Associate Professor, African American Studies & Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Brandi Wilkins Catanese is an Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, as well as being affiliated faculty with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. She earned her BA in African American Studies and Dramatic Art/Dance from UC Berkeley, and her PhD in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University. Her work addresses the role of performance in constructing our understandings of black identity, both through aesthetic production and through the performativity of everyday life. She has published articles in...
Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Michael Mark Cohen was born in Denver, Colorado, the child of two public school teachers. He holds a BA in History from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University (2004). He is currently an Associate Teaching Professor at UCB with a joint appointment in American Studies and African American Studies. His general research and teaching areas cover the cultural and political history of the United States from the Civil War to the Present. Areas of emphasis include racial capitalism and racial formations in the United States; labor, work and radical...
Nikki Jones is Professor of African American Studies at UC-Berkeley. Her work focuses on the experiences of Black women, men, and youth with the criminal legal system, policing, and violence. Professor Jones is the author of two books: Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence (2010) and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption (2018), which received the Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology in 2020. Her current...
Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work traces how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which excavates the significance of post-bellum fugitivity as a window into the geographies of the evolving carceral state. Her scholarship has appeared in ...
Professor Nwokeji’s research deals with the cultural history and political economy of Africa since 1500, with particular focus on international commerce in the Nigerian Niger Delta and its hinterland. This research is placed in the contexts of the Atlantic world and globalization, the latter of which encapsulates and synergizes the range of his teaching and research interests in slavery, migration, slave emancipation, as well as colonial and postcolonial political economy, including concerns with oil and gas. His book, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society...
Tianna Paschel is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California – Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America. Her work can be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies and various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to...
Director, Othering & Belonging Institute; Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion; Professor, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies; Professor of Law
Othering & Belonging Institute
john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. In addition to being a Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Professor powell holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion. He is also the Executive Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and...
AAS 100: Black Intellectual Thought (required for the major in African American Studies)
AAS 144: Introduction to Cultural Studies: Black Images
AAS 240: Black Art
Biography
Leigh Raiford is a Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, writes and curates about race, gender, justice and visuality. She is the inaugural director of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon...
Darieck Scott earned his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and an M.A. in African American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. Before coming to UC Berkeley he taught in the English departments of the University of Texas at Austin, and UC Santa Barbara. His teaching and research interests include: 20th and 21st century African American literature; creative writing; queer theory, and LGBTQ studies; race, gender and sexuality in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books.
Publications
Scott is the author of Keeping it Unreal: Black Queer...
Professors Small’s new book – In the Shadows of the Big House. Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana was published June 2023.
Stephen Small has taught in the Department of African American Studies since 1995. On July 1st, 2020, he was appointed Director of...
Professors Small’s new book – In the Shadows of the Big House. Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana was published June 2023. 