|
Graduate Program
Director of
Graduate Studies:
Gerald Jaynes
203.432.1170
History and Structure
In 1993-94, African American Studies developed a unique
graduate program in cooperation with a number of other
departments and programs across the university. This
program, which grew out of the M.A. program that African
and African American studies had launched in 1978, now
offers a Joint Doctoral Degree in African-American Studies
and another field or discipline. The program became
a department in July 2000.
 African American Studies offers a combined Ph.D. in conjunction
with several other departments and programs. Departments
and programs which currently offer a combined Ph.D.
with African American Studies are: American Studies, Anthropology,
English, Film
Studies, French,
History, History of Art, Political
Science, Psychology,
Religious
Studies, Sociology,
and Spanish and
Portuguese. Within the field of study, the student
will select an area of concentration in consultation
with the directors of graduate studies of African American
Studies and the joint department or program. An area
of concentration in African American Studies may take
the form of a single area study or a comparative area
study: e.g., Caribbean or African American literature,
a comparison of African American literature in a combined
degree with the Department of English; an investigation
of the significance of the presence of African cultures
in the new World, either in the Caribbean or in Latin
and/or South America in a combined degree with the Spanish
and Portuguese department. An area of concentration
may also follow the fields of study already established
within a single discipline, e.g., race/ ethnic studies
in a combined degree with Sociology. An area of concentration
must either be a field of study offered by a department
or fall within the rubric of such a field. Please refer
to the description of fields of study of the prospective
joint department or program.
Special Requirements for the Joint
Doctoral Degree
The African American Studies Department and the other
department or program will jointly supervise students.
Individual study programs will be decided in consultation
and agreement with an advisor, the Director of Graduate
Studies of African American Studies and the Director
of Graduate Studies of the participating department
or program. For details of these requirements, please
refer to the Special Requirements of the Joint Ph.D.
for the particular department or program printed in
the Graduate
School's Programs and Policies. Generally, students
will be required to meet the foreign language requirements
of the participating department or program. Students
are required to take three core courses in their two
years of coursework. In their third year, there are
research workshop seminars that are required. The purpose
of these workshops is to support the preparation of
the dissertation prospectus and the writing of the dissertation.
Qualifying examinations must be passed within the time
required by the participating department or program
and will be administered jointly by the Program and
participating department. Students will be admitted
to candidacy when all requirements, including the dissertation
prospectus, have been fulfilled and approved by the
Graduate Studies Executive Committee of the African
American Studies Program and the participating department
or program.
Core
Courses
Theorizing
the Racial Formation of the U.S. (AFAM 505a)
-- is a required course for all first-year graduate
students in the Joint Program. The course exposes students
to advanced issues in black history and culture through
a study of selected examples of black literary and cultural
theory and political and socioeconomic analyses. The
course examines topics such as racial identity, group
consciousness and nationhood, black feminism, and class
structure in African-American societies. The colloquium
is an interdisciplinary seminar that addresses issues
central to both the humanities and the social sciences.
Core
course in Black History --- Students are required
to take at least one graduate history course directly
related to African American experiences during their
two years of coursework.
Core
course in the Social Sciences -- Scheduled
for the third semester, this course examines social
science approaches to African American Studies drawing
from methodologies and studies from the areas of political
science, anthropology, and sociology. The aim is to
give students who tend to be based more in the humanities
further interdisciplinary skills that will aid their
own research and analysis.
The
Third-Year Research Workshop -- After the completion
of all course work, students will be required to attend
a one-semester research workshop. Students will be expected
to present their dissertation proposals during that
term. Time permitting, students from the joint departments/
programs also have a chance to present their work. This
workshop is open to all students even during semesters
when they are not required to register for it. It is
advised that first and second years voluntarily attend.
The workshop will be an important part of each graduate
student's professionalization and serves as a vital
stimulus to intellectual activity in African American
Studies.
