The Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) has a core faculty made up of professors and lecturers who hold appointments in CAAS or have a formal association within the Center.
Core Faculty
PAUL ANDERSON (paanders@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture
Research and teaching interests: African American and U.S. intellectual and cultural history, the Harlem Renaissance, history and representation of jazz and African American music, critical theory and Black modernism
Selected publications: Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke University Press, 2001)KELLY ASKEW (kaskew@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: sociocultural anthropology, cultural politics, ethnomusicology, nationalism, media, performance, Swahili studies, East Africa
Selected publications: The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, co-editor (Blackwell, 2002), Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 2002)MICHAEL AWKWARD (michawk@umich.edu)
Gayl A. Jones Collegiate Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English Language
Research and teaching interests: representations of gender in African American expressive culture
Selected publications: Philadelphia Freedoms, an interdisciplinary examination of sites of contestations over the meanings of black identity in the decades following Martin Luther King's assassination (in progress), Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Music and the Struggle for Artistic Identity: Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe Snow (Duke University Press, 2007), Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir (Duke University Press, 2000)MARLYSE BAPTISTA (baptistm@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Linguistics
Research and teaching interests: morpho-syntax interface in pidgin and Creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive and technological tools; how Creole languages inform linguistic theory and to what extent linguistic theory, in turn, informs Creole grammatical systems
Selected publications: Noun Phrases in Creole Languages: A Multi-faceted Approach, co-editor (John Benjamins, 2007), The Syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento Varieties (John Benjamins, 2003)LORI BROOKS (llbrooks@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture
Research and teaching interests: race and cultural studies, urban culture, black intellectual culture, popular culture with a special interest in music, humor and performance
Selected publications: Syncopated Cosmopolitanism: African American Performing Artists in the Age of Plessy, focuses on a pioneering group of African American male performing artists and their construction of urban, cosmopolitan identities that responded to the challenges facing African Americans in the twentieth century: urbanization, racial segregation, the racial politics of U.S. imperialism, and strategies of representation and professionalization in American popular culture (in progress)JAMES CHAFFERS (chaffers@umich.edu)
Professor of Architecture
Research and teaching interests: design links between spatial equality and human spiritualityANGELA D. DILLARD (adillard@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Associate Professor in the Residential College, LSA
Research and teaching interests: American and African American intellectual history and political thought, religious studies, critical race theory, conservatism
Selected publications: Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York University Press, 2001)DAVID T. DORIS (dtdoris@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History of Art
Research and teaching interests: history of African arts and visual cultures, art and culture of the Yoruba people, both in southwestern Nigeria and in the Diaspora; theories of cross-cultural interpretation, conceptions of an "anti-aesthetic" in African contexts, the representation of Africa and its peoples in world's fairs, theme parks, and other commodity spectacles
Selected publications: Vigilant Things: the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Southwestern Nigeria (in progress)AMAL HASSAN FADLALLA (afadlall@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Women's Studies
Research and teaching interests: global perspectives on gender, health, and reproduction; global perspectives on gender, Diaspora, and transnationalism
Selected publications: Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan (in progress)KEVIN GAINES (gaineskk@umich.edu)
Director, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies; Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History
Research and teaching interests: U.S. and African American intellectual and cultural history, race and gender politics in post-World War II America, African American cultural production, global dimensions of U.S. struggles over the meaning of citizenship
Selected publications: American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (North Carolina Press, 1996)LORNA GOODISON (goodison@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English
Research and teaching interests: creative writing (poetry)
Selected publications: Travelling Mercies (McClelland and Stewart, 2001), Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2000), Turn Thanks (University of Illinois Press, 1999)SANDRA GUNNING (sgunning@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture
Research and teaching interests: African American literature particularly autobiography, travel writing, and the early African Diaspora; 19th/20th century American literature
Selected publications: Subject to Location: Gender, Place, and Writing in the Early Anglophone African Diaspora (in progress), Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas, co-editor (Blackwell, 2004), The Marrow of Tradition, co-editor (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2002)NESHA HANIFF ( nzh@umich.edu )
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies and Women's Studies
