2023-24 Events

Panelists and Workshop Leaders

AKISSI BRITTON, Assistant Professor, received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), with certificates in Women’s Studies and Africana Studies. Her research interests, broadly defined, are on the intersections of race, gender, and African diasporic religions, specifically Orisa/Lucumí tradition; Black feminisms; diaspora/Black Atlantic theory; gentrification and neoliberal urban development; and the importance of the digital in the study of diasporic communities. She is currently preparing her book manuscript, tentatively titled The Children of Cotton: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Lucumí Religion, which is an ethnographic examination of African American practitioners of Lucumí/Santería religion and their interactions with other practitioners of the various denominations of Orisa traditions throughout the African Diaspora. .

KIM D. BUTLER, Associate Professor, received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 1995, and holds M.A.s in History from Johns Hopkins and Howard Universities. She is a historian specializing in African diaspora studies with a focus on Brazil and Latin America/Caribbean. Two of her courses, "Afro-Atlantic Diaspora" and "Afro-Brazilian History" engage students with diaspora studies directly. Dr. Butler also brings her training in material and oral history, and her curating experience at the Smithsonian Institution, to a special course in Advanced Methodologies for Africana Studies Research. She is the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies, and is also a member of the graduate faculty in History. Professor Butler is the author of Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition Sao Paulo and Salvador, winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association, and the Letitia Woods Brown Publication Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She was twice awarded the Fulbright Fellowship. From 2011-2015, she served as President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Butler has published numerous articles on Afro-Brazilian history and, more recently, diaspora theory. Her current work applies advances in diaspora studies to new interpretations of African diaspora history. Her most recent book, Diásporas Imaginadas, is a collaborative project placing African diaspora theory in dialogue with Afro-Brazilian history. 

LOPÖN KARLA JACKSON-BREWER, MS is a Lecturer in the Women’s & Gender Studies Department and the Africana Studies Department at Rutgers, The State University where she teaches courses on the dynamics of race, gender and class, the African diasporic experience, and how gender occurs in numerous spiritual systems. She is a Co- founder of Sine Qua Non: Allies in Healing, an Integrative Therapy Practice in New York City. She has developed and offered many workshops and trainings for organizations that focus on, race, gender, class, equity and structural oppression, Emotional Intelligence, meditation, spirituality and the Sacred Feminine.

Lopön Karla is an experienced Chöd practitioner, and has taught the Namkai Norpu Rinpoche Chöd for over 10 years among other tantric practices.. She is the Co-Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Council and is a senior teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism at Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center. She is an initiated priest in the West African spiritual system of Ifa.

Lopön Karla is a poet, and a writer. Her work can be found in Skin Deep, Afrikan Wisdoms, and Poetic People Power: Three Spoken Word Shows for Social Change.

SHANNA JEAN-BAPTISTE is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching interests lie in Francophone West African and Caribbean literature, with a special emphasis on Haitian literature. Her expertise extends to identity formation, gender politics, visual art, music, and Afrofuturist aesthetics within the Francophone context.

Her current book manuscript, Global Jim Crow South: Mapping Jim Crow Violence and Intimacies across Haiti and the U.S. South, contends that Jim Crow violence shaped and was shaped by the U.S. empire. It centers Haiti as a crucial focal point for understanding the global scope of Jim Crow violence and argues that the violence that structured the 1915-1934 American occupation of Haiti was not peripheral but integral to the racial violence of the Jim Crow South. Her second book project delves into expressions of futurity and Afrofuturism in the Francophone world.

She holds a joint Ph.D. from Yale in French and African American Studies.

BRITTNEY COOPER is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies. Prof. Cooper is also the Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers. Her books include Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, winner of the 2018 Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood (co-authored with Susana Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner) a Kirkus top Young Adult Book of 2021 and a nominee for the Garden State Teen Book Award from the New Jersey Library Association; Stand Up!: 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change; and The Crunk Feminist Collection (co-edited with Susana Morris and Robin Boylorn). Cooper co-founded the Crunk Feminist Collective, a Hip Hop Generation Feminist Collective of Women of Color Activists and Scholars. They ran the highly successful Crunk Feminist Collective Blog which was named a top blog by New York Magazine in 2011. Today, they co-edit The Remix, a weekly substack newsletter.

Dr. Cooper has also been awarded prizes or been a named finalist for several awards related to her digital commentary. She is currently a contributor at The Cut/New York Magazine and she is a former columnist at Salon.com, Cosmopolitan.com, and a former contributor at Time.com. Dr. Cooper frequently appears as a commentator on MSNBC and NPR, has appeared in several documentaries on Netflix and PBS, and her commentary has been published at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ebony Magazine, Essence Magazine, Time Magazine, Marie Claire, PBS and many other outlets. In 2016, she gave a TED Talk for TED Women on "the Racial Politics of Time." To date, her talk has been viewed over 1 million times. She has been named to The Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers four times.

