Bowdoin College has announced that it will consider scholars and artists from across the academic spectrum for four new endowed chairs whose teaching and research will address race, racism and social justice, with a focus on the challenges, histories, movements, and artistic and cultural productions of Black communities in the Americas.

The chairs, fully funded by donors, are named in honor of four distinguished Black graduates of the college and came about as a result of conversations that took place across the campus in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020.

The decision was made to launch a cluster hiring initiative rather than recruit each position separately, according to an announcement from the college.

“We’ve never taken an approach quite like this before,” said Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin’s dean for academic affairs.

Cluster hiring is a relatively new practice in the academic world where several faculty members are hired at once across multiple departments to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and to boost faculty diversity, according to the college.

“If an institution wants to really make impactful shifts in the composition of its faculty, as well as the areas of scholarship that the curriculum is missing, it’s really effective to bring in more than one person because it increases the visibility and the significance of the work,” said Judith Casselberry, associate professor of Africana studies, who has been involved in the search process since the early stages.