In the summer of 1998 I walked the empty country roads by my grandparents' house to stay busy. Surrounded by open plantation fields and cicadas in the trees above me, I walked for hours listening to homemade radio mixtapes on my Walkman. Schooling myself on OutKast, Goodie Mob, Master P, Mama Mia X, Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boys, UGK, and later Pastor Troy and Field Mob (I see you Albany, GA!), I looked at southern hip hop as a lens through which to work my newfound identity as a Down South Georgia Girl. The red clay that dusted the white rubber soles of my Keds would seep deep into my personal identity and the convictions that fuel my research on contemporary African American literature and culture.
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Bettina L. Love
Dr. Bettina L. Love is an award-winning author and Associate Professor of Educational Theory & Practice at the University of Georgia. Dr. Love is one of the field’s most esteemed educational researchers in the area of Hip Hop education. Her research focuses on the ways in which urban youth negotiate Hip Hop music and culture to form social, cultural, and political identities to create new and sustaining ways of thinking about urban education and intersectional social justice. Her work is also concerned with how teachers and schools working with parents and communities can build communal, civically engaged schools rooted in intersectional social justice for the goal of
equitable classrooms.
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Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015). In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship.
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Aimee Meredith Cox
Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Cox earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Vassar College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan) and co-editor of a special issue of Public: A Journal of Imagining Americaon art and knowledge production in the academy. Cox is also a former professional dancer. She danced on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured extensively with Ailey II. Her next ethnographic project, Living Past Slow Death, explores the creative protest strategies individuals and communities enact to reclaim Black life in the urban United States.
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Kinitra D. Brooks
Dr. Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture. Dr. Brooks will serve as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University for the 2018-2019 academic year.
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Kaila Story
Dr. Kaila Story is Associate Professor, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of Pan-African Studies. She holds the Audre Lorde Chair in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Dr. Story was also a part of NBC’s inaugural #Pride30 which featured LGBTQ Community leaders and change makers.
“#Pride30: Professor Kaila Story Is Opening Hearts and Minds in Kentucky”-Kalhan Rosenblatt, NBC , https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out-pride30/pride30-dr-kaila-adia-story-n763466
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She also co-hosts an award-winning podcast with longtime Louisville activist Jaison Gardner called Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black Gay Life on WFPL (Louisville affiliate of NPR). You can find current and past episodes here: strangefruitpod.org
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Tamura Lomax
Tamura Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion where she specialized in Black Religious History and Black Diaspora Studies. She also developed expertise in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. She is specifically interested in the ways that linguistic and representational technologies of power construct and institutionalize ideas of race and gender and how these ideas not only establish notions of innate difference, but ultimately affect Black diasporic people in general and Black women and girls specifically in their everyday lives, sometimes igniting epistemic and/or material violence. Her scholarship interrogates these intersections by placing special emphasis on North American slavery, Black social movement, religion, and popular culture.
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Imani Perry
Professor Perry is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences. She has published numerous articles in the areas of law, cultural studies, and African American studies, many of which are available for download at: imaniperry.typepad.com. She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Nobles Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Professor Perry teaches interdisciplinary courses that train students to use multiple methodologies to investigate African American experience and culture.
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Nell Painter
Nell Irvin Painter is a leading historian of the United States. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. She was Director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies from 1997 to 2000. In addition to her doctorate in history from Harvard University, she has received honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, SUNY-New Paltz, and Yale.
As a scholar, Professor Painter has published numerous books, articles, reviews, and other essays. Her most recent book is The History of White People. Six earlier books are also still in print. She has served on numerous editorial boards and as an officer of many different professional organizations, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, and the Association of Black Women Historians. She is currently a Councillor of the prestigious Society of American Historians.
Professor Painter's current work is interdisciplinary. In addition to traditional courses in American history and African-American studies, she teaches on the social construction of gender, race, and personal beauty. Dr. Painter is also an incredible visual artist.
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Khadijah Costley White
Khadijah Costley White is an Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Journalism and Media Studies at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Previously she worked as a journalist on an Emmy-nominated team at NOW on PBS and has served as a White House intern on President Obama’s Broadcast Media team.
White researches politics, activism, and the representation of race and gender identity in media. She is the author of,The Branding of Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party is a multi-platform study that examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news; it will be released by Oxford University Press in September 2018. She has conducted media research in the United States, Australia, and South Africa. She has also published her work in books, academic journals, professional blogs, and presented her research at conferences around the world.
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Mia Charlene White
Mia Charlene White is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in the Environmental Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement, with a co-teaching appointment at the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy. She is a faculty-affiliate of the Tishman Environment and Design Center (TedC), as well as with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. She has a bachelors degree in Anthropology and Political Science from the State University of NY at Stonybrook, a Master of International Affairs (Environmental Policy) from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a Ph.D in Urban Studies and Planning (Housing and Environment) from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Given the diversity of her training, Mia's work is interdisciplinary and she situates herself among radical geographers (race geography) and applied anthropologists, planning/urban theorists (fugitive planning), radical sociologists/historians and those others seeking to link social science concepts of space and race, to the humanities via art and protest.
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Malkia Devich Cyril
Malkia Devich Cyril is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a national network of community-based organizations working to ensure racial and economic justice in a digital age. Cyril is one of few leaders of color in the movement for digital rights and freedom, and a leader in the Movement for Black Lives—helping to bring important technical safeguards and surveillance countermeasures to people across the country who are fighting to reform systemic racism and violence in law enforcement.
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Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Kerry Ann Rockquemore is an author and speaker in the field of faculty development and leadership. She spent the early years of her professional career climbing the academic ladder while writing about interracial families. She is author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (2001, 2007), Raising Biracial Children(2005), and over two dozen articles and book chapters on multiracial youth. Kerry Ann’s research has been featured in numerous media outlets such as the New York Times and ABC’s 20/20. After Kerry Ann became a tenured professor (at the University of Illinois at Chicago), her focus shifted towards improving conditions for pre-tenure faculty by creating supportive communities for professional development, writing productivity, and work/life balance. Her award-winning work with under-represented faculty led to the publication of her most recent book The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul (2008). Kerry Ann now provides workshops for new faculty members at colleges across the United States, leads a popular online discussion forum for under-represented faculty, and works with a select group of new faculty each semester in her Faculty Success Program. She wrote a series of columns for Inside Higher Ed designed to help new faculty members advance toward tenure.
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Rosalie Uyola
ROSIE JAYDE UYOLA is an independent scholar, K-12 teacher, documentary filmmaker, and researcher of memory, commemoration, and Black Life and Culture.
They are an alumnae W.E.B. Du Bois Institute NEH Fellow (Harvard University, 2013) and currently develop digital humanities projects at Princeton University. Rosie’s publications include “Memory and the Long Civil Rights Movement,” in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America (University of Florida Press, 2018), “The Digital City: Memory, History, and Public Commemoration,” Ácoma International Journal of North-American Studies, Italia (2015), “Home Sweet Home - Race, Housing, and the Foreclosure Crisis,” in The War on Poverty: A Retrospective (Lexington Books, 2014), “Race, Empire, and the Rise of the Mortgage Industrial Complex,” The Newark Experience Digital Archive (Rutgers University Libraries, 2013), and “Women in the Black Freedom Movement,” School Series Production of Harriet Tubman, New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC, 2008).
Their expertise and research interests include urban culture, race and public art, and oral history.
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