The Prince Syllabus: Like Books and Black Lives
In his last televised appearance at the 2015 GRAMMY Awards, Prince invoked the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and linked it to the importance of books and albums. For some this was their introduction to Prince’s engagement with ideas of social justice; but for those who have been listening and following his career more attentively, Prince’s social commitments have long been known.
Drawing on Prince’s music and lived experience, the Prince Syllabus seeks to design content that will expand and deepen how audiences can understand and deploy his work as a catalyst for social justice and uphold a pluralist vision of America.
Zaheer Ali, Curator
The Prince Syllabus project is curated by Prince scholar and cultural historian Zaheer Ali, building on a 2017 history course he taught at New York University titled, “Prince: A Sign of the Times.” Like the course, the Prince Syllabus will explore the ways Prince’s music, films, performances, aesthetics, and lived experience reference, reflect, and refract late 20th- and early 21st-century African-American and American life, politics, and culture.
Zaheer is an educator and oral historian with more than a decade of experience directing nationally recognized public history and cultural heritage initiatives. He is currently the inaugural executive director of the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice at The Lawrenceville School, an innovative secondary school initiative advancing social justice teaching and practice through scholarship, programming, and experiential learning.
He served on the national council of the Oral History Association from 2021-2023, and currently serves on the advisory board of Seen, and on the advisory board of the University of Georgia’s History in the Headlines series.
He has presented his scholarship on Prince at various academic conferences and symposia, including the Pop Conference, Yale University’s “Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign,” the University of Salford’s “Purple Reign,” the University of Minnesota’s “Prince from Minneapolis,” and all of De Angela Duff’s Prince symposia.
Thank you to our supporters!
The Prince Syllabus is made possible through the generous support of the Becoming America Fund of the Pop Culture Collaborative, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc.
