AAS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- WGSS Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Women 's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies ( Ph.D., New York University )
Alexandra St Tellien is a Haitian PhD student of African American Studies at Emory University and is both a Woodruff Fellow and Centennial Scholar. She is from Gonaïves, Haiti and a Manbo (Vodou priestess) in northern Vodou's Tcha-Tcha/Deka Lineage. With a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Florida and an M.A. in Anthropology (linguistic) from Georgia State University, her areas of interest are Indigenous African and African heritage religious traditions at the intersection of language, culture, and semiotics and African derived ritual and sacred languages and communications as a body of knowledge. Alexandra's doctoral research, supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow Program (NSF GRFP), investigates Langaj (Haitian Vodou ritual language) as a language of devotion that connects Vodouvi (devotees) to various West and Central African communities and lineages in deep and meaningful ways. Her work aims to powerfully narrate the African legacies and cultures rooted in Vodou and charge the African Diaspora with the mission of Sankɔfa.
Between 2021-2022, Alexandra was a Fulbright U.S. Student in Grand-Bassam, Côte d'Ivoire. Alexandra also served as a Curatorial Research Assistant Intern at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. She currently serves as a Junior Council Member for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou, and a Fulbright U.S. Student Alumni Ambassador.
Job Titles:
- Alix Chapman Assistant Professor of African American Studies
- Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University
Alix Chapman is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. He received his BS from Washington State University and his MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches courses on sexuality and gender in the African Diasporic, Black Queer Studies, as well as courses on black radical aesthetics in music and performance.
Chapman's manuscript in progress is entitled Raising the Bottom: New Orleans, Sissy Bounce, and the afterlife of Katrina. Bounce music is a form of hip hop that emerged in New Orleans public housing projects in the 1990s. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and mass displacement of Black New Orleans, queer performers, locally referred to as sissies, became prominent recording artists and icons of hope.
His most recent peer-reviewed article, "Limbologics: The Black Queer Art of Uncertainty," appears in liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (April 2023). This essay argues that limbo is a chronic aspect of Black queer life and thus the tools this community has developed in responding to these experiences might offer solutions for dealing with the acceleration of disaster in the twenty-first century.
As a former professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College, Chapman held the first tenure track appointment dedicated to Black Queer Studies at a historically Black college or university and helped fashion the first trans inclusive admissions policy at an HBCU. Chapman has contributed to numerous transnational anti-war and anti-global capitalist demonstrations as a musician and performance artist.
Job Titles:
- Professor of History and Co - Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship ( Ph.D., Yale University )
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Sociology ( Ph.D., Indiana University )
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Political Science ( Ph.D., Yale University )
Job Titles:
- Professor of Humanities at Emory University
- Professor of Humanities in African American Studies and English
- Valerie Babb Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities in African American Studies and English
Valerie Babb is Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University. She holds a joint appointment in the departments of African American Studies and English. She received her BA from Queens College, City University of New York and her MA and PhD, from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Her most recent book is The Book Of James: The Power, Politics, and Passion of LeBron. Among her other publications are A History of the African American Novel and Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. She co-authored the book Black Georgetown Remembered, and developed and produced the video by the same name. From 2000-2010 she was editor of the Langston Hughes Review. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is the recipient of a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship in American Studies. She has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad and presented a Distinguished W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
Babb was co-PI for a one million-dollar Mellon Foundation grant, "Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District." The Penn Center, a historic organization that sits on the campus of what was once the Penn School, one of the nation's first schools for formerly enslaved people, was the site of a study-away course funded by the grant in which students from area universities engaged with members of the Gullah Geechee communities and artists, in order to learn more about Sea Islands history, culture, and efforts to preserve the land and legacies of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.
Professor Babb teaches courses in African American literature, American literature, Early Black Print Culture, and constructions of race in the United States. She is the recipient of a UGA NAACP Mary McLeod Bethune Image Award for teaching and mentoring. She is a strong believer in interdisciplinary learning and getting students outside the classroom whenever possible.
Publications
Publications
Selected Books:
A History of the African American Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Courses
African American Novels and Popular Culture
Job Titles:
- Angelique Anderson Undergraduate Program Coordinator
- Program Coordinator for Undergraduate Studies
- Undergraduate Program Coordinator
Angelique Anderson currently serves as the Program Coordinator for Undergraduate Studies in the African American Studies department. She received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Phoenix. Prior to joining the staff, Angelique worked in Gwinnett County School District as a Parent Outreach Liaison where she implemented activities and programs for parents in Title 1 schools to assist them in helping their children improve their academic achievement and becoming active participants in the education of their children.
In her spare time, Angelique spearheads the youth group, "Poetic Leaders" where she uses poetry, music, dance and theatrical performances to help develop and enhance self-confidence and public speaking skills in school aged children.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology
- Bayo Holsey Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology Interim Director of Graduate Studies
Bayo Holsey's research and writing address public culture and history in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize and the Toyin Falola Africa book award. Currently, she is completing a second book entitled "Tyrannies of Freedom: Race, Power, and the Fictions of Late Capitalism." Dr. Holsey received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and previously taught in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
Job Titles:
- Acting Associate Professor of African American Studies
- Bettina Judd Acting Associate Professor of African American Studies
Bettina Judd received her BA in Comparative Women's Studies and English from Spelman College and her MA and PhD in Women's Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2023) argues that Black women's creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls "feelin."
Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her article, "Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger" won Feminist Studies' 2019 Claire G. Moses Award for the Most Theoretically Innovative Article published in the journal that year. Her collection of poems titled patient. (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women, won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in African American Studies
- Associate Professor of African American Studies
- Calvin Warren Associate Professor of African American Studies
Calvin Warren is an Associate Professor in African American Studies. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University. Warren's research interests are in the area of Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018).
He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies. He has published articles in various journals, including CR: New Centennial Review, GLQ, TSQ, and Nineteenth Century Context.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences ( Rollins School of Public Health ) and African American Studies
Chandra L. Ford joins the Department of African American Studies from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California Los Angeles, where she served as professor of community health sciences and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health. Much of her work is dedicated to studying the impacts of racism and inequities on public health and supporting interdisciplinary research to prevent and combat the consequences of racism.
She is lead editor of "Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional," which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2020 by the American Library Association's Choice magazine. A dynamic and in-demand speaker, teacher and author, Ford's contributions to public scholarship are profound. Her eminence has been recognized by a number of accolades, including: the 2019 Paul Cornely Award from the Health Activist Dinner group; the 2020 Wade Hampton Frost Award from the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Black Women Physicians; a TrueHero Award from TruEvolution; and the 2023 Russell G. Mawby "People Helping People" Award from the Alliance of Leadership Fellows.
Chandra Ford is a leading expert on racism and its health impacts. Accolades for her research include the 2020 Wade Hampton Frost Award from the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Black Women Physicians. Walter Rucker's pathbreaking research in early Atlantic African Diaspora and African American history includes Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (2015). Dr. Rucker also served as co-chair of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, and he is the founding Director of Graduate Studies in our department. Last year, we had the pleasure of welcoming our inaugural cohort of doctoral students. Prospective graduate students should contact Dr. Rucker at wrucker@emory.edu. Dianne Stewart is a renowned scholar of African-heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. Her pioneering works include Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage (2020), Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume 2, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (2022). Dr. Stewart is also the faculty coordinator for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Program Coordinator for the Department of African American Studies
Charles E. Jackson currently serves as the graduate program coordinator for the Department of African American Studies. He earned his bachelor's degree in political science and master's degree in public administration from the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. His research interests include African and African American history, U.S. constitutional law, sustainable governance, and climate change's impact on growth management.
Before arriving to Emory, Charles spent the last 23 years as the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship program manager for the Florida Education Fund (FEF). In that role, Charles helped shepherd hundreds of African American and Hispanic PhD students through their doctoral programs by administering financial, moral, developmental, and professional support critical for their matriculation and post-doctoral success. Prior to his tenure with the FEF, Charles worked as a legislative aide in the Florida State Senate promulgating legislative priorities and managing constituent services.
Charles is married with two adult children. He enjoys time with family. Charles is also an avid video gamer, unashamed science fiction geek, and a well-informed political aficionado.
Job Titles:
- Charles Jackson Graduate Program Coordinator
- Graduate Program Coordinator
Charles E. Jackson currently serves as the graduate program coordinator for the Department of African American Studies. He earned his bachelor's degree in political science and master's degree in public administration from the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. His research interests include African and African American history, U.S. constitutional law, sustainable governance, and climate change's impact on growth management.
Before arriving to Emory, Charles spent the last 23 years as the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship program manager for the Florida Education Fund (FEF). In that role, Charles helped shepherd hundreds of African American and Hispanic PhD students through their doctoral programs by administering financial, moral, developmental, and professional support critical for their matriculation and post-doctoral success. Prior to his tenure with the FEF, Charles worked as a legislative aide in the Florida State Senate promulgating legislative priorities and managing constituent services.
Charles is married with two adult children. He enjoys time with family. Charles is also an avid video gamer, unashamed science fiction geek, and a well-informed political aficionado.
Job Titles:
- Charles Jackson Graduate Program Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of African American Studies
Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Black Women's History, Civil Rights History, and the History of Black Education. She received her BA (cum laude) in History and Public Policy from Duke University and a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Before coming to Emory, she was an Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University.
Professor Sanders is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016 and A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. A Chance for Change won the 2017 Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the 2017 New Scholar's Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. A Chance for Change was also a finalist for the 2016 Hooks National Book Award. Professor Sanders' work can also be found in many of the leading history journals, including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History.
Professor Sanders is the recipient of a host of fellowships and prizes. These honors include the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American Historians, an Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Anthony Kaye Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2021, the American Historical Association awarded her its Equity Award.
Professor Sanders currently serves as the Assistant Editor of the Journal of African American History.
Crystal Sanders is an award-winning historian whose groundbreaking book, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle (2016), won the 2017 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Research Association and the 2017 New Scholar's Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. Her new book A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, will be available October 2024. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is a luminous scholar in African American material and visual culture. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities faculty participant and she curated the award-winning exhibit, "Framing Shadows: Portraits of African American Nannies with White children from the Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection." Calvin Warren's evocative scholarship which spans Continental Philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology, is evidenced in his book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). Dr. Warren also serves as a faculty mentor for theoretical engagement for Emory's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religion and African American Studies
Dianne Marie Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, specializing in African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Hartford, CT, USA. She obtained her B.A. degree from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, her M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School, and her Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she studied with well-known scholars such as Delores Williams, James Washington and her advisor James Cone. Dr. Stewart joined Emory's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and teaches courses in the graduate and undergraduate programs.
