A group of Boston University faculty with an interest in Africa, including George Lewis (geography), Zeb Reyna (psychology), William Newman (political science), Lyn Watson (anthropology), Al Zalinger (sociology), and Adelaide Cromwell (Sociology), began to meet in 1951 and approached the dean of the Graduate School about creating a program in African studies.
[2] As director, Brown successfully secured funding from the Ford Foundation, which continued to support the ASC until the creation of the federal Title VI program in the 1970s.
[1] The ASC has been a regular recipient of National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the Title VI program in the US Department of Education.
The Outreach Program has also received several Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad (GPA) to take teachers on study trips to Africa and National Endowment for Humanities grants to support summer institutes.
ASC faculty who have won the Herskovits Prize for the most important book in African studies include Sara Berry (1986), Diana Wylie (2002), Linda Heywood, John Thornton, and Parker Shipton (2008), and Fallou Ngom (2017).