SCHOOL of INTERNATIONAL SERVICE

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FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES -- Clarence Lusane

Clarence Lusane
Ph.D., Howard University
E-mail: clusane@american.edu
Phone: (202) 885-1674

Professor Lusane's current research interests are in international race politics, human rights, and electoral politics. He teaches courses in comparative race relations; modern social movements; comparative politics of African, the Caribbean and Europe; black political theory and political behavior; international drug politics; and jazz and international relations.

His most recent book is Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century (2006). His other books include Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans During the Nazi Era (2002); Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the Millennium (1997); No Easy Victories: A History of Black Elected Officials (1997); African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections (1994); The Struggle for Equal Education (1992); and Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (1991).

Dr. Lusane is the former editor of the journal Black Political Agenda. He is a national columnist for the Black Voices syndicated news network, and his writings have appeared in The Black Scholar, Race and Class, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Baltimore Sun, Oakland Tribune, Covert Action Information Bulletin, Z Magazine, Radical History Journal and many other publications.

He has lectured and presented scholarly papers at a wide range of colleges and universities including Harvard, Georgetown, George Washington, North Carolina A&T, University of California-Berkeley, University of Chicago, Yale, London School of Economics, and University of Paris among others. He has also lectured on U.S. and global race relations in numerous foreign nations including Colombia, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Japan, the Netherlands, Panama, Switzerland, and Zimbabwe among others. Dr. Lusane has often appeared on C-SPAN, PBS, BET, and other local, national, and international television and radio programs where he has discussed international relations, global black politics, economic globalization and new technologies, cultural issues, and multilateral narcotics policy. He is the former Chairman of the Board of the National Alliance of Third World Journalists under whose auspices he traveled to numerous countries to investigate the political and social circumstances or crises those nations faced including Haiti; Panama; the former East Germany; and Zimbabwe. Other nations that he has visited and written about include Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, Jamaica, the Netherlands, North Korea, Italy, and South Africa.

Dr. Lusane has been a political and technical consultant to the World Council of Churches, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a number of elected officials and non-profit organizations. He worked for eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives as a staff aide to former D.C. Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy, and then for the former Democratic Study Group that served as the primary source of legislative information and analysis for House Democrats. He has taught and worked at Howard University’s Center for Drug Abuse Research, and the Center for Urban Policy; Medgar Evers College’s Du Bois Bunche Center for Public Policy, and Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies.

In 2001-2002, he worked for London Mayor Ken Livingstone as a British Council Atlantic Fellow investigating the impact of regional anti-racism legislation on the anti-racist movement and anti-discrimination policies in the UK. In 2002-2003, he served as Assistant Director of the 1990 Trust, one of the UK’s largest and most important anti-racist, human rights non-governmental organizations.

Dr. Lusane is currently conducting research on the intersection of jazz and international relations. This work examines how jazz has been politically and ideologically appropriate by a wide range of social groups in the international community.

Dr. Lusane received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Howard University in 1997.

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