Dr. Stewart's research and teaching interests cover a wide range of topics under the umbrella of Africana religions with attention to religious thought and practices of African-descended people in the Anglophone Caribbean and the United States; womanist approaches to religion and society; theory and method in Africana religious studies; and the impact of African civilizations upon religious formation in the African diaspora. Dr. Stewart's first monograph, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005), offers a historically and ethnographically grounded theological analysis of the motif of liberation in Jamaica's African heritage religious cultures from the 18 th to the 21 st century.
Inspired by her pedagogical investment in Black love studies and her widely celebrated courses, The Power of Black Self-Love, (co-taught with Dr. Donna Troka), Black Love and Black Women, Black Love and the Pursuit of Happiness, Dr. Stewart published Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage (Seal Press in 2020) to inspire a new national conversation about love in the African American experience. Her public scholarship and interviews on the subject of Black love, partnership and marriage have also been published in The Washington Post, Oprah Daily and disseminated through prominent media outlets such as APM's Marketplace, KBLA Talk's Tavis Smiley, Ebony, TheGrio, The Root and WGBH's Basic Black.
Dr. Stewart's third monograph (Duke University Press, 2022) is part of a two-volume project with Dr. Tracey Hucks. Obeah, Orisa and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination, examines the Yoruba-Orisa religious culture as a meaning-making tradition in the afterlives of slavery and colonialism with attention to the affective mode of religious apprehension, the salience of Africa as a religious symbol, the sacred poetics of Black/Africana religious imagination and the prominence of Africana nations in projects of Black belonging and identity formation in Trinidad and the wider African diaspora. In so doing, the book emphasizes how Orisa spiritual mothers' leadership and collective activism have helped to resituate their tradition from its location on the margins of society (folk religion) to its position alongside other religious traditions such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam at the center of civil society.
Beyond her work in Trinidad and Jamaica, Dr. Stewart has studied and lectured in several African, Latin American, and Caribbean countries, including Nigeria, The Benin Republic, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Bermuda. She spent a year and a half conducting archival and field research as a Fulbright Scholar in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she focused on the history of religions in Central Africa during the slave period and prophetic religious movements in Congo today. Her current book project, Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World, builds upon this research to explore how 18 th-century Kongolese Catholicism inspired the formation of Afro-Protestant institutions among African descendants in the wider 18 th- and 19 th-century Atlantic world. From the southeastern coastal Afro-Methodist/Baptist traveling and seeking rites to the rise of cognate Native Baptist, Revival Zion, and Spiritual Baptist traditions in Jamaica and Trinidad, the book demonstrates how a Kongo Christian heritage lent central ingredients to this African Atlantic terrain of religious exchange and innovation.
Dr. Stewart has won several awards and fellowships over her career at Emory, including the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, Emory College of Arts and Sciences' Distinguished Advising Award, Emory University Laney Graduate School's Eleanor Main Graduate Faculty Mentor Award, a Senior Fellowship at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and an Emory College of Arts and Sciences Chronos Faculty Fellowship. Among her service contributions, Dr. Stewart is most proud of her leadership of Emory's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. This international initiative aims to diversify the academy by helping students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups to earn a Ph.D. degree and secure teaching positions at tertiary institutions across the United States and South Africa. Dr. Stewart has also served on several committees within the American Academy of Religion, and she is a founding co-editor, with Drs. Jacob Olupona and Terrence Johnson, of the Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series at Duke University Press. Its most recent titles include Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality by Todne Thomas, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan by Christopher Tounsel, and Rage and Carnage in the Name of God by Abiodun Alao.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Faculty
- Grace Towns Hamilton Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
Dr. Delores P. Aldridge, EMERITUS (Ph.D. Purdue University) is the Grace Towns Hamilton Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Emory University, the first distinguished chair named for a living African American woman and in African American Studies at a major institution. Dr. Aldridge was the first African American woman faculty member at Emory where she became the founding director of the first Black Studies degree granting program in the South in 1971 which she administered until 1990. In 2003, the Delores P. Aldridge Excellence Awards were inaugurated at Emory. This is one of three awards named for her, another being the Excellence Faculty/Staff Award at one of her alma maters, Clark Atlanta University. And., a third is the Delores P. Aldridge Academic Achievement Award inaugurated in 2010 by the National Black Herstory Taskforce. There are numerous documentaries focusing on her life.
The Phi Beta Kappa trained sociologist and clinical social worker, civil rights activist is the recipient of more than 100 awards including the premier Thomas Jefferson Award (recognizing distinguished service to Emory and to the development of Black/Africana Studies as one of its pioneers) from Emory University with Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev participating in the presentation. Also, the recipient of the Georgia Governors Award in the Humanities for contributions to Georgia, and six teaching awards from Emory including a Great Teacher of the Century Award as well as the Association of Black Sociologists' Teaching, Mentoring and Service Award. And, she was listed in Lisa Birnbach's Guide to American Colleges on three separate occasions as one of Emory's three best teachers. Other awards from national, regional and local professional organizations and institutions have been bestowed upon her including a W.E.B. Du Bois Award from the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists for her scholarship. She is the recipient of the Southern Sociological Society's 2006 Charles S. Johnson Award for an extraordinary career in race and the South and is the recipient the 2010 Cox, Frazier, Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association. She was honored as the unprecedented two term elected president of the National Council for Black Studies and has served as consultant to more than 90 foreign governments, US federal agencies, social agencies, educational institutions and foundations as well as corporate entities, she is author or editor of more than 160 commentaries, monographs, articles and books with emphasis on race, gender, families, social policy, ethnicity, intergroup relations, diversity, and cultural democracy.
