Zalika U. Ibaorimi is a multidisciplinary artist and doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, "Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators: Modalities of Black Desire, Pleasure & Sexual Shame," engages Black material and digital publics as the landscape to trace the human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator.
Matthew Greer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Syracuse University, where his studies focus on the archaeology of enslaved life. His dissertation project, Assembling Enslaved Lives: Labor, Consumption, and Landscapes in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, uses historical archaeology, Black studies, and assemblage theory to write the stories of enslaved people in back into the history of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
My project, "In the Time of Disaster: Representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American Literature and Culture", explores African American post-Katrina cultural production that engages the political, cultural, and social effects of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. I read the spatio-temporal parameters of Black post-Katrina films, music, and literature to consider how these texts challenge and revise our cultural memory of the storm.
Dissertation title: Credit Is Due: African Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia
My research reveals how human geographies of the Atlantic slave trade shaped colonial rule in the Gold Coast, leading to the British state’s early—and path-breaking—downfall. In March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence from colonial rule. My project suggests that it is no coincidence that it is also the territory where the colonial state owned the lowest proportion of land—a fact owed to transformations in human-land relationships during the slave trade.
Jillean McCommons is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. My dissertation project, “The Black Appalachian Commission: Regional Black Power Politics and the War on Poverty, 1969-1975,” is a social history of the Black Appalachian Commission (BAC), a Black-led grassroots organization created to address the specific needs of Black people in the thirteen states that comprise the Appalachian region.
Dissertation title: "We Dance With Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond"
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