Alumni

Nicole-Marie Cotton

CITRIS Program Manager for Workforce Development

After working in a microbiology lab and 3M, Nicole was set on a career in the life sciences until one day she was in the middle of a debate between her zoology professor and her philosophy professor about ethics. Since then, Nicole has been interested in ways to bring people together from different backgrounds to discuss ethical issues such as environmental justice, multicultural inclusion, and tech for social good. Nicole is a graduate researcher for UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute working on a landscape scan on technology, surveillance, and social determinants of...

Ariane Cruz

Associate Professor of Women's Studies, Penn State

Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies. Her research and teaching interests include images of black female sexuality, black women and/in BDSM, black visuality, and race and representation.

Edward Davis IV

Dr. Edward Davis IVDr. Edward C. Davis IV was born in Chicago via ancestors who built Underground Railroad homesteads on Southern Illinois’ Trail of Tears Highway. As Melungeon Maroons, family freedom papers and DNA confirm his grandmother’s own grandmother had a grandmother who descends from royal leaders kidnapped near Malanje, Angola in 1619. Davis has...

Kelley Fanto Deetz

Historical Consultant

Research & Teaching Interests:

African American History, Labor, Foodways, Material Culture, Historical Archaeology, Third Wave Feminist Thought, Memory and Memorials.

Maude Dikobe

Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Studies, University of Botswana

gaidi faraj

Assistant Professor, African Leadership University

Gaidi Faraj has taken a position at the new African Leadership University (ALU) in Mauritius, where he teaches in the Business Management department. He is also currently developing curriculum for ALU. He is a Harvard Research Fellow for 2017-2018.

J Finley

Assistant Professor, Middlebury College

Jessyka (J) Finley joined the American Studies department at Middleburry College in 2014 as a C3 Post-Doctoral Fellow. J earned her PhD in 2012 in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her B.A. in Black Studies and Legal Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA in 2004. In 2008 she earned an MA in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Some of J’s research interests include black women’s performance history, performance theory, cultural performance, feminist thought, reparations, abjection, and utopias. Her...

Robeson Taj Frazier

Associate Professor, USC

Robeson Taj P. Frazier is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg. His research and teaching examine race, cross cultural exchange and traffic, social movements, and popular culture. Frazier traces how articulations and representations of race and gender travel globally through performance, media, art, athletics, diplomacy, and activism. He is currently considering these questions by scrutinizing African American activist intellectuals’ cross-cultural exchanges with the People’s Republic of China from 1949-1976. Prior to coming to USC, Frazier taught courses...

Marisa J. Fuentes

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Rutgers University

Marisa J. Fuentes completed her Ph.D. in the department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley in July of 2007. She joined the faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies and History in 2009. Her current manuscript, The Archives of Slavery: Gender, Power and Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Urban Caribbean explores the spatial, historical and symbolic confinement enslaved women experienced in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados. Grounded in archival research and recent scholarship on gender and enslavement, Fuentes investigates how the construction of legal,...

Gabrielle Williams

Gabrielle received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts from the New School University in 2006. Subsequently, she received an M.A. in African American Studies from UC Berkeley in 2008, and participated as a Visiting Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London in the Anthropology of Food program (2008-2009). Successfully completing Qualifying Exams at UCB in 2012, Gabrielle is currently working-on a dissertation surrounding food imagery in African American literature which reflects her broader research interests in: the interplay between race,...