University of Puget Sound-Visiting Assistant Professor – African American Studies

University of Puget Sound

Visiting Assistant Professor – African American Studies

Job ID: 8630

Location: African American Studies

Full/Part Time:

Regular/Tempoary:

Faculty Posting Details

Appointment:
A two semester Visiting Assistant Professor position housed in the African American Studies Program for the fall and spring semesters of the 2026-2027 academic year.

Context:

In this current moment when higher education and its fields that prioritize the critical examination of race and its differential intersections are under increased intellectual and financial attack, we seek a colleague with a degree in Black Studies/African American Studies who will help continue our work and provide ideas for stability and future growth. This colleague will practice the corrective and counter narrative stance of Black Studies to invest in this field even amidst broader socio-political conditions and institutional actions which pronounce its “lack of educational value” and enact its dismantling.

This colleague will help us grapple with the public ethical concerns of the past, present, and future, including responsibilities for repair, the (re)understanding of the implication of borders, and the imposition of gender norms. In our present, and looking towards our futures, African American Studies desires to continue embracing community in new ways, especially with a lens of public and digital spaces. We also desire to build on our unique interdisciplinary models of infusion and elevated attention to Public Scholarship as innovative pedagogical and scholarly practice.

The teacher-scholar who will be ready to take on the big public ethical questions would also be someone who teaches with critical race and decolonial frameworks, intersectional lenses, and critical futurisms. We seek teachers and scholars whose research engages Black social and political thought and who possesses the theoretical, practical, intercultural, and communal knowledge of social justice approaches and pedagogies.

Responsibilities:
Teach three courses in fall `26 and three in spring `27. Depending on expertise, these classes could be made up of the following courses: AFAM 401, Narratives of Race; AFAM 305, Black Fictions and Feminisms; AFAM 205, Survey of Race and Culture in Ethnic Literature; AFAM 380, Special Topics in Race and Ethnicity; AFAM 375, The Harlem Renaissance; and CCS 176, Imaging Blackness. The University of Puget Sound offers faculty the opportunity to teach in the summer for additional compensation.

Qualifications:
A doctoral degree (ABD considered) in African American/Black Studies or a relevant field in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences, and a commitment to liberal arts education are required. We particularly seek a colleague with training in African American/Black Studies for this visiting position with approaches that are interdisciplinary, and even more so, transdisciplinary, and who deeply engages decolonial thought. Such a colleague’s training would support the continued work of African American Studies, in collaboration with the Race & Pedagogy Institute, to bring the critical insights of the African American Studies discipline to course content across the university campus. With this kind of intellectual orientation, such a colleague will advance our relationship-making work and engagements with differential publics within our campus communities. In this time of intensified public calls to recognize and come to terms simultaneously with the differential histories of peoples and communities of color who are oppressed, we are looking for a colleague who is ready to do the intentional work of critical and reflexive inclusivity through a decolonial framework. We highly desire candidates with the theoretical foundations which allow them to teach about, and engage, beyond one racially ethnic people.

Application Deadline:
Review of applications will begin March 30, 2026, with a goal of hiring for fall 2026, but application reviews will continue until the position is filled.

Compensation and Benefits:
Rank: Visiting Assistant Professor

Salary is commensurate with education and experience.

Faculty salaries at the University of Puget Sound are based on a common salary scale based on experience. Assistant Professor salaries in 2025-2026 begin at $73,904 annualized for an assistant professor without a terminal degree in their field in their first year of full-time post-doctorate teaching through $83,262 annualized based on experience.

Puget Sound offers a generous benefits package. For more information, visit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-V01N1oErCUcWgqHZShgA1eG4dyWb1-O/view

Puget Sound has a well-established Shared Faculty Appointments Policy, https://www.pugetsound.edu/policies/faculty-policies/shared-faculty-appointments

About African American Studies:
Our department is an interdisciplinary program that focuses on African American experiences, while recognizing that other academic subjects bear importance on the understanding of these experiences and should have a place in the African American Studies curriculum. Within the interrogative mode that guides African American Studies students in the program 1) acquire sophisticated knowledge of African American and other African diasporic experiences; 2) become conversant with local, regional, national, international, as well as personal and intersectional issues of race, power and difference, and recognize the implications these have for equity in daily life; 3) cultivate skills in analytic, transdisciplinary, reflexive, and community-based research methodologies, and modes of written oral, and multimedia communication allowing for the formulation, articulation, and interrogation of ideas in private and public spheres; 4) develop critical, intellectual, and ethical perspectives that can guide and advance personal, educational, vivid, political, and professional actions; and 5) engage and elaborate nuanced understandings of the role of race in African American life and also in broader social and institutional relations in the United States, other parts of the Americas, and elsewhere. https://www.pugetsound.edu/academics/african-american-studies

