Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
She is the author of Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory).
Her article “Intimate Justice, Political Obligation and the Dark Ghetto” (Signs, 2014) was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Okin-Young Award, which recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal in 2014. She was the 2017-2018 Ralph E. and Doris M. Hansmann Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Political Studies at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2009-2012. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
Her current manuscript, The Labors of Resurrection: Women, “Death Work” and Re/Making the Black Counterpublic Sphere, which examines Black Femicide and how Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Margaret Prescod and others have confronted disproportionate black deaths and made transformative interventions into the public sphere regarding those deaths.
Minkah Makalani is Director of the Center for Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
He works in intellectual history, the Black radical tradition, black political thought, Black Power and social movements in the Caribbean and U.S. Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, he was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin, and at Rutgers University. Makalani is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (UNC Press, 2011), and co- editor (with Davarian Baldwin) of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minnesota, 2014).
His articles have appeared in such scholarly publications as The Journal of African American History, Souls, Small Axe, Social Text, and South Atlantic Quarterly, and the collections Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (Duke, 2018), Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol (Columbia, 2018), Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History (Oxford, 2016), Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective (Mississippi, 2017), Race Struggles (Illinois, 2009), and Whiteout: The Continuing Significance of Racism (Routledge, 2003). He has also written for such popular publications as The New Yorker, New York Times, Slate, and Ebony.
Makalani is currently at work on two projects. Calypso Conquered the World: C.L.R. James and the Politically Unimaginable in Trinidad, examines C. L. R. James’s return to Trinidad and his work on West Indies Federation and his thinking about the role of art in democracy in the decolonizing world; and Words Past the Margin: Black Thinking Through the Impossible, which explores streams of black political imagination and what he terms the politically unimaginable.
Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, where she teaches courses on racial justice, black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Her current book, Black Grief/White Grievance: Democracy and the Problem of Political Loss, is forthcoming in 2023 from Princeton University Press. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Megan Ming Francis is the G. Alan and Barbara Delsman Associate Professor of Political Science and an Associate Professor of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington.
During the 2021-22 academic year, she is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and a Racial Justice Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. Francis specializes in the study of American politics, with broad interests in criminal punishment, Black political activism, philanthropy, and the post-civil war South. She is the author of the award winning book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State.
She is currently working on two book projects: (1) The Crimes of Capitalism examines the role of the criminal punishment system in the rebuilding of southern political and economic power after the Civil War and (2) How to Fund a Movement examines the history and future of philanthropy’s complicated relationship with social movements. In addition, her research and commentary have been featured in numerous academic and public outlets, including a popular TED talk.
Francis is a proud alumnus of Seattle Public Schools, Rice University in Houston, and Princeton University where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics.
Robbie Shilliam researches the political and intellectual complicities of colonialism and race in the global order. He is co-editor of the Rowman & Littlefield book series, Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Question. Robbie was a co-founder of the Colonial/Postcolonial/Decolonial working group of the British International Studies Association and is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association.
Over the past six years, Robbie has co-curated with community intellectuals and elders a series of exhibitions–in Ethiopia, Jamaica and the UK–which have brought to light the histories and significance of the Rastafari movement for contemporary politics. Based on original, primary research in British imperial and postcolonial history, this work now enjoys an online presence as a teaching aid: www.rastafari-in-motion.org. Robbie also works with Iniversal Development of Rastafari (IDOR) to retrieve histories of the Rastafari presence in Baltimore and Washington DC.
Currently, Robbie is working on two strands of inquiry: firstly, a collective project to rethink the discipline of Political Science as to expose its abiding racial logics, and, alternatively, to retrieve and expand the anti-racist ethos of some of its less canonized practitioners; secondly, a critical consideration of the "free thinkers" of the Black radical tradition - especially Rastafari intellectuals - and their contributions to what we in academia call "political economy".
Sherwin K. Bryant is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History. As an historian of colonial Afro-Latin America and the Atlantic/Pacific Worlds, Bryant works at the intersections of cultural, legal, social history and political economy, with an emphasis upon Black life in the Kingdoms of New Granada and Quito (what is now modern Colombia and Ecuador).
With regard to comparative slavery studies, his work addresses the need to conceptualize early modern histories of slavery, freedom, and race as colonial practices of governance. In addition, Bryant’s research expands the diasporic paradigm from the Atlantic to the Pacific by specializing in the history of the Afro-Andes and the development of "Black Pacific" subjectivities.
Dr. Bryant's book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), offers the first serious treatment in English of slavery and slave life in colonial Quito. By investigating just how and why slavery mattered in a colony that featured a relatively smaller slave population (no more than 15,000), Rivers of Gold challenges the narrower conceptualization of slavery as primarily an economic demand. Instead, Rivers of Gold argues slavery performed a fundamental dimension of governance as an extension of imperial power for colonial Spanish America.