While serving on numerous editorial boards including the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, she is a founding member of the book series African Americans in the West, University of Colorado Press (2004). She has guest edited special issues of leading journals in the field including Phylon: Review of Race and Culture, Journal of Black Studies, and Western Journal of Black Studies. One of her first publications, seminal in social stratification, focused on Black Women and the Economic Marketplace: A Battle Unfinished (1974). Another seminal work is entitled Toward Integrating Africana Women into Africana studies (1992). Other publications include: Racial Ethnic (1987); Coping with Conflict: The Natural Resource Agency (1983); Black Male-Female Relationships: A Resource Book (1989); Focusing: Black Male Female Relationships (1991); Leadership for Diversity (1994) and, Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies, co-editor(2000), co-author,Every Black Woman Should Wear A Red Dress ((2003) and editorial author on diversity and cultural democracy in such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune (February 20,1994) and USA Today (May 7, 1984) and had feature stories in numerous dailies including The Atlanta-Constitution Journal and Tampa Tribune. Her most recent works are Our Last Hope: Black Male-Female Relationships in Change (Authorhouse, 2007); Philosophical Perspectives and Theoretical Paradigms In Africana Studies (co-editor) (Washington State University Press, 2007); and, Imagine A World: Pioneering Black Women Sociologists (Academic Press of America,2009,2010).
Professor Aldridge has lectured widely both nationally and internationally. She has served as president of national organizations on four separate occasions including an unprecedented two term presidency of the National Council for Black Studies and a term as president of the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists, Inc. She has also served as chair of the board of several organizations including the International Black Women's Congress. Throughout the course of her career, Dr. Aldridge has moved back and forth between theory and practice in a productive way. As a Merrill postgraduate fellow at the University of Ireland-Dublin, she initiated programs and training institutes in mental health across the country. In the 1960s, she developed social services for the first comprehensive mental health center located in a general hospital in the U.S. A few years later, she served as the first chief administrative officer at the Greater Lafayette Community Centers in Indiana. At the beginning of the 1980s, while on leave at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she became the first sociologist to serve as a policy analyst with the U.S. forest Service. In 2000, she co-founded KESS NSONA Health and Education FOUNDATION and currently serves as its President as well as Vice-Chair of the Dekalb County, Georgia Development Authority which she has represented in China and Africa. She devotes major amounts of time to other community and civic activities, co-chairing the 30th Anniversary Celebration of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta and a charter member of Care International-Atlanta, the first local affiliate of this international service organization.
In the February, 2009 issue of Upscale magazine, Dr. Aldridge was profiled in an article entitled "History in the Making." In this 20th Anniversary of the magazine's existence, there are twenty individuals profiled beginning with President Barack Obama. Upscale states: "Filling the shoes of legendary civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks is no easy feat. Along with other contemporaries, they (those profiled) helped pave the way for many of the changes and rights that we now enjoy. Historic events continue to unfold before our eyes. Last November, we elected our first African-American president-but he's not the only one making strides. Take a close look at President Obama and 19 other achievers who are working hard to create a better tomorrow for the world."
Job Titles:
- Leader
- Pearl Dowe Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
- Professor of Political Science
- Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Dr. Pearl Dowe is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Political Science and African American Studies with a joint appointment between Oxford College and Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She is also currently the vice provost for faculty affairs at Emory University.
Dr. Dowe's most recent research focuses on African American women's political ambition and public leadership. Her manuscript, The Radical Imagination of Black Women: Ambition, Politics, and Power, will be published in fall of 2023 by Oxford University Press. Dr. Dowe's 2020 article ‘Resisting Marginilzation: Black Women's Ambition and Agency,' published in 2020, received the Anna Julia Cooper Best Paper Award from the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics.
In addition to this work, Dowe's published writing includes co-authorship of Remaking the Democratic Party: Lyndon B. Johnson as Native-Son Presidential Candidate (University of Michigan Press: 2016) and editorship of African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy Reflection in the New South (Mercer University Press, 2010). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters throughout her career.
Dr. Dowe is also a leader in the field of political science. She has held leadership roles in national and regional professional associations and is the National Review of Black Politics co-editor.
A Georgia native, Dowe obtained her B.S. from Savannah State University, her M.A. from Georgia Southern University, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Howard University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History ( Ph.D., University of Michigan )
Job Titles:
- Acting Professor of African American Studies
- Erica Armstrong Dunbar Acting Professor of African American Studies
Erica Armstrong Dunbar received her B.A. in History and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her area of expertise centers the lives of eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women who lived in what would become the United States of America. Her work focuses on the history of slavery and freedom, social history, urban history, and women's history. While Dunbar is committed to the production of scholarly literature, she is deeply invested in more public facing work-scholarship that reaches large general audiences through television, film, radio, and podcasts.
