The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Announces its Fourteenth 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 2026-2027 class of fellows.

“We are happy to welcome our next cohort of W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” says Gates. “We look forward to the new fellows and their exceptional scholarly and creative work next academic year. Sports in Black communities, Black mothering, expressive practices of grief and loss, a biography of John Hope Franklin, the last slave ship to Brazil, Afro-Filipina aesthetics and solidarities, Afro-Asian architecture and environmental justice, an audio series on corporal punishment, Brazilian Hip Hop and the Black Atlantic, and Black women’s sculptural practices as well as films on Paul Robeson, on 19th-century African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington, and on a legendary gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries are among the exciting projects that the 2026-2027 class of fellows will bring to the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”

The twenty 2026-2027 W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:

Ben Carrington is Associate Professor of Journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. In residence as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2027 term, Carrington will be at work on Black Skin, White Flannels: Culture, Identity and Sport, which seeks to find sociological answers to the significance of sports within Black communities.
Charles Blow is a writer, journalist, and former Opinion columnist for The New York Times. In residence as the Langston Hughes Fellow for Fall 2026 term, Blow will be at work on two book-length projects.
Rita Freed is John F. Cogan Jr. and Mary L. Cornille Chair Emerita of the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In residence as an Image of the Black Archive and Library Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Freed will be at work on Image of Nubia, part of the Image of the Black in Western Art series.
Tao Leigh Goffe is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of Earth and Environmental Studies at Hunter College. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Goffe will be at work on Black Milk: The Politics of Mothering Beyond the Plantation, which examines Black mothering as a site of political theory, historical memory, and futurity across the Black Atlantic and its diasporas.
Hazim Hardeman is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow during the 2026-2027 academic year, Hardeman will be at work on the dissertation Ghetto Adornments: Grief and Poetics in the Black Underclass, which is a formal reading of the expressive practices circulating around grief and loss primarily among young people in the Black underclass.
Lee Hawkins is an audio series creator, host, and co-executor producer at American Public Media Group. In residence as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Hawkins will be at work on Learning Under Threat: Corporal Punishment and Black Children in the Classroom, a long-form narrative audio investigation that reconnects discipline records to adult lives and explores how corporal punishment is administered, defended and normalized inside schools today.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. In residence as a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow for the Fall 2026 term, Higginbotham will be at work on John Hope Franklin and the Weapon of History, a biography of Franklin that reveals the ways historical narratives function as “intangible weapons.”
Yuko Miki is Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latine Studies at Fordham University. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Miki will be at work on Kalunga: The Story of the Last Slave Ship to Brazil, which, spanning four continents over 170 years, narrates the history of the last slave ship to Brazil and stories of the Africans held captive in its hold.
Togara Muzanenhamo is an award-winning poet. In residence as a James D. Manyika Fellow for the Spring 2027 term, Muzanenhamo will be at work on Sentinels: African Lighthouses and Coastal Histories, a book-length poetry collection that explores Africa’s coasts through the history and symbolism of the continent’s lighthouses. There will be thirty-nine poems set in every coastal country and island state in Africa, with each poem anchored by a specific lighthouse as its central figure or backdrop.
Jewel Pereyra is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Society of Fellows at Boston University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Pereyra will be at work on Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Kinship Networks and Relational Performance, which intervenes in scholarship on Afro-Asian military solidarities, social movements, and musical collaborations by amplifying minor figures of Black and Filipino America and their intertwined performance genealogies and creative modalities across the long twentieth century.
Ebonie Pollock is a doctoral candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Pollock will be at work on the dissertation Gold Would Not Be Too Precious a Medium: The Material and Memory of Black American Women's Modern Figurative Sculpture, which probes the intersection of Black women sculptors’ material conditions and material strategies and focuses on alternative, unrealized, and non-extant material dimensions of Black women’s sculpture that fall outside the purview of traditional scholarly studies.
Jean-Frédéric Schaub is Directeur d'études at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). In residence as a McMillan-Stewart Fellow for the Fall 2026 term, Schaub will be at work on White Ethiopian Women and Successful Africans in Slave Societies: Western Aversion to Racial Hybridity and False Hopes of Emancipation, which focuses on two key tropes of Black people in Europe and its colonies during the early modern period: the metamorphosis of humans and the framing of certain Black achievements as miraculous.
Maya Shipman, professionally known as Suzi Analogue, is the inaugural Professor of Hip-Hop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Shipman will be at work on By Any Meanz Sonically, a research-driven creative project that examines Hip Hop as a living archive, centered on Black women’s sonic practices as critical to the genre’s historical development and contemporary innovation.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is Associate Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Siddiqi will be at work on Ecologies of the Past, which is an intellectual history of environmental justice, social and political imagination, and critical heritage practice, following the work of art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier and architect Minnette de Silva, Sri Lankan sisters who advanced pan-Asian and Afro-Asian discourses in architecture, the arts, and culture.
Mariana S. Vieira is an award-winning recording artist, lyricist, and performer. Known professionally as Ladybug Mecca, she was a founding member of the influential Hip Hop trio, Digable Planets. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Vieira will be at work on Sounding Black Brazil: Rhythm, Language, and the Politics of Hip-hop, which is both an experimental sonic documentary and a book project that traces the history, aesthetics, and political force of Brazilian Hip Hop within a broader Black Atlantic framework.
Daniel G. Williams is Professor of Literature at Swansea University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Fall 2026 term, Williams will be at work on On the Margins of 'Man': The Particularist Universalism of Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and Raymond Williams, which investigates how universal ideas of human dignity, freedom, and equality can be sustained without erasing the particular cultural, racial, and national contexts in which people live.
Oliver Wunsch is Associate Professor of Art History at Boston College. In residence as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year, Wunsch will be at work on Aesthetic Redemption: Art, Race, and Secular Salvation in Eighteenth-Century France, which examines how Enlightenment aesthetics redefined theological concepts of grace and redemption through depictions of Black subjects.

The following are the Black Film Project Fellows in Residence for the 2026-2027 academic year:

Emmy, Guggenheim, and Sundance award-winning filmmaker Michèle Stephenson and her partner Joe Brewster co-founded Rada Studio, creating fiction films, documentaries, XR installations, and books. Through a Black Atlantic lens, they explore resistance, healing, and Black diasporic experiences. Their works include Black Girls Play, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and True North. For the fellowship project, Stephenson along with Brewster will be at work on a documentary on the life and legacy of Paul Robeson.
Anne de Mare is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Media and Journalism Grant. Anne de Mare produced and edited Once Upon a Time in Harlem (2026), a documentary based on archival footage of a legendary gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries filmed by William Greaves in 1972 and directed by his son David Greaves. For the fellowship project, De Mare will be at work on developing an audio-visual archive of the Greaves Harlem footage.
Mamadou Dia is a Senegalese filmmaker whose work explores politics, religion, and memory through intimate stories rooted in his community. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital Fellow, his debut feature, Baamum Nafi (2019), won the Best First Feature Award at Locarno and was Senegal’s official Oscar entry. Dia’s second feature, Demba (2024), premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. For the fellowship project, Dia will be at work on his third feature, Augustus, inspired by the life of 19th-century African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington.