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 2023-2024 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 extraordinary scholarly and artistic work that advances interdisciplinary inquiry into the histories of Africa and its diasporas and that innovatively addresses current pressing concerns, frequently in global contexts. Student protest in Kenya; music, Black interiority, and confrontation with harm; British visual culture, orientalism, and enslaved, American mixed-race beauty; youth agency, education, and hiphop literacy; Black culture and crosscurrents between the Caribbean and the United States; reparation and Black pain; race, caste, and world history; digital activism and gendered violence in South Africa; and African American women and marginalized Black memorial landscapes are among the important projects which the next class of fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”
The twenty-two 2023-2024 W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:
• Gbemisola Abiola, Social Anthropology; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the postdoc fellowship project When 'Japá' Meets‘Blaxxit': A Study of the Continuum of Black Migration.
• Riana Elyse Anderson, Psychology and Public health, University of Michigan; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Reparation of the Mind: Black Healing from Racial Pain.
• Mia L. Bagneris, Art History, Tulane University; in residence for Fall 2023 with the fellowship project Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art and Culture, c. 1865-1900.
• David Bindman, Art History, University College London; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Editing the Image of the European in African Art.
• Charity Clay, Sociology, Xavier University of Louisiana; in residence for Spring 2024 with the fellowship project Systemic Police Terrorism: A Conceptual Framework.
• Ana Paula Batista da Silva Cruz, Afro-Latin American History; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the postdoc fellowship project Black Families and Diasporic Experience: Black Associativism, Land Struggles, and Worlds of Work in the Vale do Iguape, Recôncavo da Bahia (Brazil).
• Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, History, The University of Texas at San Antonio; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project The Cuban Slave Trade: An Atlantic History.
• Gregg Hecimovich, Literary Studies, Furman University; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project The Columbia Seven: The Life and Times of the Zealy Daguerreotypes.
• DaMaris Hill, Creative Writing, University of Kentucky, in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Blood Bible: An American History.
• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Education, Rutgers University, in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year, with the fellowship project Transforming Schools and Communities through Critical Hip Hop Literacies: An Exploration of Youth Agency and Critical Consciousness in Hip Hop Education.
• Gavaza Maluleke, Political Studies, University of Cape Town; in residence for Fall 2023 with the fellowship project Digital Activism against Gendered Violence.
• James McNally, Cultural History; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the postdoc fellowship project The Long Island Rap Renaissance: Hip-Hop's Suburban Turn and America's Changing Black Middle Class, 1986-1993.
• Kenda Mutongi, History, MIT; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Burning Down the School: A History of Student Protest in Kenya.
• Jak Peake, Literary Studies, University of Essex; in residence for Spring 2024 with the fellowship project Black Routes, American Waves and Caribbean Undercurrents, 1889-1931.
• Michael Rain, Storytelling and Technology, ENODI; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Storytelling and Technology to Expand the World’s Perception of Diverse Communities. Joint fellow with the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
• Shana Redmond, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; in residence for Fall 2023 with the fellowship project Dark Prelude: Black Life Before Mourning.
• Carla Brito Sousa Ribeiro, Anthropology, University of São Paulo; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Implied Pasts, Desired Futures: African and Afro-diasporic Tourists in Dakar.
• Britt Rusert, Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project The Afric-American Picture Gallery: Imagining Black Art, circa 1859.
• Alexandria Russell, History; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the postdoc fellowship project Mapping Black Women Legacies: Reckoning with Erasure & Engaging Public Audiences.
• Karin Stanford, Political Science and Africana Studies, California State University, Northridge; in residence for Spring 2024 with the fellowship project Jonathan Jackson, Man-Child at the Revolution: The Marin County Courthouse Tragedy that Turned Civil Rights into Social Justice.
• Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Transatlantic History and Culture, University of Augsburg; in residence for Fall 2023 with the fellowship project A Voice for the Voiceless: Marian Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund.
• Suraj Yengde, History, University of Oxford; in residence for the 2023-2024 academic year with the fellowship project Caste Coloniality: Dalit, Black, and the New Politics of the Twenty-first Century.