Yale University African American Studies
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Yale Graduate School
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About the Faculty

Elizabeth Alexander, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1992, is Professor of African American Studies and effective July 1, 2009, Chair of the African American Studies Department (on leave Spring 2009). She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and American Sublime (2005), which was one of the American Library Association’s 25 Notable Books of the Year as well as one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection of essays on African American literature, painting, and popular culture, The Black Interior, was published in 2004. Her verse play, "Diva Studies," was produced at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996. Alexander has taught at the University of Chicago, where she won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and Smith College, where she was Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence, first director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, and member of the founding editorial collective for the feminist journal Meridians. Professor Alexander is an inaugural recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.” She teaches courses on African American poetry, drama, and 20th century literature, as well as the survey introduction to African American Studies.

Jafari Allen, Ph.D., Columbia University, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. Professor Allen's research interests include gender and sexuality in African diasporas; critical social theory; black feminisms; critical cultural studies; Cuba and the Caribbean; and TBLGQ culture and political organizing.

David Blight, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1985, is Professor of African American Studies and History. His books include Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989); Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001); and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002). He also has edited and co-edited five other books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (1992), and Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (1997), and is the co-author of the U.S. history textbook, A People and a Nation. His courses include seminars in nineteenth-century U.S. history, African-American history, and historical memory. During the 2006-07 academic year, Professor Blight will be on a research fellowship at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

Khalilah Brown-Dean, Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2003, is Assistant Professor of Political Science and African American Studies (on leave Fall 2008). As a specialist in U.S. politics her work focuses on voting rights, mass political behavior, public opinion and political psychology. Professor Brown-Dean's current research focuses on the emergence of the criminal justice system as a powerful political institution. She is a Faculty Affiliate of the Ohio Criminal Justice Research Center and previously served as a Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute. She has published several pieces on issues such as felon disenfranchisement laws, racial profiling, and perceptions of bias in the American criminal justice system. In 2005 she received the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Research and was selected to present her work on felon disenfranchisement to the prestigious Oxford University Roundtable. In addition, Dr. Brown-Dean convened a national conference recognizing the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 entitled, "Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future." She teaches courses on Voting Rights and Representation, Race and Ethnicity in American Politics, Public Opinion, and Black and Jewish Community Politics. She is a recipient of the Henry R. Spencer Award for Distinguished Teaching and has been recognized by the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha for excellence in teaching.

Hazel V. Carby, Ph.D. Birmingham University, England, 1984, is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization (on leave Spring 2009). Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture,” Open Democracy; the Foreword to making race matter: bodies, space & identity, eds. Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles; and two essays, “The New Auction Block: Blackness and the Marketplace,” in Companion to African American Literature, ed. Lewis Gordon and “Postcolonial Translations” for Ethnic and Racial Studies. Her current work in progress is Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain. She teaches graduate courses on transnational and postcolonial literature.

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997, M.A. Yale Law 2002, is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Research Associate at the Yale Law School, with a courtesy appointment in African American Studies (on leave Spring 2009). Her areas of research explore issues related to rethinking diasporic formations by examining questions of religious nationalism, legal institutions, international law, the interface between culture and power and its relationship to the modernity of race as related to neoliberal globalization. Recent articles and books have focused on the relationship between knowledge and power, including Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Duke Press, 2004), Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, co-edited with Deborah Thomas (Duke Press, 2006), and Justice in the Making: The International Criminal Court and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (Forthcoming.)

Kathleen Neal Cleaver, J.D. Yale University, 1989, is a Senior Lecturer in African American Studies and a Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Law School (on leave 2008-2009). A former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Communications Secretary of the Black Panther Party, Professor Cleaver has been a participant in the human rights struggle for most of her life. She also serves as the co-director of the Human Rights Research Fund, which is part of a network of anti-racist organizations engaged in documenting human rights violations of U.S. citizens who challenge the racist and military policies that injure their communities. Professor Cleaver has served on the Georgia Supreme Court Commission on Racial and Ethnic Bias and been a board member of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. Along with George Katsiaficas, she co-edited Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (2001), and her essays have appeared in Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, in addition to numerous magazines and newspapers. Among other grants and fellowships, Professor Cleaver is the recipient of the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library to complete her book, Memories of Love and War. She has taught legal ethics, litigation, torts, a legal history seminar entitled "The American Law of Slavery and Anti-Slavery," as well as a course on Women in the Black Freedom Movement.

Terri Francis, Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2004, is Assistant Professor of Film Studies and African American Studies. She specializes in the history and aesthetics of African American filmmaking in a broad cultural context and close analysis of film. Her current research examines the stardom of Josephine Baker, the American-born dancer who became a Paris sensation in the 1920s and 30s. This work foregrounds her concerns with interdisciplinary relationships between films and black aesthetic traditions in other art forms. Related research and teaching interests include "race" and ethnicity in American cinema, avant-garde cinema, black documentaries and home movies, and black women's writing and performance.

