This workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty whose work concerns the material and sociocultural lives of people of the African continent and its discursively constituted diasporas, present and historical. Student participants tend mostly to come from the anthropology department, but the workshop also has active members in the fields of history, human development, literatures, political science, religious studies, and history of culture, and encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. In addition to regular presentations by students, faculty, and invited guests, the workshop hosts biannual Red Lion Seminars jointly with Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies.