African and African American Studies Affiliated Faculty Program

Alexandra M. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Fordham. Her teaching and research focus on African and African diasporic art histories with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and migration. Currently, she is writing about the Black queer feminist errantry of the artist Mildred Thompson.

Aly is also an art critic: her writing can be found in Hyperallergic, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, and various exhibition catalogs. Prior to Fordham, she curated the exhibitions “Paul Camacho: El Ritmo y La Unidad” at MoCA Westport, and “Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art” at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

Brandy Monk-Payton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in African & African American Studies at Fordham University. Her academic interests include the theories and histories of African American media representation and cultural production. She is currently writing her first book, Blackness in the Limelight, which focuses on the aesthetics and cultural politics of contemporary Black celebrities. She is also working on a long-term research project on television and Black Lives Matter. Her work has been published in edited collections such as Unwatchable and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry as well as the journals Film Quarterly, Women's Studies in Communication, Feminist Media Histories, and Communication, Culture and Critique. 

Christina M. Greer, PhD is an Associate Professor of Political Science and American Studies at Fordham University (Lincoln Center Campus). She was the 2018 Fellow for the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University Silver School of Social Work. Her primary research and teaching interests are racial and ethnic politics, American urban centers, presidential politics, and campaigns and elections. Her additional research interests also include transportation, mayors and public policy in urban centers. Her previous work has compared criminal activity and political responses in Boston and Baltimore as well as Baltimore and St. Louis. Prof. Greer's book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013 ) investigates the increasingly ethnically diverse black populations in the US from Africa and the Caribbean and was the recipient of the WEB du Bois Best Book Award in 2014 given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Professor Greer is currently working on a manuscript detailing the political contributions of Barbara Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Stacey Abrams. She recently co-edited Black Politics in Transition, which explores gentrification, suburbanization, and immigration of Blacks in America.

Dennis Tyler is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in African American literature and culture, disability studies, Black studies, critical race studies, popular culture, and performance studies. He is the author of Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (NYU Press, 2022; winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Book Award for Literary Scholarship or Criticism; honourable mention for the Robert K. Martin Book Prize; and a finalist for the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History [ASALH] Book Prize). The book examines how the color line has been shaped as much by disability as it has by race, sexuality, gender, geography, photography, and sound, and it analyzes how Black writers and activists have rigorously engaged disability both as a response to forms of discrimination and in the twin pursuit of racial and disability justice.

His essays and reviews have appeared in African American Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Gender: Space, The Feminist Wire, Oxford Bibliographies, American Literary History Online Review, and elsewhere. His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. He has taught courses on Oprah’s Book Club, African American autobiography, Black disability studies, Black women novelists, epistolary novels, literary adaptations, and Black protest.

H. Shellae Versey is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. Her research focuses on aging in place, neighborhoods, and housing. Shellae's work engages themes of research and advocacy, exploring how older adults aging in place experience neighborhood change. One of her current projects include the Fighting Displacement Study, a nationwide study examining drivers of displacement (e.g., eviction) among precariously housed women. Shellae graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in Psychology, and MS in Epidemiology.  Her teaching now focuses on social psychology, issues of intersectionality, housing, and environmental justice.

Isaie Dougnon’s research examines migration, work, and lifecycle in West Africa. Before coming to Fordham, Isaie was a professor of Anthropology at the University of Bamako in Mali where he taught courses on the anthropology of development, migration, and local knowledge. After publishing his first book, Travail de Blanc, Travail de Noir (Karthala 2007), Dr. Dougnon published several articles contributing to current debates on child labor. His work uses historical and anthropological approaches to offer a local perspective on labor and migration in colonial and post-colonial Africa. From 2008-2012, he directed the UNESCO-University of Bamako research program Water and Migration. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, Crises of Passage, which examines how Malian civil servants engage in secret societies and ritual practices to overcome career impasses and moral crises. Dr. Dougnon has contributed to the debate on the Malian political and humanitarian crisis of 2012 by publishing essays in local and international newspapers and journals. His most recent research examines the crisis of academic freedom and higher education in Mali after the end of dictatorship. Hehas held several fellowships, including at the Humboldt Foundation, Re:Work (Humboldt University, Berlin), and the Fulbright Foundation. His work has appeared in many journals and edited collections, including Humanity, African Economic History, African Identities, and Hommes & Migrations.

Jordan Alexander Stein is a book historian whose research focuses on methods for literary history––with particular interest in the ways that social identities (including religion, race, and sexuality) inflect material practices (like reading, editing, or printing).  With Lara Langer Cohen he co-edited Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and in the same year co-directed the American Antiquarian Society's summer seminar in the history of the book, on "African American Cultures of Print."  A scholarly monograph on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reading in the Protestant Atlantic, When Novels Were Books, was published in 2020 with Harvard University Press.  Stein also writes critical non-fiction for venues such as Avidly, The Awl, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Salon, and Slate.  A book-length extension of this work, on reading literary theory in the 1990s, was published on the "Avidly Reads" series from NYU Press in 2019.  A related monograph, Fantasies of Nina Simone, will be published in 2023.  He’s currently thinking a lot about textual transmission and doing some research on print practices in early Haiti.