Special
Admissions Requirements
Strong undergraduate
preparation in a discipline related to African American
Studies, writing sample, description of the fields of
interest to be pursued in a combined degree program,
transcripts of all relevant post-secondary education,
and GRE scores. To be considered for admission to this
program you must indicate African American Studies as
your "Proposed Department/Program of Study" and then
indicate one of the participating departments/programs
listed as your "Combined Program/Specialty/Subfield/
Track." Additionally, please indicate African American
Studies as your "Proposed Department/Program of Study"
on all supporting documents, statements of purpose,
letters of recommendation, transcripts, etc.).
Fellowships
and Admissions Information
Fellowships
for qualified students are available through African
American Studies. For inquiries concerning applications
and fellowships, please visit the Graduate
School Admissions Website or contact the Graduate
School's Admissions Office at: Graduate School Admissions,
Yale University, P.O. Box 208323, New Haven, CT 06520-8323.
For all other questions please contact the Director
of Graduate Studies, or the Graduate Registrar, Janet
M. Giarratano at 203-432-1170.
Graduate Students
Listed are
some of the graduate students enrolled in the Joint
Ph.D. Program.
Aisha D. Bastiaans (American Studies)
received a B.A. in English and American Literature and
Africana Studies from New York University in 1999. Her
teaching and research interests include: race and gender
in U.S. history and culture, nineteenth and twentieth-century
African American literature, and cultural studies. Her
doctoral dissertation explores the relationship between
race, gender, and representation through analyses of
literary and cinematic treatments of the mulatta figure.
Sheriden
Booker (Anthropology) received a B.A. summa cum
laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001. She
currently conducts research in Cuba.
La
Marr Jurelle Bruce (American Studies) received a
B.A. in African American Studies and English, with honors,
from Columbia University in 2003. At present, he investigates
iterations of Black “madness” in late modernity
and postmodernity. He is interested in how “madness”
has been ascribed to Afrodiasporic subjects by colonial
and neocolonial regimes - and in how Afrodiasporic
subjects have appropriated “madness” for
insurgent modes of seeing, knowing, being, and performing.
La Marr is also a poet, novelist-in-waiting, co-editor
of Maroon: The Yale Journal of African American
Studies, and an occasional madman (appropriately
enough). His hobbies include time travel, transcendental
sex, freedom-fighting, handwashing, and self-parody.
Lucia
Cantero (Anthropology) received Bachelors and Masters
degrees from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation,
entitled "Advertising Pleasure and Death: Global
Health Regimes, Tobacco Consumption, and the Cultural
Politics of Transnational Marketing in Brazil,"
looks at science studies, biopolitics, and consumption
as they relate to the intersection between aesthetics
and politics. Ms. Cantero is presently completing her
fieldwork and research in Brazil. Her prior work has
dealt with the hermeneutics of Afro-Cuban art as it
relates to the global market in Havana. She is also
currently working on a documentary film about the Ethiopian
diaspora in Cuba, among other photographic and media
ventures.
Awendela
Grantham (French) graduated with a B.A. in French
and International Studies from Yale University in 2005.
She received the Montaigne Prize for French in 2002
and was a fellow in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Program. She is interested in the commoditization of
blackness in postcolonial literature and in the writings
of Frantz Fanon.
Sarah
Haley (American Studies) received a B.A. in Political
Science from Vassar College in 2001. Her interests include
19th and 20th century histories of race and punishment,
the history of gender and sexuality from 1865 to the
present, 20th century radical social movements, and
prison studies.
Brandi Hughes (American Studies) graduated
from the University of Virginia in 2001 with a B.A.
in Literature and American Studies. Her interests include
late 19th and 20th century U.S. cultural and social
history with a particular focus on historical remembrance,
racial identity, and Afro-Native communities following
Reconstruction.
Anna
Kesson (Art History) is a first year graduate student.
She graduated from the University of Western Australia
with a BA Hons (First Class) in Art History and History.
