Ianna Hawkins Owen, he/none, is an advanced assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Owen’s first monograph, Ordinary Failure: Diaspora’s Limits & Longings, is under contract with Duke University Press. Owen has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, & he recently received a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award to support his second book project, This Time Without Feeling: Reading Black Asexual Affects.
Janée A Moses is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, CUNY, whose research focuses on black expressive cultures from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. Her current book project is an intertextual study of black women’s life writing and performances that combines extraordinary pursuits and ordinary experiences to highlight the fullness of their lives. Prior to this appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.
Rosemary Millar is an Associate Professor of Humanities, Literature and Writing in the Division of Liberal Arts. Her classes are interdisciplinary within a hybrid mode, blending different teaching styles (lecture, demonstrator, facilitator, student as teacher, group work) to respond to the needs of diverse learning. She uses this style to illuminate the significance of academics and the arts on each other.
H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2020 from Indiana University where he was a professor of law at the Maurer School of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. He previously taught at Duke Law as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History in the spring 2019 semester. During the 2019-2020 academic year he served as a visiting professor of law at the University of Virginia.
Dr. LaTasha Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies. She earned her a B.A. in African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia; a master's degree from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Northwestern University. Dr. Levy's research and teaching interests include African American History and Culture; Black Intellectual Thought; Black Studies; Black Women's Studies; and the Social Significance of Race.
Delali Kumavie earned her doctoral degree in English from Northwestern University in 2020. Prior to coming to Syracuse, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Institute at Harvard University, and a predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Kumavie’s teaching and research interests are situated at the intersection of Global Black Literature, Studies in Science and Technology, Global Migration, and Black Ecologies.
Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies, a specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories.
Laura Helton, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of History, specializes in American literature and history of the twentieth century with an emphasis on African American print culture and public humanities. Her research and teaching interests include archival studies, material texts, race and memory, gender and sexuality, and the literary history of social movements.
There are 4 generations of educators in my family, and I can go back to at least one member who taught in one-room schools in the early part of the century. They were amazing storytellers, and in my child's mind, I associated being educated with the ability to tell stories to people inside and outside the classroom. Because I was such an avid listener, a reader and extremely curious, I saw early how stories empowered people, imparting wisdom and guiding their actions in one way or another. The more I advanced in my own education, the more I left these stories behind.