Alumni

Kevin Rigby Jr.

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Kevin Rigby Jr. is a PhD Candidate in the Department of African American Studies. His research interests include critical philosophies of race, political philosophy, and critical social movement studies. His dissertation theorizes the relationship between black political demands and the political as such, by interrogating responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. He earned a BA in African American Studies from Wayne State University, and completed a post-baccalaureate research program at Yale University before arriving at Berkeley.

Petra Rivera Rideau

Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Petra Rivera-Rideau is an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Prior to this, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond as part of the Consortium for Faculty Diversity in Liberal Arts Colleges program. Dr. Rivera-Rideau’s research interests concern race in Latin America and the Caribbean, diaspora studies, and popular culture. She is currently finishing her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Todo Puerto Rico!: Race and Diaspora in Puerto Rican Reggaeton, that concerns the...

Reginold A. Royston

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of African Cultural Studies and the Information School

I received my PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a designated emphasis in New Media in spring 2014. I’ve received degrees in anthropology and philosophy from Howard University. My areas of interest include Science & Technology, media, modernity and race, Online education, and IT for Social Change. My dissertation, Trending in Ghana: Homeland, Diaspora and New Media Publics, investigates how diaspora is deployed in discourse on development; in news, social and entertainment media; and in the social imaginary of Ghana. I also research the role of online classrooms in promoting global...

Natoschia Scruggs

Psychology, Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP)

Natoschia Scruggs, M.A., Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley; her BA in international studies from York College of Pennsylvania, and her MA in political science with a focus on African studies from Boston University. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Egypt and has lived in or traveled through ten African nations. Natoschia authored the Egypt chapter in State Violence and the Right to Peace: An International Survey of the Views of Ordinary People Greenwood Publishing Group / Praeger series...

Rashad Timmons

Rashad Timmons graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. and M.A. in Journalism, specializing in African American and African Studies. His work broadly explores Black being and participation in online communities. More specifically, he is interested in how digital performances of Blackness trouble subjective embodiment and disrupt spatial-temporal logics of being.

Elisa Joy White

Associate Professor, UC Davis

Elisa Joy White is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies, Black European Studies, New Diaspora Communities, New Media Studies at University of California, Davis. She completed a PhD in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also received a MA in African American Studies. She also holds a MA in Media Studies from the New School University and a BA in Theatre from Spelman College. Her research interests and publications include lesser-examined African Diaspora sites, Black European Studies, the social and cultural dimensions of...

Ronald Williams II

Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Ronald Williams II is assistant professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining the faculty at Carolina, Ronald was a lecturer here in the Department of African American Studies, where he taught African American politics, race and public policy, and college writing. Grounded in a curiosity about the interplay between race and politics, Ronald’s research interests include African American politics and political thought, race and public policy, African Diaspora politics, race and U.S. foreign relations, and...

Erin N. Winkler

Department of African & African Diaspora Studies - Associate Professor

Effects of racism on individuals, communities, and society; Racial identity development and well-being in children and adolescents; African American families; Qualitative research methods in Africology; Sociology of African American communities; Race and place (nationally and internationally).

Research

Racial socialization; Racial identity development in African American families and communities; The impact of gender, skin tone, and other demographic factors on racial identity development and responses to racism; The effect of place on shaping...

Lisa Ze Winters

Associate Professor, Wayne State

African American and African Diaspora literatures; race & racialization; visual culture, cultural studies

Olivia K. Young

Olivia K. Young is a doctoral candidate in The Department of African Diaspora Studies at The University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her dissertation foregrounds notions of distortion within the work of black female artists from the onset of feminist art movements of the 1960s. Her research takes seriously the interplay of visual registers with other sensory modalities and the role of performance in staging and re-staging social reality. Prior to her doctoral studies she earned her Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies and...