Her interests lie in exploring, and perhaps mapping,
some of the visual histories of humorous images of black
people that were in circulation throughout the 'circum-atlantic'
world during the nineteenth century. She has also written
for publications in Australia, mostly on digital and
bio art, and most recently has been involved in the
research and writing of local Western Australian histories.
Leah
Khaghani (American Studies) received a B.A. from
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in Political Science
and English Literature. Before coming to Yale, she worked
in Washington, D.C. where she was active in Middle Eastern
American politics and studied at Georgetown's Center
for Contemporary Arab Studies. Leah's general interests
include postcolonial studies, diaspora, race, nationalism,
and third world feminism. Specifically, she explores
issues pertaining to the Middle Eastern community in
the United States and African Americans around issues
of identity formation and political mobilization.
Melissa
Mason (Political Science) is a third year graduate
student with a focus on comparative politics and political
economy. Specifically, her research interests include
the incentive structures provided by labor market institutions.
She is interested in how this affects the relationships
between labor unions and immigrant/ethnic communities.
Warren
McKinney earned a BA in Sociology & Africana
Studies from Vassar College in 2006. His work examines
the effects of migration within the African Diaspora
on the social determinants of race, class, and gender
and in turn, on the structure and focus of Pan-African
organizations.
Uri
McMillan (American Studies) graduated cum laude
from Rice University in 2003 with a B.A. in English.
His research interests include black visual culture,
performance studies, 20th century African-American literature,
racial passing, and theories of plastic surgery and
the body. He was co-organizer of "Regarding Michael
Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender, and Sexual difference
Center-Stage", a two-day academic conference held
recently at Yale.
Lauren
Pearlman (American Studies) graduated with honors
from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in African American
Studies (2004). She is primarily interested in the political
and cultural legacy of the Black Power movement and
the development of black consciousness in the post-Civil
Rights era. Other interests include 20th century African
American literature and intellectual history and the
relationship between scholarship and activism. Before
coming to Yale, she worked for a civil rights law firm
in Washington, DC and with the Appleseed Foundation
in their Austin, Texas office.
Jayne
Ptolemy (History) graduated in 2006 from Albion
College where she studied History and Ethnic Studies.
Her interests include race formation in Early American
history, particularly as it interacts with urban issues,
economic prejudice, and benevolence.
Emmanuel Raymundo (American Studies)
was born in Manila and raised in New York City and Toronto.
Kamil
Redmond (History) received a B.A. from Harvard College
in History and Literature and Women's Studies with a
focus on African-American Studies. Before entering graduate
school, she taught Social Studies at a Baltimore high
school which sparked her interest in the history of
education reform, namely civil rights era desegregation.
Eventually, she hopes to do a comparative analysis of
school integration in Baltimore, Maryland and Johannesburg,
South Africa in order to comment on the role of education
under different white supremacist systems.
Robert Sambat (American Studies) received
a B.A. in Women's Studies and English from Queens College,
City University of New York (Phi Beta Kappa), 1998.
Robert is a professional guitarist/ singer/ songwriter/
session musician/ recording artist; commercial artist/
fantasy illustrationist/ political cartoonist; fantasy/sci-fi
writer/ historical novelist/ occasional poet / dancer.
He is also graduate student advisory/ member of the
Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANAAY), founding
member/ mediator of the Yale Group for the Study of
Native America (YGSNA), an active member of the Black
Rock Coalition, and a vigorous supporter of local bands
and music. His research and teaching interests include:
Federal Indian Law, Red Power and the Resurgence of
American Indian Identity and Culture during the 20th
Century; blues music, its history, meanings, and applications;
phenomenological approaches to music and performance;
theories of racial and gender formations; and 19th century
African American and women's literature. Robert's dissertation,
entitled "Blood-Letting," focuses on the history
of blood quantum as a determinant of Indian-ness and
its relationship to self-determination and aboriginal
rights in Indian Country, with a particular emphasis
on the tribal nations of Connecticut.
