AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Social Scientist
Andrene Wright-Johnson is social scientist interested in Black political behavior and urban politics at the intersection of race, gender, and class. She currently serves as an Anna Julia Cooper Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will begin her appointment as an Assistant Professor in the department of African American Studies in Fall of 2024. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Political Science department, a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin Election Research Center, and a Senior Research specialist at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Title
Brenda Gayle Plummer is a historian whose research includes race and gender, international relations, and civil rights. Her work ranges from essays on Haitian-American relations to studies of Afro-Americans, race, and foreign affairs. Plummer has taught Afro-American history throughout her twenty years experience in higher education. Plummer has taught at historically black Fisk University, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.
Plummer's publications include articles and reviews that have appeared in such journals as Phylon, International History Review, TransAfrica Forum, Latin American Research Review, and Diplomatic History, American Historical Review, and the Journal of American History. She has contributed to a number of collections and reference works. Plummer is also the author of three books of original scholarship and the recipient of book prizes in Afro-American history and diplomatic history respectively from the American Historical Association, and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Interests
Civil rights and modern Afro-American history
Job Titles:
- School of Education / 574C Teacher Education Building
Christy Clark-Pujara is a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined-small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Clark-Pujara contends that the full dimensions of the African American and the American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how Black people managed their lives in places where they were few. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery-economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods-shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725-1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-Black race relations in the Midwest.
Clark-Pujara is committed to both academic scholarship and public history. She works closely with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Development, where she teaches community history courses. Her public history work also includes writing blogs and op-eds like, "Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence," for the Smithsonian American History Magazine and "The 1539 Project: Why Black Midwest and Iowa History Matters". Des Moines Register. Clark-Pujara is also a Segment Producer, for an in-progress documentary "African American Midwest" (Kartemquin Films and Democracy Films Co-Production distributed by PBS).
Education
Ph.D., in English, University of Illinois, 1979
M.A., in American Literature, University of Illinois, 1975
B.A., summa cum laude, Colorado College, 1973
Job Titles:
- School of Education / 476e Teacher Education
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
- Title
Education
PhD - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MLS - Rutgers University
BA - Rutgers University
Ethelene is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison affiliated with the departments of African American Studies, German, Nordic, and Slavic, and Gender & Women's Studies. She received an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship and a Lois Roth Endowment grant to support this project. She was also a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Transnational American Studies
Education
Ph.D., University of Chicago
M.A., M.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.S., Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University, N.Y., 1973.
Certificate of African Studies (M.A.), Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, 1969.
M.A., Columbia University, 1968.
B.A., Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., 1964.
Jessica Lee Stovall's research sits at the intersection of Black Studies and education. In her current work, Jessica employs notions of educational fugitivity to theorize how Black teachers co-construct Black space, and how these curated Black-affirming places are rehumanizing and sustaining for Black teachers. Her dissertation on Black teachers provides a blueprint for how teachers can create classrooms of liberated learning for their students, and it was awarded the Critical Educators for Social Justice Dissertation Award at the 2024 American Educational Research Association annual meeting. Jessica's research has been generously funded by the Spencer dissertation grant, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, and the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching grant, among others. Before starting her doctoral studies at Stanford, Jessica taught ELA 11 years in the Chicagoland area.
Job Titles:
- School of Education / 270D Education Building
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor of Folklore and African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Langston Collin Wilkins is an Assistant Professor of Folklore and African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include African American folklife, African American music, urban folklore, car culture and public folklore. Dr. Wilkins received his PhD from Indiana University's Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology in 2016. He also holds a MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University and a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Everybody Inherits the Hood: Place, Identity and Hip Hop Heritage in Houston (University of Illinois Press, 2023), which explores the relationship between music creation, place attachment and local heritage within Houston, Texas' hip hop music scene. His work has also appeared in the Journal of Folklore Research, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, and several other publications. From 2019-2022, Dr. Wilkins served as the Director of the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions, a public program that seeks to document and preserve the traditional culture of Washington State. Dr. Wilkins is currently an executive board member of the American Folklore Society.
Education
• Indiana University, PhD in Folklore & Ethnomusicology: Ethnomusicology Institute (2016)
• Indiana University, MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies (2010)
• Indiana University, MA in Folklore & Ethnomusicology (2010)
• University of Texas at Austin, BA in English (2006)
Biography
With an emphasis on artists' encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and representation, Melanie Herzog teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on North American art and visual culture, particularly African American art, and art and visual culture of the African diaspora. She holds an M.F.A. in ceramics and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000), Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer (2006), "Imaging History, Memory, and the Raced and Gendered Body: The Legacy of Elizabeth Catlett," in The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World (2012), "`My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples': Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico," in The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America (2018), "Chinese in America: Flo Oy Wong, Suturing Gaps in the Weave," in Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (2018), "African American Artists and Mexico," in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2020), and "William Kentridge: See for Yourself," (2022). Her essay "‘Thinking About Women': Form, Substance, and Radical Politics" will be published in the companion publication for the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Black Artist and All That It Implies, opening in Fall 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum.
Job Titles:
- School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Social Scientist and Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Community and Environmental Sociology / 5113 Mosse Humanities
Job Titles:
- Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis / 270k Education Building
Job Titles:
- Harlem Renaissance Librarian ( University of Illinois Press, 2014 )
Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary scholar, a veteran journalist, and a writer working in theater, fiction and non-fiction. She is currently working on a study entitled Improviser Country: Itinerant Black Performance in the Mississippi Valley. Her teaching interests include black political thought, Reconstruction, African American literature and film. She has been a recipient of the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City, and was an inaugural fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York. At NYU she received the Lerner Prize in American Studies, and she is a Distinguished Alumna of Barnard College, as well as a Barnard Africana Studies Distinguished Alumna. She was honored by the Congressional Black Caucus' Veterans Committee for work on 2011 national monument designation of Fort Monroe, Va., cite of the 1619 landing, by President Barack Obama. Davis was the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes and is a two-time Grammy nominee in opera as a librettist.