The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures provides faculty and student intellectual and creative engagement with interdisciplinary investigation of cultures, histories, narratives, peoples, geographies and arts of Africa and the African diaspora. In parts of western Africa a Griot is a central figure who serves as historian, cultural critic, artist and collective spokesperson. The mission of Bucknell’s Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures is to follow in the intellectual practice of the Griot to foster collaborative enterprise devoted primarily to the interdisciplinary exploration of the aesthetic, artistic, and scholarly cultural products and intellectual currents of historical and contemporary Africana communities. The Griot Institute produces narratives of Black lives and cultures as a thematic and theoretical framework.