Julie Chun Kim is an Associate Professor of English. She has published articles on eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights, natural history, and early Caribbean plantation economies. She is currently writing a book manuscript about the Afro-Caribbean artist John Tyley and his work as a botanical illustrator in the early Atlantic world. Her research and teaching interests include early Caribbean literature and culture, the early Americas, the eighteenth century, empire and colonialism, slavery, the history of science, food, and the environment.

Michele Prettyman is a scholar of African American cinema, visual and popular culture, and a media consultant. Her recent publications include “The Persistence of Wild Style: Hip Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation” in the In Focus Series on Black Liquidity issue in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She also contributed an essay to a recent anthology called, The Lemonade Reader entitled, “To Feel Like A “Natural Woman”: Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé and the Ecological Spirituality of Lemonade.” In 2019 she co-edited and contributed to a “Close Up” series in Black Camera journal focusing on the “New York Scene of black independent filmmaking in New York. She also published in the online journal World Records in its recent issue “Documenting Blackness at the National Museum of African American History and Culture” in 2020.

Dr. Mónica Rivera Mindt, a board-certified neuropsychologist, is Past-President of the Hispanic Neuropsychological Society and a tenured Professor of Psychology, Latinx Studies, and African & African American Studies at Fordham University with a joint appointment in Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her multidisciplinary, community-based research is funded by the NIH/National Institute of Aging (NIA) and Genentech. Her work primarily focuses on the intersection between cultural neuroscience and health disparities in cognitive aging. Her current studies are examining genetic, cerebrovascular, and sociocultural risk factors for cognitive impairment and dementia in Latinx, Black, and Indigenous adults, as well as ways to increase diverse representation in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research. In addition, she is Co-Lead of the NIA-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative’s (ADNI) Diversity Task Force. She has authored ~100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters dedicated to three lines of inquiry, including: 1) the effects of biopsychosociocultural factors on cognitive aging;  2)  how  sociocultural  factors impact the expression of neurologic disease, cognition, and health behaviors; and 3) the identification of resilience and modifiable factors to promote brain health in vulnerable and underserved populations.

Sasha Ann Panaram is an Assistant Professor of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in African & African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her doctoral degree in English from Duke University in 2020, where she also completed certificates in African & African American Studies, Feminist Studies, and College Teaching. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century African American and Caribbean literature and culture, with a particular interest in women’s and gender studies and slavery studies. Panaram is currently working on a book that examines rewritings of the Middle Passage in fictive works by African American and Caribbean writers with an eye towards Black movements that outlive the transatlantic slave trade. Her academic writing has been published in The Black Scholar. Other public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. From 2018 to 2020, she served as co-host of the weekly webcast Left of Black, a series featuring interviews with Black Studies scholar-activists who work on art, literature, history, and politics.

Subha Mani is an Associate Professor of Economics and a Research Associate at the Center for International Policy Studies at Fordham University. Subha also holds a Research Affiliate position at the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania and Research Fellow positions at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) and Global Labor Organization (GLO). She has her BA (honors) degree in economics from Delhi University, Masters degrees in economics from Mumbai University, and a Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Southern California. Her areas of specialization are development economics, labor economics, health, education, program evaluation, field experiments, applied econometrics, and applied microeconomics. Subha’s main area of interest is in understanding the causes and pathways through which human capital (health, education, vocational training, language training) can be accumulated for young children and adults and has examined these issues specifically using large scale panel data sets from Indonesia, India, Ethiopia, Peru, and Vietnam. Subha has worked on numerous experimental and non-experimental evaluation studies. She has additionally undertaken extensive primary data collection, fieldwork, and management in India, Sierra Leone and Azerbaijan. Her scholarly work has received external funding from the International Growth Center – India Central, 3ie (International Initiatives for Impact Evaluation), and Grand Challenges Canada.

Tom De Luca is a life-long New Yorker, and Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, where he created and is Director of its International Studies Program.  He specializes in the study of democracy and politics in the U.S. and abroad, with additional interest in China. Before coming to Fordham, he was an activist and directed public interest advocacy organizations working on issues of peace and social justice. De Luca is the author or co-author of four books, including: Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.  He comments on politics for major national, international, and local TV, radio, and print and has written op-eds for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Baltimore Sun, and other outlets. He was the Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Social Studies, at the University of Amsterdam, and Honorary Professor of Political Science at Sun Yat-sen University, and China University of Political Science and Law, P.R.C.

Yuko Miki is Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University, specializing in slavery in Brazil and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. She is the author of Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil [cambridge.org] (Cambridge, 2018), in which she demonstrates how the intersecting histories of the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas were foundational to the formation of race, citizenship, and nation in nineteenth-century Brazil. Frontiers of Citizenship won numerous awards including the 2019 Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Warren Dean Memorial Prize for Brazilian History from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). She is currently writing her new book, Emancipation's Shadow: Stories of Illegal Slavery, for which she has received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She has authored various works in English in Portuguese and is also working on a project on a Kongo-based society in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, in which she interrogates the possibilities and limitations of documentary archives in writing about African people's lives under slavery. In 2021 Fordham recognized Miki's scholarship with a Distinguished Research Award in the Humanities. She serves on the Editorial Board of The Americas and is Chair-Elect of CLAH's Brazil section.