David
Stein (American Studies) was born and raised in
Tucson, Arizona. At Wesleyan University, he majored
in Black Studies and Sociology. He is a member of the
imprisonment industrial complex abolition organization,
Critical Resistance. His research focuses on the ways
in which rehabilitative paradigms are deployed in order
to sustain the imprisonment industrial complex in the
United
States. His greatest intellectual influence is the work
of Sylvia Wynter. Other interests include "gangster"
rap, eugenic logics, and the idea of borders.
Erin
Wood (History) received a BA in History and Feminist
Studies from Stanford University. Prior to graduate
school, she spent several years conducting historical
research and documentary editing at the Martin Luther
King, Jr., Papers Project. She is working on a dissertation
about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and its relationship to international liberation
struggles. Her broader research and teaching interests
include Political and Social United States History since
1865, the 20th Century Black Freedom Struggle, and late
19th and 20th Century Pan-Africanism and African
Nationalism.
Jennifer Wood (American Studies) received
a B.A. in English from the University of Connecticut,
an Ed.M. from Harvard University, and an M.A. in African
Studies from Yale. She is currently investigating sartorial,
corporeal and sexual politics in the New Negro Renaissance.
She teaches courses on Toni Morrison, the Harlem Renaissance,
and African-American Literature from 1920 to the present.
She also serves as the Dean of Ezra Stiles College.
Former
Students
Dr. Mary Barr's (Sociology) current research
interests include racial formation processes in the
US, community studies, oral history methods, and 20th
century African American history. Her dissertation used
Evanston, Illinois as a case study to examine how social
categories of race, class and gender are constructed
and reproduced in neighborhoods, at school, and through
work. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University
of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in sociology.
View CV.
Dr. Louise Bernard (American Studies)
earned her Ph.D. in December 2005. She received her
B.A. in Drama from the University of Manchester and
M.A.s in Theatre History and English literature from
the University of Indiana. Her research and teaching
interests cover 19th and 20th century African American
literature, 20th century modern American literature
and drama/ performance/ film and Anglophone Caribbean
cultural productions/ post-colonial theory. Her dissertation
is entitled, "National Maladies: Narratives of
Race and Madness in Modern America." She is currently
an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University.
Dr.
Lori Brooks (American Studies) earned her Ph.D.
in December 2001. Her dissertation is entitled "The
Negro in the New World: the Cultural Politics of Race,
Nation, and Empire, 1885-1911." She is now a post-doctoral
fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Dr. Jayna Brown (American Studies)
is a proud member of the African American Studies Department's
first graduating class. Her dissertation is entitled,
"Babylon Girls: African American Women Performers and
the Making of the Modern." Her areas of interest include:
African American women's performance history/ theory,
cross-Atlantic literatures, cultural studies, gender
and race studies. Dr. Brown's publications include:
"Primitivism, Technology and the Black Women Performer,"
in Body and Society: Cultural Perspectives, (forthcoming,
2001), "Black Patriarch on the Prairie: Black Masculinity
and National Identity in the Early Works of Oscar Micheaux,"
in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: Early Race Films
and Filmmakers (1999).
Dr. Kimberly J. Brown (American Studies)
earned her Ph.D. in May 2006 and was also a recipient
of the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize. She came to Yale with
a B.A. from Queens College, City University of New York
in Africana Studies and English Literature. Her dissertation
examined historical mother / warrior figures and the
ways in which they are replicated in African American
Literature.
Dr. Erin D. Chapman (History) earned
her Ph.D. in May 2006. Previously, she received a B.A.
from Stanford University in African American History.
She focuses on African American gender ideologies and
cultural history. Her dissertation, "Prove It On
Me: New Negro Women in Politics and Popular Culture,"
considers representations of black women in modern forms
of cultural expression and early twentieth century racial
advancement politics. Dr. Chapman is currently Assistant
Professor of History and African American Studies at
the University of Mississippi.