Dr. Bryant is currently working on two new book-length projects. The first charts the history of Black subjectivities along Colombia and Ecuador’s Pacific littoral while the second develops a history of slave life within the contraband slave routes that ran through Panama and New Granada before the era of free trade. He interrogates these histories through legal sources with an eye towards colonial legal cultures and Black interiority, or the ways that Africans and their descendants crafted lives that were circumscribed within the racial order, yet lived to some degree without regard for the broader power matrix.
Dr. Bryant has held postdoctoral fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Alice Berlin Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University and has been both a Fulbright and Ford Fellow. He teaches courses on the histories of colonial Latin America, the Early Modern African Diaspora, comparative slavery, and the politics of Afro-Latin America since 1800.
Melanye Price is an Endowed Professor of Political Science at Prairie View A&M University and the inaugural director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice. Dr. Price also serves as principal investigator for the university’s African American Studies Initiative, which is funded by grants and gifts from the Mellon Foundation. Her research and teaching interests include black politics, public opinion, political rhetoric and social movements.
Price is the author of two books: The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) and Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009). The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race examines the strategic ways President Obama used race to deflect negative racial attitudes and engage with a large cross-section of voters. Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion examines contemporary support for Black Nationalism. Price’s latest project, Mountaintop Removal: Martin Luther King, Trump and the Racial Mountain, uses MLK’s “Mountaintop Speech” as a lens for understanding the rise of Donald Trump and the 2016 election. Price completed her B.A. (magna cum laude) in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science at The Ohio State University. Before coming to Prairie View, Price was an associate professor of Africana studies and political science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
In 2017, Price served as the Black History Month lecturer for the U.S. Embassy in Germany, where she lectured at universities and community organizations across the country about the meaning of Barack Obama’s presidency. She has also done major keynotes and lectures at universities and conferences across the U.S. In 2019, Price received Prairie View A&M University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor an alumni can receive.
Price is a regular contributor for The New York Times Opinion section and has also done political commentary for MSNBC, CNN, Ms. Magazine, Elle Magazine and National Public Radio. She was also a contributor to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, “Obama: Through the Fire,” which aired on BET.
Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. She first taught at Bennington College for the MATSL program in 2003, and has since taught at Barnard College, the Bard Prison Initiative, and Columbia University where she was also invited as a Visiting Scholar (2002-2003) and International Visiting Professor (Mellon Arts Project, Fall 2022).
A well published specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research, and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021). This book received the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.
Based in France, Soumahoro served as an appointed member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery from 2013 to 2016. She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for the 2016-2017 academic year and returns for 2022-2023.
Brittney Cooper is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University.
She is author of the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. She is also author of the award-winning Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, co-author of Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood and co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection. Dr. Cooper is also co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Her most recent book is Stand Up!: Ten Mighty Women Who Made A Change.
She is a contributing writer for The Cut/NewYork Magazine and a frequent commentator on MSNBC. Her work has been featured in Time Magazine, the New York Times, Essence Magazine and many others.
Melynda Price is the William L. Matthews, Jr. Professor of Law and the John and Joan Gaines Professor of Humanities. Since 2018, she has been the Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities. The Gaines Center is devoted to cultivating an appreciation of the humanities among students and faculty and embraces varied paths of knowledge.
In 2017, she was named University Research Professor, which is awarded by the University of Kentucky to faculty for outstanding research achievements. From 2012 to 2017, Professor Price was the Director of the African American and Africana Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is an affiliated faculty member in the African American and Africana Studies Program and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Professor Price is the author of At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her work has been published in both peer- reviewed social science and law journal, newspapers and literary journals. In addition to her published research, she is a member of the UNITed in Racial Equity (UNITE) Research Priority Advisory Board and has served as a panel reviewer for multiple national research foundations.
Professor Price joined the UK College of Law as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2006 after completing the doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was awarded the 2007 Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. In addition to her degree in political science, she also earned a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law in 2002. While at the University of Texas, she was a member of the Texas International Law Journal and was awarded both the University of Texas Coop Award for Public Interest Law and the Baron and Budd Scholarship for Public Interest Law. She completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at Prairie View A&M University in 1995.
Professor Price’s research focuses on race, gender and citizenship, the politics of punishment and the role of law in the politics of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and at its borders. In 2008, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her host institution was the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law. She was a 2016-2017 fellow in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University.
Deva Woodly is an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School. A former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (2012-2013), she is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015). Her research covers a variety of topics, from media & communication, to social movements, race and imagination, and political understandings of economics. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political understandings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Her process of inquiry is inductive, moving from concrete, real-world conditions to the conceptual implications of those realities. In all cases, she centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities. Her current book projects are #BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, an examination of the ways that social movements re-politicize public life in times of political despair and What We Talk About When We Talk About the Economy, a broad investigation of American economic discourse and its implications for politics and policy in the post-Great Recession era.
The event was co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt Dean’s Office, Vanderbilt’s Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy Department, the Johns Hopkins Center for Africana Studies, and the Margeurite Casey Foundation
Special thanks to Professor Naa Oyo A. Kwate for location, translation and logistical support.
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