Alumni

Asia Leeds

Assistant Professor, Spelman College

Asia has a Social Science in Practice Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA and is jointly housed in the Interdepartmental Program in African American Studies and the Department of History.

I am currently a tenure track Assistant Professor in the African Diaspora and the World program at Spelman College. Before that, I was a Dean’s Social Science in Practice postdoctoral fellow at UCLA from 2010-2012. I have an article coming out in Spring 2013 in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International titled “Toward the ‘Higher Type of Womanhood’: The Gendered Contours of...

Marlon M. Bailey

Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Marlon M. Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and American Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) in the Department of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. His forthcoming book manuscript, Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, is due to be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013. Butch Queens up in Pumps is a performance ethnography of the House/Ball community in Detroit MI and throughout North America. Dr. Bailey’s...

Lia Bascomb

Assistant Professor, Georgia State University

Lia T. Bascomb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University. She earned her B.A. at Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. at The University of California, Berkeley. Her current research projects investigate popular culture as a site of national identity formation in the Caribbean; gender, belonging, and land rights in diasporic settlement and its literary representations; genealogies of the black female body in visual images of the Caribbean; and the role of the “freak” in building a diasporic identity in black American music....

Jamal A. Batts

Jamal A. Batts hails from Virginia Beach, VA. He holds a B.A. in African American Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.A. in American Studies from California State University, Fullerton. He is a recipient of the Townsend-Mellon Discovery Fellowship and a former Editorial Assistant for the American Quarterly.

Research

His research interests include black studies, queer theory, and visual culture.

Kathyrn Benjamin Golden

Africana Studies, University of Delaware - Assistant Professor

Brittany Botts

Phd

Ree Botts is a poet, scholar, and activist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ree received her MA in African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College.

Her work focuses on the ways Black women create and sustain healing spaces that inspire individual agency. Rooted deeply in a framework of Black Feminist Thought, Ree engages nuanced conversations on the ways in which Black sisterhood impacts Black women’s interiority.

Botts is the founder and CEO of The Selfology...

Kenly Brown

Kenly Brown graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.A. in Sociology and minor in Political Science. She went on to pursue a doctorate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where she developed research interests in race, gender, and juvenile justice. Kenly earned an M.A. in Sociology from UCSB in 2013. Her Master’s thesis looked at the participation and transformation of justice-involved and high-risk youth in a cognitive-based mentoring program. In January 2014, she transferred to the University of California, Berkeley as a...

Charisse Burden

Assistant Professor, Carlton College

Charisse Burden graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2009 with Bachelor’s Degrees in Political Science and African and African American Studies from Barrett, The Honor College at Arizona State University. She received a Masters of Art in African American Studies from UC Berkeley in 2011. She is currently the Five College Fellow at Amherst College. Her research interests include coloniality, economic development and cycles of accumulation in the United States and Anglophone African Diaspora; the Black radical intellectual tradition; feminization of poverty and labor; alternatives to...

Christina Bush

Presidential Post-Doctorate, University of California Davis

Christina earned B.A.s in both English and History from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She also recently earned an M.A. from Ohio State University in African American and African Studies. During her time at Ohio State she served as an Outreach Consultant for the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing engaging issues of youth literacy in Columbus Public Schools. Her research interests include mis-and disembodied black masculinity, and how notions of racial and gender authenticity are mediated through consumption and commodification.

Robert Connell

Berkeley Connect

Rob earned his Bachelor of Environmental Studies degree with honors and a minor in Political Science from York University, Canada in 2009 and earned his Master’s degree in African American Studies from UC Berkeley in 2012. His dissertation subject examines the legacy of dual ethnogenesis in 21st century circum-Caribbean Maroon conflicts over resource extraction and sovereignty. Specifically, Rob is investigating the politicization of Jamaican and Surinamese Maroon communities given contemporary challenges to their self-proclaimed sovereignty through state-sanctioned resource...