Dr. Radiclani Clytus (American Studies)
is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Tufts
University. His manuscript, "Envisioning Slavery:
American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual,"
examines the ocularcentric roots of American anti-slavery
discourse.is interested in theories of modernisms. He
is also editor of, "Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews,
and Commentaries," which offers an assortment of
poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry
and music.
Dr.
Cheryl Finley (Art History) is currently an Assistant
Professor of Art History at Wellesley College, MA. Her
dissertation, "Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon
in the Black Atlantic Imagination," examines the history,
meaning, and use of the official British abolitionist
engraving Description of A Slave Ship, from its emergence
in 1789 as a propaganda tool of the abolitionist movement
to the present day where it remains an icon of remembrance
and identity in twentieth century black Atlantic literary,
political, and artistic spheres.
Dr. Anita Gallers (Spanish and Portuguese)
earned her Ph.D. in December 2000. Her dissertation,
"Enslavement and Masculinity in Afro-Hispanic Narrative,"
discusses works by Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba), Gertrudis
Gómez de Avellaneda (Cuba), Quince Duncan (Costa
Rica) and Cubena (Panama). Anita has been an Assistant
Professor at Simon's Rock College of Bard since the
fall of 1999. She teaches Spanish language and literature
as well as literature in translation, including Afro-Hispanic
literature.
Dr. Eric Grant's (History) dissertation is
entitled "'Message in Our Music': Spirituals and
Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, 1871-1945."
He is currently an Assistant Professor of African American
Studies at Ohio University in Athens, OH. His research
focuses on the generational struggles of African Americans
and their use of the spirituals as a weapon in the fight
for African American human and civil rights. Eric's
work extends the range of roles that historians have
traditionally assigned to race and culture.
Dr. Joshua Guild (History) earned his
Ph.D. in 2007. His research and teaching interests include
20th century African American social, political, and
cultural history; American urban history; and the making
of the modern black diaspora. His book manuscript situates
the Second Great Migration within a diasporic framework
by connecting black migrations to Brooklyn, New York
to the parallel settlement of West Indians in London
in the mid-twentieth century. In 2005-06, he was in
residence at Dartmouth College as the Chavez/ Eastman/
Marshall Dissertation Fellow in the Department of History.
He is currently Assistant Professor of History and African
American Studies at Princeton University, where he teaches
courses on the civil rights era, memory and African
American history, and African American urban history.
Dr. Guild's publications include “Metropolitan
migrations, diasporic spaces, and the black world remade,”
in Maroon: The Yale Journal of African-American
Studies (May 2006) and his work-in-progress, "1994:
The End of Pan-Africanism and the Future(s) of Black
Solidarity."
Dr.
Peter Hallward's (French) dissertation is entitled
"Immanent Authorities: Literal Mysticism in the
works of Deleuze, Sarduy, Sarraute, Dib, Glissant, and
Johnson." He is now an Assistant Professor at Kings
College, University of London, England. He is currently
completing a book on Deleuze entitled Out of This
World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.
He then plans to work on a wide-ranging study of recent
French philosophy organized around the concepts of singularity,
alterity and universality, as configured by thinkers
like Deleuze, Badiou, Levinas, Nancy, Henry, Corbin,
Jambet, Rosset and Laruelle. A longer term project involves
the study of relationality in the broadest feasible
sense; tentatively entitled Relational Reality,
it will draw on the resources of the dialectical tradition
to review and develop relational conceptions of individuation,
decision-making, politics, ethics, and art. Peter has
supervised and examined graduate work on recent French
thought, philosophical materialism, beur literature
and francophone African and Caribbean literature. He
convenes a monthly reading group dedicated to contemporary
philosophy and critical theory.
Dr.
Françoise N. Hamlin (American Studies) earned
her Ph.D. in May 2004. Her dissertation is entitled
"'The Book Hasn't Closed, The Story Isn't Finished':
Continuing Histories of the Civil Rights Movement."