Dunbar's first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City was published by Yale University in 2008. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Simon & Schuster) was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a co-winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The young readers version of Never Caught (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster) was published in January 2019. In the fall of 2019, Dunbar published She Came To Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman, an accessible biography of one of the most remarkable social activists of the 19th century. Dunbar's op-eds and essays in outlets such as the New York Times, The Nation, TIME, Essence, and the New York Review of Books, her commentary in media outlets such as CNN and the LA Times, and her appearances in documentaries such as "The Abolitionists" an American Experience production on PBS, the History Channel's biopic of George Washington, Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Black Patriots, and Ken Burns' Benjamin Franklin, place her at the center of America's public history. More recently, Dunbar has expanded her audience by serving as Co-Executive Producer on HBO's hit television series, "The Gilded Age."
From 2019-2022, Dunbar served as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians-the only professional organization focused on Black women's history. From 2011-2018, she served as the inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies
- Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Janeria Easley is an Assistant Professor in the department of African American Studies. She received her B.A in Sociology and English from Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology, with a concentration in Demography, from Princeton University.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University
- Jessica Lynn Stewart Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Jessica Lynn Stewart is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research and teaching focuses on race, place, and political economy; particularly the ways socioeconomic context and race intersect to influence public opinion and policy preferences.
Professor Stewart is the author of Regional Blackness: Diverging African American Views on Racial Progress and Government Assistance, which was published in the National Political Science Review. Her most recent publication, Moving Up, Out, and Across the Country: Regional Differences in Causes of Neighborhood Change and its Effect on African Americans appears in the edited volume, Black Politics in Transition. At present, she is working on a book project inspired by her dissertation.
Tentatively titled, Race, Place, and Progress, it examines how geography and economic restructuring influences American racial progress in the post-Civil Rights Movement era. Professor Stewart is a graduate of Denison University where she earned a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics. She also holds a Master of Science degree in Health Systems Management and completed an administrative fellowship at Mayo Clinic before pursuing a doctorate.
Professor Stewart earned her PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Prior to arriving at Emory, she completed the Anna Julia Cooper Center Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Wake Forest University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History ( Ph.D., Harvard University )
Job Titles:
- Jimmy Carter Professor of History ( Ph.D., Stanford University )
Kali Nicole Gross earned her B.A. from Cornell University in Africana Studies and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies, the Publications Director for the Association of Black Women Historians (2019-2021), and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Her primary research explores Black women's experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system. Her expertise and opinion pieces have been featured in press outlets such as Vanity Fair, TIME, The Root, BBC News, Ebony, HuffPo, Warscapes, The Washington Post, and Jet. She has appeared on ABC, C-Span, NBC, NPR, and other media venues.
Her award-winning books include Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, winner of the 2006 Leticia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, winner of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. Her latest book, co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry, is A Black Women's History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).
Her numerous grants and fellowships include the prestigious Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Scholar-in-Residence, 2007 and 2000, the Ford Foundation, Postdoctoral Fellowship, hosted at Princeton University, 2001 - 2002, and she was selected to be a Public Voices Fellow for The Op-Ed Project, 2014-2015.
She is a dynamic educator, having taught students in housing projects, correctional institutions, and colleges and universities nationwide.
Job Titles:
- Imagining Democracy Lab Program Coordinator
- Kennedy Crawford Imagining Democracy Lab Program Coordinator
- Program Coordinator for the Imagining Democracy Lab
Kennedy serves as the Program Coordinator for the Imagining Democracy Lab under Dr. Carol Anderson and Dr. Bernard Fraga. She graduated from North Carolina A&T State University with her bachelor's degree in Health Services Management in 2024 and plans to pursue a dual master's degree in Library Sciences and Public History within the next year. Kennedy has a great enthusiasm and dedication to public service, as well as the preservation of archives as they are critical conduits for connecting with history.
Before working at Emory University and while obtaining her bachelor's degree, Kennedy spent her free time volunteering with the Atlanta Community Food Bank, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Job Titles:
- Communications Specialist
- Communications Specialist for the Department of African American Studies
- Khalid Johnson Communications Specialist
Khalid Johnson (He/Him) serves as the Communications Specialist for the Department of African American Studies. He received his B.A. in fine art from Young Harris College and his M.F.A. in sequential art from SCAD's Atlanta Campus.
Over his educational career and years since, Khalid has worked across different forms of media from web-development to illustration and cartooning; having taught the latter on a seasonal basis at SCAD's Summer Seminar program. He has a passion for storytelling and brings that to his position as a part of the AAS staff at Emory.
In his free time, Khalid is typically working on comics, or reading them. He volunteers, reviewing comics for the Comics Beat and his interests encompass and extend to liberation both within his work as a cartoonist and outside of it.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of American and African American Studies
- Professor
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is an Associate Professor of American and African American Studies in the department of African American Studies. She received her B.A in English from Oberlin College, her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Brown University and her PhD in American Studies from Boston University. Her research and teaching specialties are: 19 th Century American and African American Women's Literature, Ethnic Stereotypes in Visual and Material Culture, Representations of Race and The Female Body, Race, Gender and Visual Culture, African American Photography and Portraiture, Race, Gender and the American South and The Black Female Body, Beauty and American Culture. Professor Wallace-Sanders is a recipient of Emory's 2014-2015 Associate Professor Completion award.
