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Afroamerican and African Studies Faculty Listing
4700 Haven Hall | 505 South State Street | (734) 764-5513 (phone) | (734) 763-0543 (fax) | www.lsa.umich.edu/daas | e-mail: daas-info@umich.edu
Professor Tiya Miles, Chair (7/1/11-6/30/14)
Academics and Requirements
Professors
Fernando Arenas (Romance Languages and Literatures), Lusophone African, Brazilian, and Portuguese Studies with an emphasis on literature, film, and popular music
Adam Ashforth, African politics, post-apartheid South Africa, religion and spirituality
Marlyse Baptista (Linguistics), morpho-syntax interface in pidgin and Creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive and technological tools; how Creole languages inform linguistic theory and to what extent linguistic theory, in turn, informs Creole grammatical systems
Angela Dillard (Residential College), American and African-American intellectual history and political thought; religious studies; critical race theory; and conservatism
Frieda Ekotto, 20th-century French and Francophone literature
Kevin K. Gaines (History) (Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor Of History and Afroamerican and African Studies), African American history, progressive era; jazz
Lorna Goodison (Lemuel A. Johnson Collegiate Professor of English and Afroamerican and African Studies) (English Language and Literature), Creative Writing
Sandra Gunning (English), 19th- and 20th-Century American literature and Afro-American literature
Paul Johnson (History), History and ethnography of the religions of the African Diaspora in Brazil and the Caribbean, religion and race, religion and migration, ritual studies, and methodological and theoretical perspectives on the comparative study of religion more broadly
Tiya Miles (American Culture/History) (Elsa Barkley Brown Collegiate Professor of African American Women's History), African American and Native American Comparative and interrelated histories, women of color history, literature and feminist history
Derek Peterson (History), intellectual history of colonial eastern Africa
M. Anne Pitcher (Political Science), African politics, privatization in Africa
Elisha Renne (Anthropology), ethnographic research, abortion in Nigeria, reproductive health matters in Nigeria, aesthetics in northern Nigeria, African art
Ray Silverman (History of Art), African Visual Culture, especially Ghana and Ethiopia; Museum Studies
Howard Stein, African development including foreign aid, finance, institutional transformation, industrial and trade policy, health and economic change and structural adjustment
Alford A. Young (Sociology) (Arthur F. Thurnau Professor), race and urban poverty; African American social thought; African American intellectuals; race and ethnic relations; low-income African American men in urban communities; and the political orientations of African American scholars
Magdalena Zabarowska (American Culture), Immigrant literatures, narrative and gender, cultural theory
Associate Professors
Kwasi Ampene (Music), Afromusicology; Music composition in oral cultures with emphasis on the Akan of Ghana, Intersection of Phonology, Oral Composition and Performance, Music and Social Change, and Popular Music
Paul Anderson (American Culture), modern U.S. cultural history; cultural history of popular music
Kelly Askew (Anthropology), cultural politics, ethnomusicology, nationalism, media, performance, Swahili studies, East Africa
David Doris (History of Art), African Art and Culture
Amal Fadlalla (Women's Studies), Cultural anthropology, Gender Studies, Medical anthropology, and Anthropological demography
Martha Jones (History), African American History, 19th-Century United States History; Women's History; Race and the Law
Karyn Lacy (Sociology), Race, Class, and Gender; Community; Qualitative Methodology
Robin Means-Coleman (Communication Studies), researches, and publishes in the areas of: African Americans and the media (texts, contexts, industry, and audiences); Black popular culture; and African American identity formation/performance
Damani J. Partridge (Anthropology), Cultural anthropology, race and displacement, citizenship and non-citizens, technologies of exclusion, gender and sexuality, critical visual anthropology, German studies, European studies, anthropology of the state, post-socialism
Xiomara Santamarina (English), nineteenth-century African American women; antebellum culture; nineteenth-century African American and American literature; and African American writers
Megan Sweeney (English), 20th/21st-Century African American literature and culture; inter-American literatures; U.S. Latino/a literature; critical race studies; transnational feminist and gender studies; critical prison studies; cultural studies and ethnography
Richard Turits (History), Hispanic, Caribbean, and Haiti; race, slavery, violence, non-democratic regimes, peasantries, and U.S. interventions
Stephen Ward (Residential College), urban studies, Black politics, Detroit history
Assistant Professors
Omolade Adunbi, Transnationalism, Governance, Human and Environmental Rights and politics of natural resources in Africa
Lori Brooks (American Culture), race and cultural studies, urban culture, Black intellectual culture, popular culture with a special interest in music, humor and performance
Lori Hill (Education), Education inequality and stratification; urban education; and South African education and social policy
Sherie Randolph (History), Creation of a feminist pedagogy for political and social change, African Americans, the African Diaspora, women and gender
Larry Rowley (Education), African-American issues in higher education, the role of race in American academic and intellectual hierarchies, relationships between urban universities and communities, and organizational analyses of racial diversity and the public service mission of higher education; relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois for African Americans in higher education and the importance of role models and mentors for Black college students
Lecturers
Scott Ellsworth, history and literature of the American South, slavery, the Civil Rights movement, criminal justice in America
Nesha Haniff (Women's Studies), abortion in Jamaica; women's reproductive health, violence against women in the Caribbean; AIDS in South Africa
Nyambura Mpesha, Swahili Language and literature, African folklore, African Literature, Children's literature, creative writing
Jon Onye Lockard, African, Afro-Brazilian, and traditional art of the Americas; contemporary African American art and comparative Black art
Julius Scott (History), Caribbean world in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries; slavery and emancipation; the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Afro-America
Ronald Woods, African American constitutional and legal studies and civil rights law and policy
Adjunct Professor
Martin Murray, Sociology and African studies, Urban planning, South Africa, global cities
Adjunct Lecturer
Melba Boyd (Wayne State University, Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies) African American film and literature
Faculty Associates
Michael Awkward, Feminist scholar, gender in Afro-American expressive culture
James Chaffers, design links between spatial equality and human spirituality
Elizabeth Cole, Class, race and gender as social identities; relationship between political attitudes and behaviors, particularly among African Americans and all women; qualitative methods
James Jackson, survey methodology; mental health, cultural influences
Warren Whatley, southern labor history; migration; urban poverty; and Black workers in the industrial age