Department of African and African American Studies

We are very pleased to welcome Professor Rachel Klein, who will be a Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in three academic units. Kay two-year postdoctoral fellowships are shared by multiple programs and departments, allowing us to discover and deepen interdisciplinary capacities across the Brandeis curriculum. This particular Kay Fellowship was proposed, and will be shared by the AAAS Department, the English Department, and the Legal Studies Program. Professor Klein studies carceral social movements, with a special focus on the “insurgent kinship” of incarcerated women’s activism, and their cross-generational solidarity, in California. She organizes with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Here on campus, she will also work with the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. We are delighted that this Fall she will teach “Carceral Studies,” AAAS/WGS 122a, a course that was introduced into the curriculum by Professor Anya Wallace. Professor Klein has just completed her PhD studies at the University of Southern California. Congratulations, and welcome to Brandeis! 

We have been blessed by the creativity and imagination of two brilliant visiting faculty members, who taught courses and supported initiatives for the department, allowed us to deepen our connections to other departments, especially WGS, and inspired students with their pedagogy and their mentorship. Between them, they taught “Carceral Studies,” “Carceral Arts,” “Black Girlhood Sexual Politics,” “Black Visibility,” “Black Feminist Thought,” “Black Sexual Politics,” “Gender and Surrealism in Popular Black TV and Film,”

Professor Anya Wallace

Professor Wallace was a Visiting Professor of Black Feminist Studies in AAAS and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, after which she held the 2022-24 Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellowship in Black Feminist Studies. She taught courses already in the curriculum and also introduced new courses into the curriculum. The holder of a PhD in Art Education and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from the Penn State University School of Visual Arts in the College of Art and Architecture, Professor Wallace’s teaching drew on her own work with incarcerated young women and her theorization of the physical and emotional architecture of the prison. We were delighted to learn about Genius Species, the exhibition that she curated in Opa Locka, South Florida, in early 2023, featuring the work of ten artists.

Professor Carmel Ohman

As a lecturer in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Professor Ohman taught AAAS/WGS courses. She held the 2023-24 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship for the seminar “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence,” co-led by Brandeis Professors Anita Hill, Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze. With a PhD in English from the University of Oregon, Professor Ohman’s research and teaching interests include Black Feminist Studies, erotic freedom, and visual culture, and she is working on a book about the relationship between Black women’s fiction in the 1970s and television comedy by and about Black women in the second decade of the 21st century. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Olivet in Michigan. 

Dear AAAS Family:

It is bittersweet to announce that our colleague Professor Derron Wallace, currently on leave as a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, will leave Brandeis to take up an appointment at Brown University as of June 30. He will join Brown as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 

He has been the best of colleagues: giving his all to his own students in the classroom and as mentor and advisor on thesis and dissertation committees (and to mine, in visits to my classroom); cheering on colleagues on and off campus; serving on university committees to transform the university curriculum in the wake of our students’ activism in Ford Hall 2015, and in many other ways  -- not to mention gifting me Jamaican delicacies: the list goes on and on. As we saw in the fall, his book The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations: and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth, at once deeply theoretical and engaging, challenges us to question the paradigms that we have been given – in the way that we recognize injustice, but also in the way that we use our imagination to frame our critiques of this injustice, in order to make our work relevant and accessible to a range of audiences. 

Thank you for your support and your courage, congratulations, and walk good!   

Professor Shoniqua Roach has recently published “To Put Afoot A New Black Woman: On Hortense Spillers and the Possibilities of Gender” in the journal boundary 2 (Vol 51, 1: February 2024); edited the special Issue on Evelyn Hammonds, “Inside the Black (W)hole” in the journal differences (35, 2: Sept 2024), which includes her own contribution, “Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective”; and she has an essay entitled “The Black Living Room” in the new volume The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press), edited by Margo Crawford C. Riley Snorton and