Professor Wallace-Sanders is currently completing work on a book called "Framing Shadows: Portraits of African American Women with White Children." Ranging from 1850 to 1950, it will be the largest collection of portrait photographs of its kind. These portraits reveal an astonishing and complex intra-racial and inter-generational intimacy between family members and servants, offering innovative and original insights into American family life. In this research project her intention is to foreground formal studio portraits of African American women with the white children of their owners or employers as unique examples of the historically troubling and complicated relationship between African Americans and white Americans; one of domestic service centering on childcare. As the natural sequence to her book Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2007), this new book project represents a shift in her scholarly interests from the cultural representations of "the mammy" as a character to the African American women (and often young girls) whose daily lives were focused on caring for white children. This project takes on the "family with servant" portrait genre as a subject with tremendous possibilities; each individual portrait represents a unique microcosm of power dynamics reflecting race, gender, class, status, and age.
Professor Wallace Sanders taught in the Institute of Liberal Arts from 1999 to 2011 and served as Director of Graduate Studies of the Graduate Program in the Institute of Liberal Arts from 2009 to 2011. This list of her accomplished former students includes: Brittney Cooper (author of Eloquent Rage and Beyond Respectability ), Sheri Davis-Faulkner, Whitney Peoples and Moya Baily(author of Misogynoir Tansformed )who are all Founding Members of the award-winning "Crunk Feminist Collective," Pellom McDaniels, Curator of African American Collections at the Rose Library, Emory University, Donna Troka, the Associate Director for the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Emory University, Janelle Hobson author of Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Stacy Boyd author of Black Men Worshipping: Intersecting Anxieties of Race, Gender, and Christian Embodiment, Tamura Lomax, founding editor of "The Feminist Wire" and author of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Cultural Productions, Kwesi DeGraff Hanson, featured on CNN for his work with the online database African Origins,Brent Campney, author of This Is Not Dixie,Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927, Miriam Petty, author of Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood, Michelle Hite, Associate Professor of English at Spelman College and Michelle J. Wilkerson, Museum Curator at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Wallace-Sanders has been nominated for both the Martin-Massey Teaching Award and the Eleanor Main Student Mentoring Award.
Professor Wallace-Sanders edited the volume Skin Deep. Spirit Strong: Critical Essays on the Black Female Body in American Culture, (University of Michigan Press, 2002) which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in Literature. Her book Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory, (University of Michigan Press, 2007) is regularly taught in American Studies, Women's Studies, African-American Studies and Southern Studies courses. Her most recent publications include: "Your eyes returning my Gaze" Southern Quarterly, Special Edition on Natasha Trethewey, Vol. 50,no.4 , Summer 2013, and "Every Child Left Behind: Minny's Many Invisible Children in The Help," Southern Cultures, Special Issue on The Help, spring 2014,
Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2014.
Professor Wallace-Sanders joined the Department of African American Studies in 2012 and has taught the following courses: "Introduction to African American Studies," "Black Beauty: Race and the Politics of Beauty in American Culture," "The Black Female Body in American Culture" and "Race, Gender and Southern Culture," "Black Motherhood in American Culture", "Black Girlhood in American Culture," and "Black Middle Class in Film and Photography.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University
- Kyrah Malika Daniels Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Kyrah Malika Daniels is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She completed her B.A. in Africana Studies from Stanford University, and earned her M.A. in Religion and her Ph.D. in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Daniels teaches courses on Africana religions and art history, material culture and museum studies, and race, religion, and representation. Her research centers on African derived religions, sacred arts, religious initiation and conversion, and ritual healing traditions in the Black Atlantic. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was awarded a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art.
Daniels is currently completing a book tentatively titled Art of the Healing Gods: Illness, Imbalance & Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic, a comparative religion project that examines ritual art traditions and religious healing legacies of Kongo-derived communities in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa). The book investigates how sacred art objects mediate relationships between humans and spirits in healing ceremonies to treat spiritual illness and imbalance holistically. Daniels' work has been published in the Journal of Africana Religions, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, the Journal of Haitian Studies, and the Journal for the American Academy of Religion.
Between 2009-2010, Daniels served as Junior Curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Following the earthquake of 2010, she worked in St. Raphael, Haiti, with Lakou Solèy Academic and Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots organization that develops arts-based pedagogy. Previously, she held the first appointment dedicated to African religious heritage traditions and African and African Diaspora art history at Boston College. Daniels currently serves as Leadership Council Member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) and as Vice President for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou.
Publications
Book
Art of the Healing Gods: Illness, Imbalance & Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic (in progress).
Articles
"Mirror Mausoleums, Mortuary Arts, and Haitian Religious Unexceptionalism." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 4 (2017): 957-984.
"She Wears the Mask: Black Atlantic Masquerade in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems." In Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement exhibition catalogue, eds. Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press and McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2018, pp. 47-56.
"Whiteness in the Ancestral Waters: Race, Religion, and Conversion within North American Buddhism and Haitian Vodou."Journal of Interreligious Studies 23 (2018): 90-102.
"Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,"Meridians: Feminism, Race, & Transnationalism, Vol. 21, No. 1 (June 2022): 11-48.
"Vodou Harmonizes the Head-Pot, or, Haiti's Multi-Soul Complex."Religion 52, no. 3 (2022): 359-383.
"Indigo, Camwood, & Woven Cloth: The Kongo Dikenga & Yorùbá Ancestry in Stephen Hamilton's Sacred Artistry." In Passages exhibition catalogue, ed. Laisun Keane. Boston: Laisun Keane Contemporary Art Gallery, 2022.
