Meet the Team
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Anika Simpson is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Howard University. She has dedicated the majority of her career to teaching at Historically Black Universities, where she has invested deeply in the work of institution building. Dr. Simpson is author of Single Black Mother: Queer Reflections on Marriage and Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024). Single Black Mother disrupts the prevailing negative view of single Black motherhood by making the case that unmarried Black mothers are not problems to be solved. Rather, the institution of marriage is the problem. A graduate of Spelman College, Dr. Simpson is committed to supporting and advancing racial justice, gender justice, and LGBTQ+ equity through advocacy and education.
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Moya Bailey is a Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).
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Kevin A. Blanks is a PhD Candidate in the department of English at The George Washington University. As a Black queer and disabled educator-scholar, his research interests include exploring the intersections of Black childhood studies, crip/queer theory, and African American literature. Recently, He was recognized as the 2024 DEI Graduate Trailblazer for his unwavering commitment towards DEI through his scholarship, community service, campus engagement, and leadership. His scholarship has appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, the Black Feminist Collective, and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender and Childhood. Currently, he is working on his dissertation which examines how Black children and adolescents offer crip/queer epistemologies for surviving within an anti-Black world.
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Savannah Shange is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania, a MAT from Tufts University, and a BFA in Experimental Theater from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area.
Website: savannahshange.com
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Marlon M. Bailey is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. He is currently Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, with appointments in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equality at Washington University, St. Louis. He has served as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in Africana Studies at Carleton College; the Distinguished Weinberg Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Marlon is a member of the committee that co-authored the award-winning report, Understanding the Well-Being of LGBTQ+ Populations, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This report won the 2021 Achievement Award from The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA).
Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013. In 2014, Butch Queens Up in Pumps won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize awarded by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Book Award in LGBT Studies. Dr. Bailey has published in the Architecture Review, American Quarterly, GLQ, Signs, Feminist Studies, Souls, Gender, Place, and Culture, The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, QED, AIDS Patient Care and STDs, LGBT Health, Health Promotion Practice, and several edited volumes.
Marlon’s current book manuscript in progress, Black Gay Sex, is an ethnographic examination of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Black gay men’s sexuality. His manuscript is under contract with the University of California Press. He also co-edits (with Jeffrey McCune) the New Sexual Worlds Book Series, also with the University of California Press.
Marlon is a member of the Black Sexual Economies Collective which edited the volume, Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in the Culture of Capital, published by the University of Illinois Press (2019). Marlon is also a performing artist and presented his solo performance called, “Exploring Black Gay Sex, Love, and Life,” at Concordia University and McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds a PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Department of African American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies respectively from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Jennifer D. Williams is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century African-American literature and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, particularly in relation to space, race, and class. Dr. Williams is completing a book on Black women’s literature and urban segregation. You can find her other publications in The Black Scholar, Meridians, and Contemporary Women's Writing, among other places.
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Ashon Crawley is a writer, artist and teacher, exploring the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness and spirituality. He moves in and out of multiple genres in order to sound out a critique of the normative world–to sound out the possibility for alternatives, for otherwise. He is the Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). As Founder of the Otherwise Arts Lab, an integrative arts practice and space, Crawley brings togethers scholars, artists, musicians and community members to exchange ideas, concepts, and practices. He has been granted fellowships with Yaddo, MacDowell, New City Arts Initiative, and Gilead COMPASS Faith Coordinating Center. His audiovisual art has been featured at Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Welcome Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, California) and the California African American Museum (Los Angeles, California).
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SA Smythe is a transmedia artist, educator, and cultural theorist committed to Black belonging beyond geography, gender, and other borders. They are Associate Professor of Black Studies and the Archive at the University of Toronto, where they are founding director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis, a multidisciplinary hub for Black studies research and community-based aesthetic practice. Smythe is the editor of Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity (vols. 1 & 2, Postmodern Culture) and Transnational Black Studies (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press). Forthcoming works include Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean and [proclivity], a poetry collection and sound installation-performance suite. Shortlisted for the 2025 Creative Capital Award in Multimedia Performance, Smythe is also a recipient of the 2021–22 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies and numerous arts residencies, including Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and a MacDowell Fellowship in Multimedia Installation.
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Brendane A. Tynes is a queer Black feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. Her dissertation examined the affective responses of Black women and nonbinary people to multiple forms of violence within Black liberation movements. Her research interests include Black feminist anthropology, Black feminist critical theory, gendered violence, Black political movements, abolition, memory, and affect studies. Her scholarship has received generous support from the CAETR, Ford, and Wenner Gren Foundations. She has published essays in Feminist Media Studies, SAPIENS, and in the edited volume Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and Intersectional Approaches (NYU Press, 2022). She was the co-host of Zora’s Daughters Podcast, a Black feminist anthropological intervention on popular culture and issues that concern Black women and queer and trans people. She received her Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Cultural Anthropology and a minor in Education from Duke University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University.
What the Reimagination of Breonna Taylor’s (After)Life Reveals
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Dr. Shaeeda Mensah, is an assistant professor of Philosophy and Women's & Gender Studies at McDaniel College. She earned her masters degree and Ph.D., in Philosophy, from Pennsylvania State University. She earned her Bachelors of Arts from Spelman College where she majored in Sociology. Her areas of research focus on the intersections of race and gender in considerations of state violence. More specifically, her research calls into question the implications of the near exclusive focus on Black boys and men in considerations of the racialized practices of state violence-mass incarceration and police violence. Her areas of teaching expertise include, but are not limited to, Social and Political Philosophy, Black feminisms, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Africana Philosophy, Ethics, Reproductive Justice and Logic.