The Department of African American Studies (AAS) is launching a new series spotlighting alumni of our Ph.D. program. In our first spotlight, AAS Project Manager Barbara Montano intreviews recent Ph.D. program alumna Adriana Green, now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in African American Studies at Princeton University.
Where are you now and what are you up to? Tell us about your postdoc.
I am in New Jersey! I was fortunate to receive a year-long fellowship in the African American Studies Department at Princeton University and am surrounded by wonderful faculty and staff. I am especially grateful for my mentors Autumn Womack and Ruha Benjamin. I came into the position knowing that I wanted to do an event series, and so I have been organizing film screenings and writerly meet-ups with the help of the fabulous event coordinator Dionne Worthy. In addition to event planning, I have tried to get a feel for student interests and classroom culture, in part, by auditing Dr. Womack’s course on the origins of African American literature. Sitting in on her class has been fulfilling for me both as a newcomer to campus and as a student of Black history, and has made me even more excited to teach my own course in the spring, Octavia Taught Me: Black Speculative Fiction as Theory and Practice.
What in your time in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley best prepared you for your postdoc position?
Teaching an undergraduate seminar is a core aspect of this postdoc, so the frequent opportunities to teach at Berkeley allowed me to apply with a wide range of syllabi and experience. More broadly, having interdisciplinary training has allowed me to connect with and support a wide-range of students in my short time on campus. I have had generative conversations with students from English, Architecture, Art History, and Anthropology this fall.
What courses or seminars shaped the way you now teach or frame your research?
So, so many. GSIing for Dr. Taylor across multiple courses has deeply impacted my understanding of teaching as storytelling and stretched my historical awareness well-beyond my original frame of thinking for the dissertation. The courses Black + Queer (taught by Darieck Scott and Nadia Ellis) as well as Black Art (Leigh Raiford) helped me hone my questions about the relationship between cultural production and theory. The papers I wrote in those classes were important touchstones for me as I developed my project. And finally, I would be remiss not to mention Professor Paschel’s famous methods course! Taking her class was the number one piece of advice I was given by students already in the department when I began my studies and her syllabus is pinned in my Zotero library to this day.
What faculty wisdom or mentorship do you still carry with you?
I am still in touch with my mentors from Berkeley! Almost weekly at this point. Which is perhaps one of the lessons they’ve imparted: these relationships last well beyond the program. I wish I could repay the care and attention poured into me by my committee and by Lindsey, but I don’t think that’s possible. I think I can only pour that level of support into the next generation of scholars and hope to be half as impactful to them as my mentors have been to me. Additionally, attending the Black Futures Retreat while a student at Cal will forever stand as a turning point in my way of thinking about organizing beyond and through the academy. The wisdom demonstrated by Leigh Raiford, Tianna Paschel, Barbara Montano, and many others in curating that event has changed how I will think about programming for the rest of my career.
How has your work evolved since starting the postdoc?
Writing the dissertation felt like answering questions I’d been carrying for years: Why is outer space the assumed horizon of humanity? How is racial capitalism underwriting mankind’s reach for the stars? Now I have clearer answers and am thinking about how I want to structure the book manuscript. I don’t want to force the dissertation to be a book, so I am zooming out to outline the manuscript before considering what parts of the dissertation belong in the project and what parts might stand alone as articles. Since starting the postdoc I have had a number of folks at Princeton reach out to learn more about my work. Their interest has been encouraging and has also pushed me to be more confident in my own voice and define myself beyond the questions of the dissertation. I now understand myself as a scholar of the politics of futurity.
What are your future dreams and aspirations? Where do you hope your postdoc takes you?
This is an interesting (read: challenging) time to be on the job market and in the academy in general. And yet, I am still a bit in awe of campus life. The idea that there are these spaces where we can gather to create and debate and analyze is very dear to me, especially in this political moment. I hope my postdoc allows me to gain further confidence in the classroom and to strengthen my event planning skills. Wherever I land next, I’d like to contribute to a bustling campus life. I am daydreaming of hosting a symposium gathering together folks who treat the future as a site of study and co-curating an art exhibit based on a panel I did recently with Drs. Jane Henderson and Luke Williams about frontier imaginaries (think cowboys, aliens, and astrapreuners). A more permanent position would allow me to dream big.