By Regennia N. Williams, PhD
Wednesday, July 10, 2019, was the first day of my second visit to the UFS Qwaqwa campus. The first took place in July 2012, during the Global Leadership Summit.
Having arrived safely in Johannesburg, settled into the guesthouse on the Qwaqwa campus of the University of the Free State, received my Wi-Fi and Blackboard credentials, toured (and borrowed books from) the library, received an office assignment and office supplies in the Mendi Humanities Building, and completed my first full week as a co-instructor / guest lecturer in an Oral History Module for third-year students, I am convinced that my next five weeks as a
The is the Qwaqwa campus library, where I expect to learn more about what my friend describes as the “chess game of life.” (No pun intended.)
Fulbright Specialist in South Africa will be incredibly enlightening and wonderfully exciting–just as my five-month Fulbright Fellowship at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University proved to be in 2010!
In the Fulbright Specialist program welcome letter that I received from the White House (a first for me), President Trump stated, “May you use this time to teach, learn, grow, and make connections that will last a lifetime.”
Some of the titles for my research-related literature review on South African history and culture.
It is my sincere hope that I will be able to do all of these things and more while serving as one of those “citizen ambassadors” that President Trump’s letter also mentioned.
From now through the end of August, I will post at least twice a week on this site, and I invite you to follow my blog as I reflect on my experiences as a cultural ambassador, an American educator in South Africa, and a scholar-learner.
PLEASE NOTE: The blog site for the RASHAD Center, Inc. (https://rashadcenter.wordpress.com/) is not an official U.S. Department of State site or a site approved by Montgomery College. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author, Dr. Regennia N. Williams, and do not represent the views of the U.S. Department of State or any of its partner organizations.
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 
Way cool, Dr. W.