FACULTY

Department Faculty

Amir Idris
Chair and Professor Office: Lowenstein 414E (LC) Email: idris@fordham.edu Phone: (212) 636-6180	Amir Idris is Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and Professor of African History and Politics. Dr. Idris was born and raised in Sudan and educated in Sudan, Egypt, and Canada. He received his Ph.D. in African History from Queen's University, Canada, in 2000. His teaching and research interests focus on the historyand politics of colonialism, on slavery and race, and on postcolonial citizenship in Northeast and Central Africa. He is the author of Sudan's Civil War: Slavery, Race and Formational Identities, 2001, and Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan 2005. He has also published several book chapters.
Mark D. Naison
Professor Office: Dealy Hall 640 (RH) Email: naison@fordham.edu Phone: (718) 817-3748	Mark D. Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, and Principal Investigator of the Bronx African American History Project. Naison is the author of over 100 articles on US history, sports, popular cultre, politics and urban studies. Naison is also the author of the award-winning book, Communism in Harlem During the Great Depression, and co-editor, with Ronald Lawson, of The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984. His most recent book was a memoir entitled Whiteboy, which was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and was the subject of feature stories on Black Entertainment Television, New York One News, and the Tavis Smiley Show on National Public Radio.
R. Bentley Anderson, S.J
Assoc. Chair and Assoc. Professor Office: Dealy Hall 637 (RH) Email: randerson13@fordham.edu Phone: (718) 817-3830	R. Bentley Anderson, S.J. is Associate Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies. A Jesuit from the New Orleans Province, Fr. Anderson’s research deals with the issue of race and religion in the southern United States and South Africa in the post-World War II period. He is the author of Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956 (Vanderbilt 2005) and several articles that deal with Jim Crow Catholicism. His course offerings focus on Trans-Atlantic race relations, South African history, and Religion & Civil Rights in the United States.
Irma Watkins-Owens
Associate Professor Office: Lowenstein 414D (LC) Email: watkinsowens@fordham.edu Phone: (212) 636-6363	Irma Watkins-Owens is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History. Her undergraduate courses include the African American Woman, Third World and the City, and African American History. Dr. Watkins-Owens teaches a graduate course in the History Department on African American women’s biography and life-writing. In the spring 2012 semester she will introduce a new graduate history course, Black Atlantic Migrations, which will examine the 20th century circulations of African descended people within the circum-Caribbean, North America and Europe. Her current research focuses on the migration experiences of southern African American and Caribbean women in early twentieth century New York as well as Caribbean immigrants in port cities of the 19th century. Dr. Watkins-Owens is the author of Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930.
Mark L. Chapman
Associate Professor Office: Dealy Hall 635 (RH) Email: chapman@fordham.edu Phone: (718) 817-3747	Mark L. Chapman is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and is currently involved in research about the black prison experience and its implications for black liberation theology. He seeks to contribute to a prophetic critique of the "criminal injustice" system, which has always incarcerated African American people at a highly disproportionate rate (blacks comprise roughly 13% of the U.S. population, but over 50% of the American prison population). While black theologians and church leaders have addressed many social, political and economic ills, they have not adequately confronted the incarceration binge and its impact on the African American community. His research seeks to address this crucial issue, paying special attention to the prophetic voices of prisoners themselves. Dr. Chapman is the author of Christianity on Trial: African American Religious Thought Before and After Black Power.
Fawzia Mustafa
Associate Professor Office: Lowenstein 925C (LC) Email: fmustafa@fordham.edu Phone: (212) 636-6364	Fawzia Mustafa is Associate Professor and holds a joint appointment with the English and African American and African Studies Departments. She is also affiliated with the Comparative Literature Program and the Women’s Studies Program, of which she is currently the co-director for Lincoln Center. She is the author of V.S. Naipaul (1995). Her current research project is a study of development and African Literatures. Her teaching areas include African literatures, other postcolonial literatures, and minority discourses of the US.
Oneka LaBennett
Associate Professor Office: Dealy Hall 638 (RH) Email: labennett@fordham.edu Phone: (718) 817-0594	Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is also Director of Fordham’s American Studies Program and Research Director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). LaBennett received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2002. Born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, New York, her teaching focuses on African Diasporic identities, popular youth culture, and West Indian migration. Under the auspices of the BAAHP, she is heading a hip hop history initiative which prioritizes uncovering women’s contributions to hip hop music and culture. Dr. LaBennett is the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2011), which examines how Brooklyn’s West Indian adolescent girls strategically negotiate transnational racial and gender identities as they interact with American and Caribbean popular culture. She is co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2012).
Aimee Meredith Cox
Assistant Professor Office: Lowenstein 426F (LC) Email: acox10@fordham.edu	Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of performance and African and African American Studies. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox's research and teaching interests include expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public anthropology; Black girlhood and Black feminist theory. She is currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (under contract with Duke University Press). Dr. Cox is also a choreographer and dancer. She trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the founder of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization that operates in Detroit, MI, Newark, NJ and Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Cox is the current co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the national Association of Black Anthropologists, on the editorial board of The Feminist Wire and on the founding editorial board of Public: A Journal of Imagining America.
Dr. Jane Kani Edward
Clinical Assistant Professor Office: Dealy Hall 636 (RH) Email: edward@fordham.edu Phone: (718) 817-3745	Dr. Jane Kani Edward was born and raised in southern Sudan, and educated in Sudan, Egypt and Canada. Edward received her Ph.D. in Sociology in Education from the University of Toronto in 2004. Currently she is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of African Immigration Research, Department of African and African American Studies, Fordham University. She teaches course on African history, women in Africa and contemporary African immigration to the United States. Edward’s areas of research interest center on refugee and immigrant women’s experience, human rights and education, gender, race, class and representation, gender issues in conflict and post-conflict situations, and African immigration to the United States. Dr. Edward carried out research work among southern Sudanese refugees and internally displaced persons in Egypt, Uganda and southern Sudan. She is the author of Sudanese Women Refugees: Transformations and Future Imaginings,2007, and several book chapters and articles.
Claude J. Mangum
Emeritus Associate Professor Email: mangum@fordham.edu	Claude J. Mangum, Emeritus Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, specializes in African American and Caribbean history. His research interests and publications pertain to the education of African Americans, and the experiences of African Americans in the Catholic Church. Dr. Mangum complements his scholarly pursuits by his engagement in many community service activities; formerly, as a civic association president, and presently, as an elected school board member.