Magana J. Kabugi is Assistant Professor of English at Fisk University, where his teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st century African American literature and culture, Black intellectual history, and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

While at the Warren Center, Kabugi will be working on his book manuscript, titled Turning Darkness into Day: Historically Black Colleges and the Challenge of Higher Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era. The book examines how Black Power intellectualism and cultural production helped to shape the ideological and curricular dimensions of HBCUs during the first two decades following desegregation. Although the 1970s and 1980s saw more Black Americans attending college and entering the middle class than ever before, federal education policy and the desegregation of predominantly white institutions (PWIs) were also placing Black people and HBCUs at significant disadvantages. The steady rise of Ronald Reagan from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s would further inspire white backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, and more Black students pushed their HBCUs to reconsider institutional priorities in service of the global Black liberation movement. In this newly reconfigured landscape, what exactly did it mean to be an HBCU, or to attend one?

Kabugi's research has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, Howard University, Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and Vanderbilt University, among others. He received his PhD in English from Vanderbilt and his BA in Literature from American University.