It won the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from
the Southern Historical Association in 2005 and the
Franklin L. Riley Dissertation Prize from the Mississippi
Historical Society in 2006. Her interests include African-American
literature and history, black feminisms and U.S. history,
culture, and politics. She is now an Assistant Professor
of Africana Studies and History at Brown University.
During the 2007-2008 academic year, she is a Charles
Warren fellow at Harvard University.
Dr. Robin Hayes (Political Science)
earned her Ph.D. in May 2006. Dr. Hayes specializes
in the fields of Comparative Politics, Contemporary
Theory and Race, Ethnicity and Politics. After receiving
a B.A in Metropolitan Studies from NYU, she worked in
the non-profit sector with the Urban Justice Center
and IFCO/Pastors for Peace, which facilitates human
rights delegations and material aid shipments to Chiapas,
Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua. While in graduate school,
she served as co-founder and facilitator of the Black
Resistance Reading Group and program coordinator for
the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics.
Her dissertation examined the ways in which institutions
indigenous to the African diaspora facilitate transnational
exchanges between social movements. In addition, she
recently produced a documentary about the historical
relationship between African Americans and Afro-Cubans.
Her scholarship has been published in Post Identity
and Maroon: The Yale Journal of African American
Studies.
Dr. Deborah
Ann Hughes (American Studies) earned her Ph.D. in May
2003. Her dissertation is entitled "Revising the
American Picture Gallery: Gender, Race, and Popular
Visual Culture." She is currently residing in Iceland.
Dr.
Viviana Hurtado (Spanish and Portuguese) earned her
Ph.D. in December 2001. Her dissertation is entitled
(W)rites of Passage: Developing New Conceptions of Ethnicity
in the Contemporary Latino Bildungsroman."
Dr. Jonathan
Kidd (English) earned his Ph.D. in May 2004. His dissertation
is entitled "Within the Bosom of the Bard: Shakespeare
and Social Death." He is currently in residence
in the Theater Department at Pomona College.
Dr. Ferentz Lafargue (American Studies)
earned his Ph.D. in May 2005. He is now Assistant Professor
of Literature at the New School University. His research
interests include African American and Caribbean Fiction,
Post-Colonial Literatures and Anti-Colonial Theory.
Dr. Lafargue was awarded a 2007 Woodrow Wilson Career
Enhancement Fellowship to pursue a research initiative
during the 2007 - 2008 academic year.
Dr. Sarah-Jane Mathieu (History) is
now Assistant Professor of History and African American
Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey. She specializes
is African American history from Reconstruction to the
present with an emphasis on African American migration,
social movements, and political resistance. Her
forthcoming book, Jim Crow Rides This Train,
examines the social and political impact of African
American and West Indian sleeping car porters in Canada
from 1880 to World War II. She recently published
North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and
the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails.
Dr.
Manuella Meyer's (History) academic interests include
Latin American 19th and 20th century cultural and political
history with research and teaching focus on Brazil;
history of medicine and public health; and the history
of gender and sexuality.
Dr.
Noelle Morrissette (English), who also earned an
M.A. in African Studies, earned her Ph.D. in May 2002.
She is currently a visiting Assistant Professor in English
at Oberlin College, where she teaches African American,
African, and Caribbean literatures. Her book manuscript
on James Weldon Johnson's life and writings is currently
under review at the University of Michigan Press. Morrissette's
interests include African American biography, American
law and literature, American cultural history, and African
diasporic studies.
Dr. Rebecca Peabody (History of
Art) earned her Ph.D. in May 2006 and received the Sylvia
Ardyn Boone prize for her dissertation "A Strategic
Cut: Kara Walker's Art and Imagined Race in American
Visual Culture." Previously, she completed a B.A.
in English Literature, Philosophy, and Modern Dance
at Iowa State University, and an M.A. in Art History
at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her interests
include the representation of race in the United States,
and her research draws on a broad range of visual culture.