Research and teaching interests: empowerment pedagogies and marginalized populations, HIV/AIDS, violence, women's reproductive health
Current projects: Director, Community Education Project on Violence at the Jamaica Planned Association, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica; Director, Pedagogy of Action HIV/AIDS Education Program and study abroad to South AfricaLORI HILL (lohill@mich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Education
Research and teaching interests: education inequality and stratification, urban education, South African education and social policyAUGUSTIN HOLL (holla@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology, Curator of African Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: issues of social evolution, the advent of food-producing economies, the emergence and growth of complex socialsystems in West Africa and the Levant
Selected publications: Ethnoarchaeology of Shuwa-Arab Settlements (Lexington Books, 2003), The Land of Houlouf: Genesis of a Chadic Polity: 1900BC-AD1800, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan (Museum of Anthropology Publications, 2002)SEAN JACOBS (shjacobs@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Communication Studies
Research and teaching interests: relation between media, democracy and political power; the social power of media, Southern African politics, democratic transitions, race and identity
Selected publications: Thabo Mbeki's World: The Ideology and Politics of the South African President, co-editor (University of Natal Press, 2002)PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON (paulcjoh@umich.edu)
Director, Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History; Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History
Research and teaching interests: history and ethnography of the religions of the African Diaspora in Brazil and the Caribbean, religion and race, religion and migration, ritual studies, methodological and theoretical perspectives on the comparative study of religion
Selected publications: Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery in Africa (University of California Press, 2007), Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press, 2002), To Be Possessed: “Religion” and the Purification of Spirits (in progress)MARTHA S. JONES (msjonz@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History, visiting Assistant professor of Law
Research and teaching interests: intellectual and cultural history of black women's public lives in nineteenth-century America
Selected publications: All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)COLEMAN A. JORDAN (caje@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Architecture
Research and teaching interests: ways in which architectural spaces, detail, and forms can represent and construct diverse cultural identities, African American identity in domestic and international contexts, narrative and autobiographical approaches to American identity as inscribed in the structures of the past and present, slave holding castles in Ghana, western discourses of space and identity in Europe and the United States
Selected publications: Building Black Bondage (in progress)KARYN LACY (krlacy@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Sociology
Selected publications: Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (University of California Press, 2007)ROBIN R. MEANS-COLEMAN (rrmc@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Communication Studies
Research and teaching interests: African Americans and the media: texts, contexts, industry, and audiences; Black popular culture, African American identity formation/performance
Selected publications: Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity, editor (Routledge, 2002), African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (Routledge, 2000)TIYA MILES (tiya@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture
Research and teaching interests: interrelated and comparative histories of African Americans and Native Americans, history of African American women, history, literature and feminist thought, activism of women of color
Selected publications: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, co-editor (Duke University Press, 2006), Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005)DAMANI PARTRIDGE (djpartri@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: cultural anthropology, race and displacement, citizenship and non-citizens, technologies of exclusion, gender and sexuality, critical visual anthropology, German studies, European studies, anthropology of the state, post-socialismELISHA P. RENNE (erenne@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: maternal and child health in Africa, African art and aesthetics, ethnographic research methods
Selected publications: Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town (University of Michigan Press, 2003), Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, co-editor (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Population and Development Issues, co-editor (African BookBuilders Ltd. 2000)LARRY ROWLEY (llrowley@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Higher Education
Research and teaching interests: social theoretical frameworks, empirical analyses of higher education issues, developments and institutionsXIOMARA A. SANTAMARINA (xiomara@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English
Research and teaching interests: 19th Century African American literatures with a primary focus on autobiography and slave narratives, antebellum fiction and prose, economic criticism, theories of value, race and labor; U.S. Literature, feminist theory
Selected publications: Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)JULIUS S. SCOTT (jsscott@umich.edu)
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies and History
Research and teaching interests: networks linking slave societies and the roles that enslaved black workers played in forging and elaborating those connections
