Erin Green, a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland. They received their B.A. in English literature from the University of Montevallo. Their research interests include Black studies, community literacy, activism, storytelling, and abolition. They love teaching college and writing centers, and spend their free time watching TV, online shopping, and reading horror novels. Twitter handle:@erin101green.

Dr. T. Anansi Wilson is an associate professor of constitutional & criminal law and the founding director of the center for the study of Black life and the law. They received the PhD in African & African Diaspora Studies from UT Austin and their JD from Howard Law. Their work is interdisciplinary and explores Black and BlaQueer responses to, refusals of and routes beyond the social order of the west. 

This conversation is with Dr. Watufani M. Poe (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University in May of 2021, his master's in history and Africana Studies in 2018 from Brown, and his B.A. in Black Studies from Swarthmore College in 2013. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, he served as a Center for Humanistic Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellow at Amherst College from 2021-2022, placed in the Department of Black Studies and the Program in Latinx and Latin American Studies. His manuscript project, "Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking" is an ethnohistoric analysis of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States to outline the ways Black LGBTQ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces.

This conversation is with Omari Averette-Phillips,  a Ph.D. student in History at UC Davis. An (African) Americanist, his research focuses on Black engagement with political and labor organizations in the U.S. South during Reconstruction. His research explores the intersection of race, gender, politics, and labor. His current project explores Southern Black women and their political engagement during the 1880 and 1890s with the Knights of Labor, the first public labor union in the United States. Omari is also one of the hosts of “New Books in African American Studies,” a podcast on the New Books Network. 

This discussion is with Javon Goard, he obtained a B.A. in sociology with honors from the University of Maryland, College Park (2016), and his M.S. in informatics from Indiana University, Bloomington (2018). Goard’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach in studying aspects of video game culture by working in the domains of sociology, informatics, and media studies. His current work focuses on African American/Blacks within esports and the intersection of black joy within gaming culture.  His blog, jstonee.wordpress.com, bridges the gap between academic discourse and personal anecdotes, discussing a wide range of topics from gender, race, and economics as they relate to digital spaces. Goard is also co-host and co-creator with two other UMD alum for the “My Gaming Academia” podcast which is focused on discussing psychological and sociological topics as they relate to videogames. Featured on the podcast has been guests ranging from Twitch streamers, game developers, and a games scholar. Episodes are available on Spotify. Goard is an advocate of public scholarship and he “goes where the gamers are”, thus he attends both academic conferences and anime/comic book conventions which include: SXSW 2023, Johns Hopkins University EdFest, Music and Gaming Education Symposium, BlerDCon, Balticon, Indiana Comic Con, Indy PopCon, GenCon, and the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Digital Ethics.

This conversation is with Dr. Cassie Osei is a historian of Latin America, the African diaspora, and gender and sexuality. She earned her doctorate in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. Her expertise is in Brazilian history, specializing in Black history, race relations, and Black women's studies. She teaches at Bucknell University, where she is an assistant professor of history. Her doctoral and undergraduate work was financially supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad program, the Foreign Language & Areas Studies program, and from other generous support from the University of Illinois and the University of Kansas. At Kansas, she was a McNair Scholar and has worked as a consultant and instructor for the program. Dr. Osei's expertise extends to grant writing, community building, and mentorship of rising undergraduate and graduate students. 

This discussion is with Nancy Tenorio-Spack, a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, who specializes in Afro-Mexican literature and culture in Oaxaca, Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. She is currently a guest lecturer in the American Studies Program at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Over at the American Studies Program at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, she has taught courses that intersect Native American and African American literature as well as courses on Afro-Mexican literature. 

This conversation is with Dr. Jomaira Salas Pujols, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College. She earned her Ph.D. From Rutgers University where her research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Salas Pujols’ scholarship examines how Black girls contend with and challenge multiple inequalities in and outside of schools, with a special focus on anti-Blackness and gendered forms of subjugations. Her other work looks at the Black identity development of Afro-Latina girls and the impact of in and out-of-school factors on Black girls' schooling trajectories."

Links mentioned: https://www.sadienash.org/

This conversation is with Dr. Elise A. Mitchell, a historian of the early modern Black Atlantic and is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at Princeton University. Broadly, her work examines the social and political histories of embodiment, healing, disease, race, and gender in the early modern Atlantic World, with a focus on the Caribbean region. She is also an editor and founding board member of the online magazine, Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. Dr. Mitchell earned her Ph.D. in Atlantic World history and Caribbean and Latin American history at New York University in 2021. Fellowships and grants from New York University, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council’s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Mellon Mays Graduate Studies Enhancement Grants, the Huntington Library’s Evelyn S. Nation Short-Term Research Fellowship, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective have supported her work. She completed her B.A. in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and University Scholar.

This conversation is with Dr. Bryce Henson is an assistant professor of media, culture, and identity in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a faculty associate in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University. He researches Black life, media, and popular culture in the Global South, with a particular focus on Brazil and Latin America. Dr. Henson received his PhD in Communications & Media with distinction from the Institute of Communications Research with graduate certificates in both Latin American & Caribbean studies and cultural studies & interpretive theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-editor of the book Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. His single-authored book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil will be published this fall with University of Texas Press. He also serves on the Executive Board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. He is an avid fan of Esporte Clube Bahia in the Brazilian football league.