"An Assembly of 21 Spirit Nations: The Pan-African Pantheon of Haitian Vodou's African Lwa." In Africa and Its Historical and Contemporary Diasporas, eds. Tunde Adeleke and Arno Sonderegger. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023, pp. 67-104.
"The Color of Devotion: Whiteness, Power, and Religious Citizenship in Haitian Vodou." Nova Religio Special Issue: Vodou Across the Waters, ed. Grete Viddal, Vol. 26, No. 4 (May 2023): 85-101.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
- Emeritus Faculty
Leslie Houseworth (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in African American Studies at Emory University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Education from South Carolina State University, a Master of Education in Administration and Supervision from Clemson University, and a Master of Divinity with a certificate in Black Church Studies from Emory University's Candler School of Theology. Leslie is an ordained clergywoman and has pastored churches in New York City and New Jersey and has worked as a high school English teacher. Her experiences as a grassroots organizer, minister, and educator have informed her current research, which explores how power and moral authority intersect in Black communities in a post-church era and how such power can be leveraged for the formation and sustainability of social justice movements.
Lizette London (she/her) is an Afro-Pinay Black feminist visual artist and first-year doctoral student in African American Studies at Emory University. Working at the nexus of Black Feminist Thought, Black Queer Studies, and Black Visual Cultures, Lizette seeks to complicate notions of the major Black artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries by tracing a new set of genealogies within the visual arts canon. Her work explores the artistic, intellectual, and political practices of Black Queer women image-makers and writers through themes such as self/portraiture, visual literacy, literary theory, and cultural production.
Before Emory, Lizette earned an M.A. in Black Feminist Visual Arts and Culture from the NYU School of Individualized Study, where she was awarded the e. Frances White Award for her artistic and scholarly achievements, and a B.A. in Comparative Women's Studies from Spelman College.
Aside from her studies, Lizette enjoys collaborating with other artists to produce independent films, host community art events, and facilitate workshops through her growing artist-maker space, The Lavandula Project - a Black Feminist Visual Arts and Literary Collective & Digital Resource Garden.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University
- Professor
Meina Yates-Richard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. She earned her B.A. from the University of Houston and completed her M.A. and PhD, and Doctoral Certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rice University. Professor Yates-Richard teaches courses about African American, American, and African diasporic literatures and cultures, focusing upon literary and social constructions of race and gender, as well as cultural memories of transatlantic slavery across these fields. Her research is situated at the intersections of sound, race, slavery, maternity and liberation ideologies in African American and African Diasporic literatures and cultural production. Professor Yates-Richard's work appears in American Literature, amsj: American Studies, the Journal of West Indian Literature, Feminist Review and post45: Contemporaries.
Professor Yates-Richard is currently completing her monograph project tentatively titled Sonorous Passages: Maternal Soundings and the Black Liberation Imaginary. The monograph develops an analytical framework that places sound and its literary representations at the heart of contemporary debates concerning cultural trauma, Black feminism, auditory culture, and black liberation by studying the complex relationships between sonic production and reception, race, gender, slavery, and "freedom dreams" to theorize about the ways in which sound comprises an undertheorized aspect of the production of Black liberation ideologies in the African diaspora.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science ( Ph.D., State University of New York, Albany )
Job Titles:
- Associate Teaching Professor of African American Studies
- Associate Teaching Professor of African American Studies Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
Michelle Y. Gordon works in the arenas of American literature, black studies, and cultural studies, with particular interests in the literary and cultural labors of the Left, civil rights history, black women's studies, and cultural memory. After earning her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Gordon went on to serve as assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Her scholarship has focused on 19th and 20 th century American literature and print culture; her current project explores a radical literary and cultural history of black Chicago, from the Great Depression through the rise of the Black Power era.
Courses
Recent Courses:
Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives;
Survey of African American Literature Since 1900;
Passing and Miscegenation in 20th Century African American Literature;
New Negro Renaissance and Black Arts Movement;
Black Women Writers
Monique Wimby studied for a Master's in Philosophy as a Trinity Fellow at Marquette University and completed her bachelor's degrees in dance and English at Brenau University. She has worked for the National Organization for Women in Washington, D.C., completed two years of City Year for AmeriCorps in Jacksonville, Florida, and served in Peace Corps Indonesia from 2015 - 2017. Upon returning to Atlanta, Georgia in 2017, Monique worked as a freelance dancer, director, and choreographer in Metro Atlanta. Her current research prioritizes understanding Black women's interiority in the U.S. South through investigating the myriad ways embodiment, spirituality, and land coincide for ontological survival and continuity.
Nagueyalti Warren, Professor of Pedagogy earned a B.A. (Fisk University); M.A. (Simmons College); M.A. (Boston University); MFA (Goddard College) and Ph.D (University of Mississippi). My major teaching focus includes African American literature and W.E.B. Du Bois' contributions to the field of African American Studies. A Cave Canem poet, my second collection of poetry won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize for the book titled, Margaret (Circa 1834-1858). Braided Memory, my third collection of poetry won the Violet Reed Hass Prize for Poetry.
Job Titles:
- Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Coordinator
- Naomi Diemer Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Coordinator
- Program Coordinator for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
- Undergraduate Fellowship Program Coordinator
Naomi Diemer (they/them) is the program coordinator for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program. They obtained a B.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies with specializations in Women and Gender studies from Kennesaw State University.