Selected publications: The Common Wind, a close study of the ways in which the Haitian Revolution influenced black residents of territories in North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America (in progress)RAYMOND SILVERMAN (silveray@umich.edu)
Director, Museum Studies Program; Professor of History of Art
Research and teaching interests: the interaction between West Africa and the cultures of the Middle East and the West, history of metalworking in West Africa and Ethiopia, visual culture of religion in 20th-century Ethiopia
Selected publications: Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity, editor (University of Washington Press, 1999)MATTHEW J. SMITH (mattja@umich.edu)
Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellow
Research and teaching interests: 20th century Haitian political movements, radicalism in pre-Duvalier Haiti
JACOB SONGSORE (songsore@umich.edu)
Visiting Scholar, 2007-08; Dean, School of Research and Graduate Studies and Professor of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana
Research and teaching interests: environmental problems in urban households in Accra, Ghana
Selected publications: Urbanization and Health in Africa: Exploring the Interconnections between Poverty, Inequality and the Burden of Disease, (Ghana Universities Press, 2004), Towards a Better Understanding of Urban Change: Urbanization, National Development and Inequality in Ghana (Ghana Universities Press, 2003)HOWARD STEIN (howstein@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology
Research and teaching interests: African development, including foreign aid, finance, institutional transformation, industrial and trade policy, health and poverty and structural adjustment
Selected publications: Beyond the World Bank Agenda: an Institutional Approach to Development (in progress), Deregulation and the Banking Crisis in Nigeria: A Comparative Study, co-editor (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), Asian Industrialization and Africa: Studies in Policy Alternatives to Structural Adjustment (Palgrave MacMillan, 1995)MEGAN SWEENEY (meganls@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English
Research and teaching interests: 20th/21st century African American literature and culture, inter-American literatures, critical race studies, transnational feminist and gender studies, critical prison studies, cultural studies, ethnography
Selected publications: Reckonings: Cultures of Reading in Women's Prisons weaves together historical and archival research, ethnography and literary and discourse analysis in exploring the roles that reading has played in incarcerated women's lives (in progress)DORCETA TAYLOR (dorceta@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Environmental Sociology
Research and teaching interests: the study social movements, environmental justice, environmental history, leisure and natural resource use, poverty and urban issues, race, gender and ethnic relations; the dynamics of the mainstream, environmental justice movementsRICHARD TURITS (rturits@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History
Research and teaching interests: race and slavery, violence and authoritarianism, U.S. overseas interventions
Selected publications: Race, Slavery, and Freedom Beyond the Plantation: The Greater Spanish Caribbean in Comparative Perspective (in progress), Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford University Press, 2003)HANES WALTON (hantonjr@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Political Science
Research and teaching interests: American politics, race and politics, political parties, presidential elections, voting behavior, African politics, public opinion and the Confederate flag
Selected publications: American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 3rd Edition, co-author (Longman Classics, 2005), Reelection: Liberian Politics: The Portrait by African American Diplomat J. Milton Turner, co-editor (Lexington Books, 2002), William J. Clinton as A Native Son Presidential Candidate (Columbia University Press, 2000)STEPHEN WARD (smward@umich.edu
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Associate Professor in the Residential College
Research and teaching interests: history of black radical thought, the relationship between intellectual production and social change, ideological origins and historical development of the Black Power movement, the development of the Black Power movement in Detroit, intellectual work and political activism of James and Grace Lee BoggsWARREN WHATLEY (wwhatley@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Economics
Research and teaching interests: economic history of African Americans in the twentieth century, cotton mechanization and the black migration, African American industrial workers in the twentieth century north, roots of urban poverty, small business development in the inner-city, the digital divide, supply conditions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from 1440-1800ALFORD YOUNG, JR. (ayoun@umich.edu)
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Sociology
Research and teaching interests: race and urban poverty, low income African American men in urban communities, African American social thought, African American intellectuals
Selected publications: The Souls of W. E. B. DuBois co-author (Paradigm Publishers, 2006), The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton University Press, 2004)MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA (mzaborow@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture
Research and teaching interests: immigration and ethnicity, the ways in which race, sexuality and architecture intersect in the narratives of national identity across the Atlantic
Selected publications: Erotics of Space: James Baldwin, Race, and the Transatlantic Architextures of American Identity (in progress), Over the Wall/After the Fall: Postcommunist Cultures in the East-West Gaze, co-editor (Indiana University Press, 2004)