Glenda Gilmore, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1992, is Professor of African American Studies, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, and Acting Chair of the African American Studies Department for 2008-2009. She offers seminars in the history of the New South and race and gender. She is co-editor of Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights and author of Gender and Jim Crow: Women and Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, which won the James A. Rawley Prize in 1997 for the best book in race relations given by the Organization of American Historians. Her next project is entitled, Redefining Race: From White Supremacy to Civil Rights, 1915-1955, a book that puts domestic race relations in regional and international perspective.

Ezra Griffith, M.D., University of Strasbourg, 1973, is Deputy Chair of Clinical Affairs in the Psychiatry Department and Professor of African American Studies. He has broad consultation experience in the area of mental health service systems and has written extensively in the areas of cultural and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Griffith has co-authored and co-edited three books: Clinical Guidelines in Cross-Cultural Mental Health (1988); Suicide and Ethnicity in the United States (1990); and Racial and Ethnic Identity; Psychological Development and Creative Expression (1995). He teaches a course on Black Autobiography.

Jonathan Holloway, Ph.D. Yale University, 1995, is Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies. He specializes in post-emancipation United States history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), the editor of Ralph Bunche's A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (2005), and the co-editor of Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century (2007). He is presently working on his next monograph, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory, Identity, and Politics in Black America, 1941-2000. Professor Holloway teaches "Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States," "Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1941," and "African American History: Emancipation to the Present." He served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in African American Studies from 2002-2004 and in 2005 became master of Calhoun College, one of Yale's twelve residential colleges.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ph.D., Brown University, 1992, is professor of African American Studies,
History, and American Studies. He is the author of What Have they Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History. His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790-present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.

Gerald D. Jaynes, Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1976, is Director of Graduate Studies in African American Studies and Professor of African American Studies and Economics. At Yale since 1977, he has served African American Studies as Director of Undergraduate Studies (1980-81), Director of Graduate Studies (1981-82), and Chair (1991-1995). He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Study Director for the Committee on the Status of Black Americans for the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., from 1985-89 and head of a research project on "Immigration, Blacks, and Race Relations" sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. His publications include: Branches Without Roots: The Genesis of the Black Working Class (1986); (edited with Robin Williams, Jr.) A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (1989). His book-in-progress will be entitled Race and Class in Black and White. He is an Adjunct Fellow of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

David Krasner, Ph.D. Tufts University, is Associate Professor in the Theater Studies program as well as an Adjunct professor in African American Studies and English. He is the recipient of the 1998 American Society for Theatre Research's Errol Hill Award for his book, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. He is co-editor of African American Theatre History and Performance Studies: A Critical Reader, and is at work on African American theater history from 1910-1930. He is editor of Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future.

Paige McGinley, Ph.D., Brown University, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Theater Studies.

Christopher L. Miller, Ph.D., Yale University, 1983, is the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African American Studies and French. His publications include: Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (1998); Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (1990); and Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985). His latest book, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade, will be published by Duke University Press in 2008. At Yale since 1984, he has served as Associate Chair in African American Studies (1988-89), Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and Chair of the French Department. He is on the editorial board of Yale French Studies, French Forum, and other journals. He regularly teaches courses on African and Caribbean literatures in French; postcolonial theory; French literature; film, literary and anthropological theory; and comparative African literatures.

Alondra Nelson, Ph.D., New York University, 2003, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Sociology. Prof. Nelson’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of the historical and socio-cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine; racial formation processes in biomedicine and technoculture; social movements; and social and cultural theory. She is the co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2001) and is currently completing the book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Race and Health. Her current research examines traditional and genetic “root-seeking” and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race, ethnicity, diaspora, kinship, and ancestry. From 2004-2006, she was the Director of Undergraduate Studies in African American Studies. View Professor Nelson’s webpage.

Flemming L. Norcott, Jr., LL.B. 1968, Columbia University, is Judge, Connecticut Appellate Court, and Lecturer in African American Studies.

Naomi Pabst, Ph.D., History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies. Her teaching and research focuses on the diversity among African Americans and on the complexities of black individual and collective identity. She is currently completing a manuscript that spotlights “unusual” or “unexpected” black experiences while also examining black cultural politics and the vicissitudes of African American life. Taking a humanities approach, Pabst’s research draws from black diasporic literature, cultural studies, critical theory, feminist theory, critical mixed race studies, and transnational studies. Navigating these fields, her scholarly work examines the boundaries of blackness with an eye to who winds up on the margins, and which black subjectivities are considered at once “black” and yet “not really black.” Pabst has published on these topics in various journals and anthologies and is sought after as an invited lecturer. Previously she spent two years teaching and doing research at Harvard as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.