It is bittersweet to announce that as of January 1, our colleague Chad Williams now holds an endowed professorship in the History Department and in the African and African and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University. Since coming to Brandeis in 2012, Professor Williams has been a visionary department chair. Under his leadership, an African Diaspora Studies Cluster hire initiative has generated extraordinary faculty hires within our department and also across the university. He organized major events featuring scholars and commentators of Black Studies as a discipline, as well as of the pressing issues of our time: a panel on "Race and Gender in the Elections” (in 2012, when he had barely arrived) held in Boston, featuring Boston-area legal scholars, and chaired by Professor Anita Hill; the Spring 2017 Symposium “#Black Lives Matter,” connected to his course of that name, and featuring teach-ins across our campus that were conceived and led by students; and the Spring 2019 "50th Anniversary" Symposium which brought back alumni to campus, many of whom participated in panels and received Alumni Awards.  Among other outcomes, these events have helped to reconnect Black and other alumni of color to this institution: indeed, it is not unusual to meet Boston-area folk who attended the anniversary event because, although they themselves were not alumni, they remembered visiting friends on this campus in the 1960s and 1970s. These connections are precious, and we cherish them. Professor Williams put his archival skills to good and imaginative use, collaborating with his students to produce a timeline of Ford Hall 1969, and thereby helping to re-inscribe this as a central event in the genealogy of this institution. During Ford Hall 2015, he led some faculty members in a walk-out of a faculty meeting, in order to stand in solidarity with students who were occupying the presidential enclave in the Fall of 2015, and he and other faculty held their classes in Shapiro Student Centre, so that students involved in the occupation could continue their studies in the vicinity of their protest. His rejuvenation of our core 5A course, and his courses (from "Black Brandeis, Black History" to military history, to “Hip Hop History and Culture”) have made him a beloved teacher and mentor. His award-winning scholarship, including Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War 1 Era” and The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War, continues apace with two current projects on the biography of Black Studies, and on African intellectuals and HBCUs. The Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence, which he co-edited with Kidada Williams and Keisha Blain, developed from his Twitter hashtag #Charlestonsyllabus, in the immediate aftermath of the June 2015 massacre at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, and it is but one example of his extensive public-facing commentary. 

Dearest Chad, as you move on to another institution, know that we wish you the best, and that you are always in our hearts. We look forward to celebrating you as part of our 55th-anniversary celebrations later this semester. 

With very best wishes, 

Brandeis Department of African and African American Studies 

Professor Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso served as one of the Program Chairs for the 2024 meeting of the African Studies Association in Chicago, this past December. The theme was “Global Africa.”

Professor Panashe Chigumadzi is our newest AAAS faculty member. She is teaching her first courses at Brandeis this semester: AAAS Senior Capstone Seminar (AAAS 189a) and What is Apartheid? (AAAS 139A). Her dissertation, “19^th-Century Ubuntu: Black Philosophy Under the Nine Warrs of Dispossession, 1779-1878,” is based on hundreds of newspaper articles in isiXhosa-, isiZulu-, seTswana-, and seSotho-language newspapers, and argues that Ubuntu philosophy provided an ethics of “conquest and incorporation” for Southern Africa’s indigenous peoples. Dr. Chigumadzi is an interdisciplinary historian of 19^th and 20^th-century Africa, and of global Black intellectual, political, philosophical and religious traditions in the wake of struggles against war, land dispossession, slavery, imperialism colonialism and capitalism across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. She holds a PhD from Harvard University’s Deparrtment of African and African American Studies, and an MA in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her historical memoir These Bones Will Rise Again (2018, about Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup, was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 novel Sweet Medicine won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. She was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid in South Africa, and she has been a columnist, contributing editor or had her essays published in the New York Times, the Johannesburg Review of Books, The [London] Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Zieit, Chimurenga, The Sunday Times, City Press, Africa is a Country, and Transition. 

Professor Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso has just released her recent book, "African Refugees."

"African Refugees" is a comprehensive overview of the context, causes and consequences of refugee lives, discussing issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees around the world. It covers overarching topics such as human rights, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions, as well as less-studied topics such as refugee youths, refugee camps, LGBTQ refugees, urban refugees and refugee women. It also takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees. "African Refugees" recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time but avoids the pitfalls of the colonial gaze — where refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems — seeking to complicate these narratives by recognizing African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial and neo-colonial systems of power.

Professor Chad Williams is releasing his latest book on April 4 — "The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War"

When W.E.B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to close ranks and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished.

In "The Wounded World," Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois’s failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois’s struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century. Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois' largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois and why it continues to matter today.

Professor Faith Smith is releasing her latest book in April 2023 — "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early 20th Century."

In "Strolling in the Ruins," Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades.

Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-20th century and anticipates the Caribbean's present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems and novels to newspapers, photographs and gardens to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa's place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.