Alumni

Libby Lewis

Adjunct Professor, UCLA

Libby Lewis is a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles with research and teaching interests that include: Media Studies, Communications, African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies.. Her current book, The Myth of Post-racialism in Television News focuses on how journalists negotiate their race, gender, and sexuality in a corporate newsroom culture. The book foregrounds the experiences of Black journalists. Dr. Lewis travels the world, speaking and consulting with diverse audiences on a wide range of subjects including Media, Marketing,...

Xavier Livermon

Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Austin

Xavier Livermon received his B.A. in Political Science from UC San Diego, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. His dissertation, entitled “Kwaito Bodies in African Diaspora Space: The Politics of Popular Music in Post-Apartheid South Africa” examines how popular performance cultures in post-apartheid South Africa are shaped by Afrodiasporic consciousness as well as the effect these popular performance cultures have on rapidly changing sociopolitical circumstances in contemporary South Africa. His research interests include examining the role of Africa in...

Ameer Hasan Loggins

Ameer is a 2007 graduate of UC Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies. Ameer also holds a Masters in African American Studies from UC Berkeley and is currently working towards earning his doctorate in African Diaspora Studies. His research explores Reality Television as a social phenomena, and how its effects on the perception of African Americans outside of a televisual space. Ameer has conducted research for Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African American research (The Hip-Hop Archive) and currently works with Harvard University’s...

Selina S. Makana

Post Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University

Selina earned her Bachelor’s degree in Education with a minor in Linguistics and African Literature at Kenyatta University, Kenya. In 2009/2010, she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University under the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching program (FLTA). Selina entered the African Diaspora Studies PhD program in 2011 and her areas of interest include Africa, Caribbean, gender/sexuality, Black feminism, politics/activism. Her research project focuses on questions of social and political activism of women in contemporary Caribbean and Africa. On the side, Selina is also interested in...

Zachary Manditch-Prottas

Full-Time Lecturer, Washington University in St. Louis

Zachary Manditch-Prottas is a full-time lecturer in the Department of African and African-American Studies and Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his BA in American Studies from Connecticut College, his MA in American Studies from Columbia University, and his MA and Ph.D. in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching work is at the nexus of African American literature, Black cultural studies, and theories of gender and sexuality. His work has been featured in current and...

Carter Mathes

Associate Professor, Rutgers University

Professor Mathes is a specialist in African American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. He is currently writing a book entitled, Imagine the Sound: Experimental Form in Post-Civil Rights African American Literature. This study examines the relationship between sound, social transformation, and literary innovation during the shifting racial climate of the 1960s-1980s. In a related project, he is co-editing a volume of essays on Black Arts Movement writer and critic Larry Neal. Professor Mathes is presently a member of the Rutgers Committee on New...

Kimberly McNair

Post Doctoral Fellow, USC

Kimberly graduated from North Carolina State University in 2002 with a B.S. in Africana Studies and a B.A. in Chemistry. Before relocating to California for graduate school, she taught middle school and tutored students with learning difficulties. She also earned her M.A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. While serving the campus community in various roles, she has worked with grassroots and campus organizations focusing on academic outreach and equal access to education.

Currently a doctoral candidate, Kimberly’s research interest...

Kianna Middleton

Kianna received her Bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in the spring of 2006 as well as a Master’s degree in Ethnic Studies from Colorado State University. In the spring of 2012 Kianna successfully defended her Master’s thesis, ““I Feel, Therefore I Can be Free”: Black Women and Chicana Queer Narratives as Differential Consciousness and Foundational Theory.” Kianna’s essay, “Generational Survival, the Repetition of Memory, Autonomy and Empowerment in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora” was printed in SUNY Oneonta’s Women’s and...

Maggi M. Morehouse

Associate Professor of History

Maggi M. Morehouse is the first graduate of the African Diaspora Studies program at the University of California Berkeley, completing her Ph.D. in May 2001. Today, she teaches Southern History at Coastal Carolina University, with a focus on connecting the American South to global diasporas and migrations. She has been working with media providing historical consultation and crafting oral histories into visual short stories on topics ranging from black World War II soldiers, to enslaved potters, to southern women, to African Diaspora migration.

Research

...

John Mundell

Phd

John’s dissertation, titled Sexual Order, Racial Progress: Queering Racial Democracy in Brazil, uses archival findings and close and queer readings of mainstream popular literature, cinema, music, and television to analyze the ways in which the national Brazilian myth and ideology of racial democracy constitutes a performance of race and sex. He draws on performance, queer, black feminist, and critical race theories in order to understand what he argues to be the racial and sexual anti-normativities upon which racial democracy itself is founded. Through such cultural productions, he...