerely,
Kim

Kim Vaz-Deville, Ph.D.
Chief of Staff
Office of the President
Dillard University
2601 Gentilly Boulevard
New Orleans Louisiana 70122