#  The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Announces its Twelfth Class of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows 

 



 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, has announced the 2024-2025 class of fellows.

 “We are happy to welcome our next cohort of distinguished and dynamic W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” says Gates. “We look forward to brilliant creative and scholarly work next academic year. A narrative nonfiction work on the African American women and the Russian Revolution; a study of the life and work of the cultural historian Stuart Hall; a history of Nubia and its material cultures; a history of the material and immaterial cultures of enslaved African women circulating in the Middle Atlantic; the question of how blackness travels beyond U.S. borders into China; understanding crunk as a response to policing of black youth; a study of the separate lineages of Euro-American and African American jazz traditions; and race and caste in the world are among the exciting projects that the 2024-2025 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”

 The twenty-five 2024-2025 W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:

- **Gbemisola Abiola** is an Anthropologist and Security Studies Expert. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for Fall 2024, Abiola, Al-Swaidan will be at work on the book-length study *When 'Japá ' Meets ‘ Blaxit': A Study of the Continuum of Black Migration* that investigates migration out of America to Africa and other continents, as well as the flows to America and the rest of the West from Africa and the interconnections among these routes.
- **Mafaz Al-Suwaidan** is a Doctoral Candidate in Religion at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Al-Suwaidan will be at work on the dissertation *The False Promise of Fair Play: Why Muslim Movements Fail Under the Secular Contract*.
- **Harry Allen** is a Hiphop Artist and Scholar. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Allen will be at work on the project *harbanger:SERATO®+SAX*, an experiment designed to forge more dynamic, real-time interactions between hip-hop and jazz instrumentalists.
- **Kleber Antonio De Oliveira Amancio** is Assistant Professor at the Center for Culture, Languages and Applied Technologies, Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Amancio will be at work on the book-length study *Modernisms: the painting of Arthur Timotheo da Costa.*
- **Asale Angel-Ajani** is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and in the Department of English at City College New York. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Angel-Ajani will be at work on the narrative nonfiction *Starlings in Winter​: The African American Women at the Center of the Russian Revolution 1900 to 19​35.*
- **David Bindman** is the Emeritus Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art at University College London. In residence as the Image of the Black Archive & Library Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Bindman will co-edit the volumes *The Image of the European in African Art* and *The Image of Nubia,* with the second serving as the final volume of *the Image of the Black in Western Art series.*
- **Phoebe Braithwaite** is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the English Department at Harvard University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Braithwaite will be at work on developing her dissertation *Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life: The Life and Work of Stuart Hall* into a book-length project.
- **Jordan T. Camp** is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. In residence as a Stuart Hall Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Camp will be at work on the book *The Southern Question* which analyzes contemporary nationalist movements in the context of nineteenth-century counterrevolution against labor and freedom struggles.
- **Erwan Dianteill** is University Professor at the Sorbonne (Université Paris Cité), Paris. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Dianteill will be at work on a book-length comparative study of Ifa based on the teachings of master Babalawo Aristide Falola.
- **Rita Freed is Chair Emerita of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Boston MFA.  In residence as a Du Bois Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Freed will co-edit *The Image of Nubia*, a book-length study of Nubian history and material cultures which will serve as the final volume of *The Image of the Black in Western Art* series.
- **Itzel Aurora Garcia** is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. In residence as the Edmond & Lily Safra/Hutchins Center Joint Fellow-in-Residence for the 2024-2025 academic year, Garcia will be at work on the book-length project *Police Authority* which argues that in the case of U.S. policing institutions, the obligation to obey law enforcement are not necessarily justified by the obligation to obey the law.
- **Claudia Stella Valeria Geremia** earned her PhD in Historical Studies from the University of Florence and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Fall 2024 semester, Geremia will be at work on the new project *Enslaved African Women, Knowledge and Material Culture in the Middle Atlantic (1500s-1800s)* which focuses on the circulation of material and immaterial cultures of enslaved African women in a wide area of the Middle Atlantic, that is, in Africa, Europe and the Americas.
- **Sharon Harley** is Professor of African American Studies the University of Maryland. In residence as a Du Bois Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Harley will be writing *Nannie Helen Burroughs' Critique of American Democracy and the Mobilization of Black Women Voters*, a book-length study of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century prominent historical figure and her views on American democracy.
- **Kevin Holt** is Assistant Professor of Music and Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Holt will be at work on his project *I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music* which argues for crunk and other body/movement-centered Southern hip-hop music styles as performed responses to the policing of black youth in public spaces.
- **Selina Lai-Henderson** is Associate Prof, American Literature & History at Duke Kunshan University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Lai-Henderson will be at work on *“You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Afro-Asian Imaginaries and Crossings*, a book-length study of compelling and competing visions of Afro-Asian engagement that Langston Hughes, Mu Shiying, Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison inspired.
- **Vuyiswa Thembelihle Lupuwana** is Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. In residence as a Mandela Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Lupuwana will be at work on the book *Archaeology Goes to the Cinema: Perceptions of African and Civilization through the Filmic Lens.*
- **Charles Martin** is a Distinguished Scholar of Comparative Literature. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Martin will be at work on *Optical Thinking* a book of photographs and texts that emphasize imagination, contemplation, observation, architecture, locations and people known and unknown.
- **Adeline Masquelier** is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Masquelier will be at work on *Girling Development in Niger*, a book that documents how in the aftermath of economic reforms that gutted public education in the 1990s, girls’ education in Niger has been repurposed as a means of positioning girls as the vanguard of a new economic order.
- **Tracy McMullen** is Associate Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, McMullen will be at work on *The Courage to Hear: Jazz Traditions and the Price of the Ticket,* a book-length study which argues that a Euro-American jazz lineage developed separately from an African American jazz tradition.
- **James G. McNally** is a cultural historian and rap critic. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, McNally will be at work on *Long Island Rap Renaissance*, a book-length study of the interconnections of race, class, and geography in the era-defining explosion of rap music from New York’s Black suburbia in the late 1980s.
- **Terri Ochiagha** is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at The University of Edinburgh. In residence as McMillan-Stewart Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Ochiagha will be at work on *Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads*, the first full-length biography of the African author.
- **Martha H. Patterson** is Professor of English at McKendree University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2025 term, Patterson will be at work on two book-length projects: an alternative history of the Chicago Black Renaissance and a crossover popular history of the trope of the New Negro.
- **Edward Widmer** is Distinguished Lecturer and Director of Humanities Lab, Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year, Widmer will be at work on the project *A Database of Early African and African-American Music.*
- **Chad Williams** is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. In residence as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Williams will be at work on *Toward a Biography of Black Studies,* a book-length history of the creation and innovation of Black Studies as part of a larger story of Black people determining to reshape America and the world.
- **Suraj Yengde** is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Oxford. In residence as a Hutchins Fellow for the Fall 2024 term, Yengde is at work on two projects: *Caste: A New History of the World* and a dissertation tracing the intellectual history of race and caste.