Marsha Jean-Charles

Marsha Jean-Charles is interested in transnational literary studies of black women’s bildungsroman and immigration novels. She endeavors to research the cosmologies and revolutionary politics aroused from forced migration and statelessness. A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her undergraduate thesis, titled: Of Griottes & Pantomimes, is a work elucidating the place of Black Feminisms in the novels of Edwidge Danticat. In her Master's thesis, titled: Embodying Goddesses: Edwidge Danticat’s Literary Revolution, she mixes historical narratives and two of Edwidge Danticat's short stories to include the voices of revolutionary women in Haiti's war for independence. An organizer at her core she wishes to fuse her academic work with her activist work and expand understandings of the uses of literary and performance art as tools for activism.

Kristen Wright

Kristen Wright is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She previously earned a PhD and MA in Africana Studies from Cornell University, an MA in African-American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Theater Studies and Political Science from Yale University. Her work exists at the intersections of African-American drama (from the 19th century to the present), Black performance studies, and critical theory…

Sarah Then Bergh

Sarah Then Bergh is a doctoral candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Centre at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). Originally from Germany, she earned her BSc. Econ. in International Politics, and her M.A. in International Relations at Aberystwyth University (Wales). For her master’s thesis, ‘Music, Third Space and Intersubjectivity: Reconceptualizing the Theoretical Encounter between IR and ‘International Relations from Below’’ Sarah was awarded the Alfred Zimmern Prize by the Department…

Lauren Siegel

Lauren Siegel is a doctoral candidate in Africana studies at Cornell University. She holds an MA in African Literature from University of London, SOAS, where she explored feminist films in francophone west Africa. She also served as programming associate for Film Africa, London’s annual festival of African cinema and culture. Lauren earned her BA in Black Studies (honors) from UC Santa Barbara, where her undergraduate dissertation on black entrepreneurship under the Great Recession was selected…

Zifeng Liu

Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the 20th-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. He holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Cornell University and an M.A. in American Studies from Brown University. His current book project, Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary, 1949-1976, explores how Black leftist women’s understandings of race,…

Zeyad el Nabolsy

Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University.  His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies…

Amaris Brown

Amaris has a Ph.D. in the department of Africana Studies with a concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching foci include 20th and 21st century African diasporic literature and visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, and critical disability studies. Her dissertation, “Desirous Disposability: Circuits of Race, Sex, and Refusal” examines forms of ritual violence and disposal that mark black life in modernity. Grounded in black feminist diagrammatic drawing, critical disability studies, psychoanalysis, and studies in affect and aesthetics, “Desirous Disposability” reads the ruptures created by African diasporic literature and art to colonial, imperial, neoliberal circuits of desire that dominate ideologies of black subject formation in the aftermath of slavery.

Zifeng Liu

Kevin C. Quin

Kevin C. Quin has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. He specializes in 20th century African American history, postwar social movements, and gender and sexuality studies. His dissertation, Queer Visions of Black Power: Race, Sexuality, and the Black Movement for Sexual Revolution, 1960-1985, examines how Black gender and sexual non-conforming activists, intellectuals, and cultural workers shaped the…

Afifa Ltifi

Afifa Ltifi is a Tunisian third year PhD student who works on the implications of trans-saharan slavery and colonialism on conceptualizations of race and blackness in North Africa, particularly in countries of the Maghreb. Through an interdisciplinary approach, her project examines the micro- histories of black North Africans, their representations in cultural production and the complex processes of their racial formation within the “African” milieu. In addition to her academic research, she is…

Steven Pond

Steve Pond’s scholarly interests center on jazz and musics of the African Diaspora generally. His articles and reviews have appeared inEthnomusicologyand the Music Library Association’s journal,Notes. His book,Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2005 and republished as a paperback in 2010. The book was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize for best monograph in popular music studies by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (United States chapter). His work generally focuses on historiography, especially as it relates to issues of authenticity and authority, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other identity frameworks, particularly as these issues. A central consideration is the politics of genre classification.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University and the author of The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novelsMrs. Shaw,Black Star Nairobi,Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry,Logotherapyand Hurling Words at Consciousness. Unbury Our Dead With Song, a novel about competing Tizita musicians, was released from Cassava Republic Press in May of 2021.