Dr. Ryan Poynter (French) earned his
Ph.D. in May 2006. His dissertation, "Eroticism
in Twentieth-Century Francophone Caribbean Literatures"
earned the Margaret A. Peyre Prize, awarded by the French
department. His interests include Caribbean literatures
in French, English, and Spanish, as well as 16th century
French writers, especially Rabelais.
Dr.
Leigh Raiford (American Studies) earned her Ph.D.
in May 2003. Her dissertation is entitled "Imprisoned
in a Luminous Glare: History, Memory, and the Photography
of Twentieth Century African American Social Movements."
Upon completing her degree, she was the Woodrow Wilson
Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities
Institute at Duke University. She is currently Assistant
Professor of African American Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley. Dr. Raiford has written reviews
of books on hip hop and blackface minstrelsy for the
London Times Literary Supplement and her essay, "The
Consumption of Lynching Images," appeared in
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self,
Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, editors, (Harry N. Abrams
Press, 2003). She is currently at work on two projects:
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: The Civil Rights
Movement in United States Memory, co-edited with
Renee Romano (University of Georgia Press); and Imprisoned
in a Luminous Glare: History, Memory and the Photography
of Twentieth Century African American Social Movements,
(University of North Carolina Press). Her teaching and
research interests include race, gender and visual culture
with an emphasis on film and photography; race and racial
formations of the United States; twentieth century African
American social movements; race and memory; and black
popular culture.
Dr. Stephen
Ray's (Religious Studies) dissertation is entitled "Silenced
By the Night: A Constructive Reconstrual of the Protestant
Doctrine of Sin." He is now Associate Professor
at the the Louisville Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dr.
Shana L. Redmond's (American Studies) dissertation
focused on music in Black diasporic movement cultures.
She was recently in residence in the Africana Studies
Department at the University of Notre Dame as an Erskine
A. Peters Fellow. She is a graduate of Macalaster College
with a B.A. in African American Studies and Music.
Dr.
Qiana Robinson-Whitted (American Studies) earned
her Ph.D. in May 2003. Her dissertation is entitled
"African-American Literature and the Crisis of
Faith." She is now Assistant Professor of English
at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses
on 20th century African-American literary engagements
with the philosophy of religion and humanist thought.
Her articles on Richard Wright's work have appeared
in Southern Literary Journal and the forthcoming
collection, From Around the World: Secular Authors
and Biblical Perspectives, and her essay, "In
My Flesh Shall I
See God: Ritual Violence and Racial Redemption in 'The
Black Christ'" was recently published in African
American Review.
Dr. Besenia Rodriguez (American Studies)
earned her Ph.D. in May 2006. She entered Yale after
earning a B.A. with Honors in African American Studies
and Education from Brown University. Her academic interests
include radical antiracist and anti-imperialist movements
in the 20th century, comparative racial formations,
and black "Latin" American cultural and political
history. Her article, "De la Esclavitud Yanqui
a la Libertad Cubana: U.S. Black Radicals, the Cuban
Revolution, and the Formation of a Tricontinental Ideology"
was published in a Radical History Review special
issue focusing on global and transnational dimensions
of radical history. Most recently, her piece, "'Long
Live Third World Unity! Long Live Internationalism':
Huey P. Newton's Revolutionary Intercommunalism,"
(Fall 2006) appeared in a special Souls issue
on the "The Legacy of Bandung." She continues
to serve as the African American Studies Department's
webmistress-in-absentia. A lifelong New Yorker and east-coaster,
Dr. Rodriguez has recently relocated to Los Angeles,
CA.
Dr. Rachel Roseman (American Studies)
earned her Ph.D. in May 2006. Her dissertation is entitled,
"Between the Country and the Kitchenette: Literary
Excavations of Space and Self in the work of Henry James
and Gwendolyn Brooks. Her interests include 19th and
20th century American and African American literature
and the relationship between the production of gender
and space in the modern novel.