Patricia Pessar, Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1976, is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Studies and African American Studies. She works in areas of the black Diaspora, especially the Caribbean. Her publications include When Borders Don't Divide: Labor Migration and Refugee Movements in the Americas (1988); A Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States (1996); Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (1991); the edited collection, Caribbean Circuits: New Directions in the Study of Migration (1996); and From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture. She teaches courses on social movements, popular culture, migration and the Diaspora.

Joseph Roach, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1973, is Professor of Theater Studies and English (on leave 2008-2009). His publications include: Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and Critical Theory and Performance (1992).

Edward Rugemer, Ph.D., Boston College, 2005, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and History (on leave Spring 2009). He teaches courses on early African American History and the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery.

Robert Burns Stepto, Ph.D., Stanford University, 1974, is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and English (on leave 2008-2009). At Yale since 1974, he has served as Department Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies (1974-77) and Director of Graduate Studies (1978-81; 1985-89, Spring 1994). His publications include Blue As The Lake (1998), From Behind The Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979; 1991) and The Selected Poems of Jay Wright(1987). he has also co-edited (with Michael S. Harper) Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship, (with Dexter Fisher) Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979), and (with D. McQuade et al.) The Harper American Literature (1993), for which he is the twentieth-century poetry editor. He has been an editor for journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, and Callaloo. Professor Stepto teaches courses on American autobiography, African American poetry, fiction, and drama.

John Szwed, Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1965, is Professor Emeritus of African American Studies, Anthropology, and American Studies. His work includes ethnographic studies of Newfoundland and the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad. From 1969-74, he was the Director of the Center for Urban Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. At Yale since 1982, he has been Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology and Acting Chair of Anthropology and African and African-American Studies. His research interests include creolization in the arts, folk music, jazz, sound and recording, and film noir. His books include: Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (1970), Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography of Materials from North, Central and South America (1977), Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1997), Jazz 101 (2000), So What: The Life of Miles Davis (2002). He is also President of Brilliant Corners, a non-profit music production company based in New York City and has produced recordings such as Tribute to the October Revolution in Jazz (with Rasheid Ali, Joe McPhee, Myra Melford, et al.) on Evidence, and Eight by Three (with Anthony Braxton, Borah Bergman, and Peter Brotzmann) on Mixtery. He is currently at work on a book on folklorist Alan Lomax and the politics of folklore.

Deborah Thomas is a lecturer in African American Studies and American Studies. She teaches African American literature courses.

Robert Farris Thompson, Ph.D., Yale University, 1965, is the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of History of Art, Professor of African American Studies, and Master of Timothy Dwight College. A member of the Yale faculty since 1965, he has taught and written extensively on the visual traditions of West and Central Africa, and on Black Art in the Americas. His publications include Black Gods and Kings (1971), African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (1974), The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art (1981), Flash of the Spirit: African and African-American Art and Philosophy (1983), and Pygmees (1991). In 1994, "The Face of the Gods: Art and Alters of Africa and the African Americas," a major exhibition on African-Atlantic altars that constituted twenty-five years of research by Professor Thompson, opened in New York City and traveled to museums throughout the U.S.

Emilie M. Townes, Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1989, is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology and Director of Undergraduate Studies. She is the author of three books, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (1993), In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (1995), and Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care (1998). She is the coeditor of two anthologies: A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (1993) and Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation (1997). Her most recent book, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, was relased in November 2006. She teaches courses that focus on the moral dimensions of Black religious life and thought and the political economy of misery. She is the first African American woman elected president of the American Academy of Religion.

Michael Veal, is Assistant Professor African American Studies and Music, focusing on music history and ethnomusicology. He has taught courses on Traditional and Popular Music in Sub- Saharan Africa, Jazz, Popular Music and Hybridity, and music cultures of the world Before coming to Yale, he taught at Mount Holyoke College (1996 – 1998) and New York University (1997-1998). His work has addressed topics of biography, history, analysis, and interpretation in various musics of Africa and the African diaspora. His socio-contextual biography of the late Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life of one of the most influential African musicians of the post-WWII era to explore themes of African post-coloniality, musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, and the political uses of music in Africa. His current work-in-progress on Jamaican dub music examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s created a sonic space for the emergence of a distinctly post-colonial Jamaican culture locally, while they worked to transform the structure and concept of the post- WWII popular song globally. Professor Veal's publications include, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000) and Dub: Songscape, Studio Craft, Science Fiction, and the Shattering of Song Form in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming).

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