Adjunct & Associate Faculty
MELBA JOYCE BOYD (boydmj@umich.edu)
Visiting Professor of African American and African Studies
Selected publications: Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (Columbia University Press, 2003), The Province of Literary Cats (Past Tents Press, 2002), Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001)BUNYAN BRYANT, JR. (bbryant@umich.edu)
Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Professor of Natural Resources and Urban Planning
Research and teaching interests: developing case studies on corporate, agency, and community responses to hazardous waste sites
Selected publications: Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions, co-editor (Island Press, 1995), Environmental Advocacy: Concepts, Issues and Dilemmas (Caddo Gap Press, 1990)MARK CLAGUE (claguem@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Musicology, School of Music; Associate Director, American Music Institute and Faculty Associate, American Culture Program
Research and teaching interests: the relationship of black music to social and aesthetic politics, music and race,the music of Alton Adams, Bennie Benjamin, Ornette Coleman, Wynton Marsalis, Herbert Mells and George Walker
Selected publications: Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, Sr: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy, editor (University of California Press, 2008)DAVID WILLIAM COHEN (dwcohen@umich.edu)
Lemuel A. Johnson Collegiate Professor of African Anthropology and History
Research and teaching interests: authoritative grounds and fates of different forms of expertise: scholarly, public, private, and official; pre-Colonial Uganda
Selected publications: African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, co-editor (Indiana University Press, 2001), Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics, co-author (Scholarly Publishing Office, 2005)ELIZABETH COLE (ecole@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Psychology
Research and teaching interests: the individual sense of self as connected to social groups and how that relates to their attitudes toward public policy, the roles individuals choose to play in the political sphere, how individuals experience their social environmentsFRIEDA EKOTTO (ekotto@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Research and teaching interests: twentieth-century narratives and theater, European intellectual history and philosophy, postcolonialism, film, writing and violence, legal discourse and literature, psychoanalysis and sociological approaches, critical discourse and cultural studies, French and Francophone literatures, feminist discourses and narratives of Francophone women writers, West African and Francophone theater, North African women writers and questions of silence and madness
Selected publications: Ne chuchote pas trop (L'Harmattan, 2005), Encyclopedia of African Literature, co-author (Routledge, 2004), Back from Babylon: Repetition and Difference in Post/Modernist African Cultural Production (University of New York Press, 2003)REYNOLDS FARLEY(renf@umich.edu)
Professor of Sociology
Research and teaching interests: human ecology, city growth and structure, urbanization, residential segregation, contemporary urban inequalitiesJON ONYE LOCKARD (jmlockaz@umich.edu)
Adjunct Lecturer
Research and teaching interests: African, Afro-Brazilian and traditional art of the Americas; contemporary African American art, comparative Black artLESTER MONTS(lmonts@umich.edu)
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Senior Counselor to the President for the Arts, Diversity, and Undergraduate Affairs; Professor of Ethnomusicology
Research and teaching interests: African and African American music, music of the Vai people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, music historiography, music and Islam in Africa, multimedia technology and its application to music research and teachingJEROME O. NRIAGU(jnriagu@umich.edu)
Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth & Development
Research and teaching interests:sources, behavior, fate and effects of metals in the natural and contaminated environments; environmental justice and disproportionate exposure of communities to environmental pollutants, environmental health problems in the developing countriesMAXWELL OWUSU (omk@umich.edu)
Professor of Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: aspects of democracy and democratization at the local level in AfricaREBECCA SCOTT(rjscott@umich.edu)
Charles Gibson Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law
Research and teaching interests: slavery, emancipation, post-emancipation societies in Cuba and Brazil
Selected publications: Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), Beyond Slavery: Explorations on Race, Labor, and Citizenship, co-author (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)EDWARD WEST(ewest@umich.edu)
Professor of Art
Research and teaching interests: photography, photographic investigations of the socialist worker's life in China, daily life in Black South Africa, light and shadow in the Italian landscapeMELVIN D. WILLIAMS (mddoublu@umich.edu)
Professor of Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: studies of contemporary American society, African American life, globalism
Selected publications: Race for Theory (self-published, Ann Arbor MI, 1996), The Human Dilemma: A Decade Later in Belmar (A Revision of on the Street Where I Lived) (Harcourt, 1991)ROBIN WILSON (robinwil@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Dance
Research and teaching interests: choreography and movement, African Diasporic dance forms in the Americas, Afro-Cuban dance, the intersection of African dance with western movement formsRONALD WOODS(rcwoods@umich.edu)
Adjunct Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies
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