Over the years, Naomi has held various professional roles in higher education, community health and wellness, and K-12. Previously, they worked as the administrative coordinator for Kennesaw State University's Women's Resource Center. While there, Naomi developed a vibrant and effective bystander intervention program to combat and reduce on-campus gender- and sexual-based violence. Before joining the AAS staff at Emory, Naomi worked as a middle-grades special education paraprofessional, serving the needs of young students heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Naomi's interests take a holistic approach to community wellness and self-care, weaving together Afro-anarcha feminism, abolition, ecological awareness and environmental advocacy, Southern traditions of Black spirituality and magic, and education accessibility.
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Faculty
- Senior Lecturer in the Department of African American Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor of Theology and Ethics ( Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary )
Job Titles:
- Imagining Democracy Lab Program Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Professor of African American Studies
Rose Archer received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Birmingham-Southern College where she graduated magna cum laude. She later received a Master of Divinity from Duke University and a Graduate Certificate in Theology, Medicine, and Culture where she graduated magna cum laude. Rose recently completed a Master of Science in Sociology from Florida State University where she was awarded the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship.
Broadly, Rose's research is situated at the nexus of race, gender, and reproductive health inequities across time and place. Drawing from an extensive cross-disciplinary background, her work critically examines the historical, social, and political forces that constrain Black reproductive autonomy and the individual and collective strategies engaged to resist such constraints. Her research integrates medical sociology, Black feminist and womanist epistemologies, and qualitative methods. Rose's forthcoming article in Sociology of Health and Illness, "Surviving in the midst of ‘Nowhere': Disrupting the Conceptualization of a Maternity Care Desert," earned her the 2024 Odum Graduate Student Paper Award from the Southern Sociological Society. Additionally, her research on the long-term impacts of reproductive trauma garnered her the 2024 Judith Plasklow Grant with the American Academy of Religion.
Along with her academic pursuits, Rose is an ordained minister, trained birth doula and founder of Doulas for Me. Her interest in reproductive health inequities was initially sparked in her professional life as a Board Certified Chaplain (BCC) where she worked with Duke University Hospital, Emory Healthcare, and Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare. Rose enjoys spending time with her life partner, Andrew, and their two "Littles," Anyah and Judah.
Job Titles:
- Financial Executive
- Senior Academic Department Administrator
- Shamika Walls Senior Academic Department Administrator
Shamika is a financial executive with higher education, healthcare and clinical research experience whose primary focus is improving operational efficiencies using budgetary and data analysis to standardize processes, restructure human capital, maximize revenue, and reduce costs.
She obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Accounting from Wofford College and received a MBA with emphasis in Health Care Management from Gardner-Webb University. Shamika completed her PhD in Health Service Policy and Management from the University of South Carolina. She is also a licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
With 20 years of experience in financial management and extensive knowledge in administrative and operational management, she enjoys the challenge of working to promote efficiency, internal control, and quality while providing effective leadership.
Job Titles:
- Professor of French and English ( Ph.D., Louisiana State University )
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Educational Studies
Walker is a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She is also the recipient of the Grawmeyer Award in Education, the AERA Early Career Award, three AERA SIG awards, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and awards from other professional associations. She was the 104 th president of AERA and has lectured widely in a variety of community, national, collegiate, and international settings, including delivering the 2012 annual AERA Brown v. Board of Education Lecture and the 2020 Presidential Address, which was simultaneously viewed in 77 countries. She has been featured in a variety of media outlets, among them CSPAN3 and the PBS Special, SCHOOL. Walker received her training in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
- Professor
- Professor of African American Studies and History
- White Professor of African American Studies and History
Walter C. Rucker, Goodrich C. White Professor of African American Studies and History, earned his BA from Morehouse College and his MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. Before his arrival at Emory, he was Professor of History at Rutgers University.
He is a specialist in early Atlantic African diaspora and African American history. As an ethnohistorian, Professor Rucker's teaching and research focus on the generative nexus between slavery, resistance, and ritual cultures in the Black Atlantic. The former Treasurer (2015-2019) and Vice-President (2019-2021) of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), he has received several awards and distinctions for research, teaching, mentoring, and professional service including the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service (ASWAD, 2023-and, also, in 2017), the Recognition for Excellent Teaching (Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2021), the Order of Omega Recognition for Outstanding Faculty (Ohio State, 2010), and the Ida B. Wells & Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Outstanding Scholarship & Leadership in Africana Studies (NCBS, 2008). Professor Rucker's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edgerton Family Foundation, and the Layman Trust.
His first book, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (2005), tracks diasporic African identity formation through examinations of resistance efforts in colonial British North America and the antebellum U.S. His second book, Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (2015), analyzes the origin and reinvention of "Coromantee" and "(A)mina" as neo-African ethnicities in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century circum-Caribbean. The book assesses the socio-political scripts, cultural technologies, and public performances fashioned by enslaved Gold Coast Africans as part of an emerging and non-Western abolitionist discourse.
In addition to the two books, Professor Rucker has published a range of essays, book chapters, and journal articles appearing in the Journal of African American History (and the Journal of Negro History), the Journal of Black Studies, and Black Scholar as well as two co-edited encyclopedia projects-The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (2006) and The Encyclopedia of African American History (2010). He is currently working on a new book project entitled "The Birth of a Notion: A Century of Racial Violence and Mass Incarceration in America."