About the Race & Pedagogy Institute (RPI):
The Race and Pedagogy Institute is a collaboration of University of Puget Sound and the South Sound community that integrates intellectual assets of the campus into the mutual and reciprocal partnership with local community experience and expertise, and pursues the vision of education students and teachers at all levels to think critically about race and to act to eliminate racism. Alongside African American Studies, RPI contributes to a transformative educational vision regarding the work of re-envisioning the imperatives of liberal art modes of education. https://www.pugetsound.edu/race-pedagogy-institute

About Puget Sound:
The University of Puget Sound is located in Tacoma, Washington, a vibrant, diverse mid-sized urban port city. Within, and near, Tacoma there is ready access to urban, rural, and natural areas as well as opportunities to participate in a wide variety of cultural activities.

Puget Sound is a member of the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), Greater Washington State https://www.hercjobs.org/greater_washington_state/

University Diversity Statement:

• We acknowledge the richness of commonalities and differences we share as a university community; the intrinsic worth of all who work and study here; that education is enhanced by the investigation of and the reflection upon multiple perspectives.
• We aspire to create respect for and appreciation of all persons as a key characteristic of our campus community; to increase the diversity of all parts of our University community through commitment to diversity in our recruitment and retention efforts; to foster a spirit of openness to active engagement among all members of our campus community.
• We act to achieve an environment that welcomes and supports diversity; to ensure full educational opportunity for all who teach and learn here; to prepare effectively citizen-leaders for a pluralistic world.

Puget Sound is committed to an environment that welcomes and supports diversity. We seek diversity of identity, thought, perspective, and background in our students, faculty, and staff. To learn more please visit: http://www.pugetsound.edu/about/diversity-at-puget-sound/

Required Documents:
Applicants submitted without the required attachments will not be considered.

• Curriculum vitae
• Letter of Interest
• Teaching statement
• Writing sample
• Diversity Statement (see prompt below)
• Unofficial transcripts (an official transcript will be required by the successful candidate)
• Contact Information for 3 References. You will be prompted to enter the contact information for three (3) reference providers. The system will automatically email these reference providers to request a letter.

Note: In the online application system, please submit curriculum vitae when prompted to submit resume. Additional documents can be attached within the application.

Applicant’s Diversity Statement:
As a department and university, we are strongly committed to creating an inclusive and effective teaching, learning, and working environment for all. In their diversity statement, applicants should reflect on how they will advance the values articulated in the University Diversity Statement in all aspects of their future work as faculty and members of the university community.

All offers of employment are contingent on successful completion of a background inquiry.

The University of Puget Sound is an equal opportunity employer.

Given the current Executive Order and the $100,000 petition fee for new H-1b visas, at the moment sponsoring a new H-1b is cost-prohibitive to us. Therefore, unless the executive order is rescinded or blocked by the courts, we are unable to commit to new H visa sponsorship at this time. Applicants with questions about visa sponsorship are encouraged to reach out to Human Resources.

How to Apply

For complete job description and application instructions, visit: https://apptrkr.com/6958063

About Puget Sound

Puget Sound is a selective national liberal arts college in Tacoma, Washington, drawing 2,600 students from 48 states and 20 countries. Puget Sound graduates include Rhodes and Fulbright scholars, notables in the arts and culture, entrepreneurs and elected officials, and leaders in business and finance locally and throughout the world. A low student-faculty ratio provides Puget Sound students with personal attention from faculty who have a strong commitment to teaching and offer 1,200 courses each year in more than 40 traditional and interdisciplinary fields, including graduate programs in occupational and physical therapy and in education. Puget Sound is the only nationally ranked independent undergraduate liberal arts college in Western Washington, and one of just five independent colleges in the Pacific Northwest granted a charter by Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s most prestigious academic honorary society. Visit “About Puget Sound” (http://www.pugetsound.edu/about) to learn more about the college.

As a strategic goal and through our core values, University of Puget Sound is committed to an environment that welcomes and supports diversity. We seek diversity of identity, thought, perspective, and background in our students, faculty, and staff. EOE/AA

Position closing date. *	Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Advertising contact *	Tony Ngo
Email *	tony@jobelephant.com
Phone Number *	(619) 795-0837
Institution/University *	University of Puget Sound
Position Title *	Visiting Assistant Professor – African American Studies
Hiring department or institution *	African American Studies Program

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