About SERSAS

Welcome to the website of SERSAS, the Southeastern Regional Seminar in African Studies.  SERSAS is a multidisciplinary group of Africanist scholars largely residing in colleges and universities in the Southeast.  SERSASians hold conferences twice a year at various institutions in the region.  Spring semester meetings alternate between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Florida in Gainesville.  Fall meetings are hosted by other institutions, both large and small, in the region.  Conference themes promote the discussion of interdisciplinary scholarship on Africa and its peoples.  SERSAS takes pride in its tradition of collegiality and encouragement of emerging scholars with its Graduate Student Prize awarded for the best paper presented by a graduate student at each meeting.

SERSAS held its first conference in 1973 having been founded by Joseph C. Miller (History, University of Virginia) and Rutledge Dennis (Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University).  Financially assisted until 1980 by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, SERSAS was one of several regional associations supported to regularly bring together the growing number of otherwise isolated Africanist scholars.  With the last disbursement of funds in 1980 the SSRC declared SERSAS to be the most successful regional seminar in the U.S. and it is now the only one to to survive and thrive.

In 2010 the cooperation between SERSAS and the African Studies Programs at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Florida-Gainesville was formalized in an agreement among SERSAS, the South East Africanist Network (SEAN), the University of Florida Center for African Studies, and the African Studies Center of UNC-Chapel Hill providing for their support for SERSAS meetings each spring alternating between the two centers.  Fall programs continue to be held at any welcoming college or university in the Southeast.

A more complete history of SERSAS, including a history written by Joe Miller, will be found at the original website archived at East Carolina University and found at https://aaas.ecu.edu/sersas/.   The site also contains an extensive archive including the SERSAS Constitution,  lists of all previous conferences and coordinators, and a range of conference papers available online.  That website was created by Professor Kenneth Wilburn of East Carolina University in 1997 and, together with the list serve SERSAS-L created in 2003, managed by him and graciously hosted by ECU until 2020 where it remains as an archive.

Announcements about SERSAS and conferences are found on the current website and are shared over SERSAS-2.  To be added to the subscription list of SERSAS-2 or to ask a question about the website or SERSAS please email Chris Day, web editor and coordinator (Political Science, College of Charleston) at dayc@cofc.edu.