Dr. Theresa Runstedtler (History) is a
former professional dancer/actress from Canada. She
chose to shift her passion for popular culture from
the stage to the classroom. She is currently an Assistant
Professor of American Studies at the State University
of New York at Buffalo. Her book project, entitled
"Journeymen: Race, Boxing, and the Transnational
World of Jack Johnson," explores the role of commercial
culture in the rise of modern ideas about race, manhood,
imperial control, and the body. In following the foreign
travels of African American prizefighters, like the
first-ever black World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson,
her work shows that the transmission of popular ideas
about race was one of the first examples of globalization
in the late imperial age. Touring black athletes provoked
spirited discussions about U.S. Jim Crow segregation
and racial difference in places as far-flung as Sydney,
London, Cape Town, Paris, and Havana. Professor Runstedtler's
publications appear in Canadian Issues (Fall
2005) and In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports
in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
Her research interests include the intersection of race,
gender, and resistance in popular culture; transnational
Black history encompassing English, French, and Spanish
destinations; multiracial and multicultural histories;
the history of empire and globalization; European race
relations, and Black Canada. In 2006, she also co-founded
a small business with Professor Stephen Balkaran (Central
Connecticut State University) specializing in Diversity
Training called Tri & Can Consulting.
Dr.
Stephanie Sears (Sociology) earned her Ph.D. in
May 2004. Her dissertation is entitled "Imagining
Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity
Within the Girls Empowerment Project." She is currently
Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of
San Francisco.
Dr. Joseph Thompson's (English)
dissertation is entitled, "The Story Scarcely Mentioned:
Race, Education, and Arna Bontemps." Formerly the Director
of the John Hope Franklin Collection of African and
African American Documentation in the Duke University
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
he is currently Assistant Professor of Afro-American
Studies and English at Washington University in St.
Louis.
Dr.
Lucia Trimbur (Sociology) earned her Ph.D. in 2006.
Her dissertation, "Living Wages: The Work of Amateur
Fighters and Trainers in Postindustrial Brooklyn,"
examines the opportunities for work, identity, and fictive
kinship that the urban boxing gym offers men of color,
many of whom have histories of crime and forced confinement.
Dr. Trimbur previously held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York
City and is now Assistant Professor at John Jay College,
City University of New York.
Dr.
Anders Walker (History) earned his B.A. from Wesleyan
University, his J.D./M.A. from Duke University, and
his Ph.D. from Yale in December 2003. His dissertation
is entitled "The Ghost of Jim Crow: Law, Culture,
and the Subversion of Civil Rights, 1954-1965. He is
currently Assistant Professor of Law at John Jay College,
City University of New York.
Dr.
Ivy Wilson's (English) earned his Ph.D. in May 2002.
His dissertation is entitled "I Give the Sign of
Democracy: Race, Labor, and the Aesthetics of Nationalism."
He is now Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Notre Dame. Wilson has research interests in literature,
aesthetics, and nationalism and is working on a book
concerning these issues in nineteenth-century America.
His most current research investigates the relationship
between visual culture, the public sphere, and emergent
nationalisms in the black Atlantic and South East Asia.
Dr.
Sonya Winton (Political Science) received her Ph.D.
in 2007. Previously, she received a B.A. in Political
Science at Spelman College in 1996 and in 1999, she
received an M.A. in Public Affairs from Columbia University's
School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where
she specialized in Environmental Public Policy. Her
dissertation is entitled "All Things Being Equal:
The Politics of Environmental (In)-Justice." Her
interests include: African American Politics, African
American Political Thought, American Politics, Environmental
History and Ideology, Environmental Justice in the United
States, Environmental Public Policy, Poverty and Urban
Policy, Race, Ethnicity & Politics and Social Movements.
Dr.
Laura Yow (English) earned her Ph.D. in December
2001. Her dissertation is entitled "So Sad as Silence:
Modernity and the Unspeakable." She is now Assistant
Professor in the Department of English at Vassar College.
Next: About
the Faculty
|