An award-winning teacher, Professor Cooper teaches courses on race, gender, and sexuality, Hip Hop, Black Intellectual History, and Black Feminist Thought. She was the 2016 recipient of the Masters Level Teaching Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools.

TIMOTHY MCGHEE is an African American initiated priest in the Yoruba Ifa and Lukumi traditions. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York as a double major in Black Studies and Anthropology. Tim continued his studies to pursue a Master’s degree from Columbia University in Anthropology. Currently, Timothy is a 4th year PhD student at Rutgers University in the Anthropology department and a Mellon-Mays fellow. His background as a priest and scholar is evidence of his passion to serve humanity as a cultural custodian, and preserver of Afro-diasporic religious and cultural traditions.

Timothy’s dissertation work focuses on studying Afro-diasporic religious communities that consequently informed social justice movements, guided the formation of political and social systems of governance, and he continuously writes and works to provide African centered religious context to the many instantiations of revolutions in the Americas. He resides in the south Bronx and was born and raised in New Jersey. Because of his love and respect for his own community, Timothy has a deep-seated desire to work in impoverished communities and areas where minority populations are underserved. Timothy writes and teaches to contribute both to the Academy’s, and the community’s understanding of class, race, sexuality, indigeneity, spirituality, and religion.

MWANGAZA MICHAEL-BANDELE, Ph.D. —veteran educator, facilitator, and higher education administrator—is a cultural strategist and healer who prepares individuals and organizations to vision and achieve highly. With a terminal degree in history, Dr. Michael-Bandele uses skills of the historian's craft to track behavioral patterns that inform individual and organizational practices.

As a former executive, Dr. Michael-Bandele directed multi-million dollar federally-funded teacher education programs throughout the United States before semi-retiring. She currently operates the Blacknificent Life! Education Complex, a digital learning center that teaches people of African descent how great they already are—and how to become even greater.

Dr. Michael-Bandele enjoys nothing more than activating individual and organizational strengths, often undistinguished. As a mother, grandmother, and community resource, she is honored to bring maternal wisdom to efforts that celebrate, heal, and expand human capacity.

WILSON KWAMOGI OKELLO, Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work engages Black critical theories to advance research on Black being and becoming. Most immediately, he is concerned with how Black critical approaches make visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagining otherwise possibilities for Black being therein. His work also centers on Blackness as a critical focal point in knowledge production, challenging traditional paradigms that often marginalize or objectify Black experiences. By foregrounding Black epistemologies, his work embraces methodological approaches rooted in Black ways of knowing, being, and relating. This involves not only the application of existing methods but also the creation of new ones attuned to the nuances of Black living and cultural production. He is the author of On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human: Toward Black Specificity in Higher Education (SUNY Press).

SHANTEE ROSADO is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latinx Studies in the Africana Studies and Latino and Caribbean Studies departments at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Sociology with a certificate in Latin American and Latinx Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. Her work examines racial inequalities and identities among Latinxs in the U.S. and Latin America, as well as Afro-Latinxs in popular culture. Professor Rosado's current book project, titled “Latinxs and the Emotional Politics of Race and Blackness in the U.S.,” examines how collective emotions shape the racial and political ideologies of second-generation Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Central Florida. In addition to her solo-authored book project, she is currently co-authoring a manuscript entitled “The Sociology of Cardi B: A Black/Trap Feminist Approach.” Professor Rosado is a proud member of the Black Latinas Know Collective.

BRENDANE A. TYNES (she/they) is an Afro-Carolinian queer Black feminist scholar and storyteller who received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research interests include Black feminist critical theory, gendered violence, Black political movements, memory, and affect studies. She was the co-host of Zora’s Daughters Podcast and is now the host of black. loved. free., a spiritual-political podcast nestled at the intersection of Black feminist political theory and Black and Indigenous spirituality and healing. She is the co-founder and President of She is the World, Inc., a political and arts education nonprofit that creates programming for Black girls, nonbinary youth, and Black women. Outside of the academy, you can find Brendane dancing, singing, writing, and creating healing spaces for survivors of interpersonal violence. They sit at the center of her commitment to Black feminist abolitionist anti-oppression work.

ALESSANDRA WILLIAMS, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Rutgers University-New Brunswick who researches dance, sexuality, race, gender, and transnationalism. Her anthology Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice was published with her co-editors Ananya Chatterjea and Hui Niu Wilcox. Her solo-book project “Bittersweet” identifies artistic and historical foundations for queer black dance based on the choreographies and dance-films of David Roussève and the REALITY dance company. And as a senior Yorchhā educator, vinyasa yoga instructor, and Africanist aesthetic practitioner, she facilitates workshops on movement, vocal-work, and intergenerational memory.