Faith Adiele
Professor Adiele teaches in the creative writing programs at California College of the Arts (San Francisco, Calif., USA) and Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program (Portland, Maine, USA). Her writing classes focus on decolonial travel writing and hybrid (multiracial/multigenre) memoir; her literature courses specialize in contemporary African literature, the literature of intersectional passing, and international Young Adult (YA) literature and film.
Her memoir Meeting Faith, an account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun (Norton 2004), received the PEN Open Book Award and is widely taught in American universities. She is also writer of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about finding her family in Nigeria, author of The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a tri-cultural digital chapbook about black women and fibroids, and co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology.
Professor Adiele founded the USA’s first writing workshop for travelers of color through the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, writes a weekly travel column for Detour: Best Stories in Black Travel, which appears in the Miami Herald, and is senior editor of Decolonising Travel in UK-based journal Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. She also hosts an African Book Club at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora and produces Africana content for the Calm meditation app.
She is currently at work on the USA’s first decolonial travel craft book (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) and several hybrid chapbooks about her Nigerian-Nordic-American heritage (forthcoming from Texas Review Press).
Benjamin Mier-Cruz
Benjamin Mier-Cruz
Benjamin Mier-Cruz is an assistant professor of Scandinavian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research examines Nordic writers and filmmakers of color and intersectional representations of gender, sexuality, and race. Their research also explores transgender cinema and the figure of the vampire in literature and film. Their current book project studies constructions of subjecthood and self-representation by filmmakers of color in Swedish documentary cinema and visual culture.
Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo
Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo
Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo (she/her) is a Fulani, Norwegian and Danish, black feminist ethnographer. Oda-Kange is currently finishing her PhD in Gender Studies at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Her research focuses on conceptualizations of blackness, community building and black study among African-Norwegian youth. Her work is grounded in black-queer-feminist liberatory approaches to learning. Recent publications include a chapter in the anthology “Rasisme: forskningen, fenomenet, erfaringene” (Universitetsforlaget, 2022) and two articles with a zine published in Teaching Anthropology Journal on “Decolonizing the Anthropological Classroom” (2021), co-authored with Nico Miskow Friborg.
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter is an Afrofeminist Cultural Studies analyst. Her work focuses on understanding articulations of racism in post-racial Europe, specifically how Nordic Exceptionalism affects public memory and racial discourse in Denmark. Through original interviews and text analysis, Elizabeth examines how the multifaceted condition of Black racial isolation has impacted subjectivity formation among diverse first-generation Danish people of African descent (like herself) between 1905-2021.
Jasmine Kelekay
Jasmine Kelekay
Jasmine Kelekay is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work examines the ways in which ideas about Blackness are both circulated globally and shaped by local contexts, histories, and material conditions, with a focus on the Nordic context. Situated at the intersection of African diaspora studies, sociology, critical criminology, and cultural studies, Kelekay employs interdisciplinary methods informed by Black/Afrofeminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Her current book project investigates the racialized politics of crime control in the Swedish welfare state by examining how Black communities in Sweden are targeted by, experience, navigate, and resist racialized policing. Grounded in community-engaged Black feminist ethnography, Kelekay illustrates how Afro-Swedish communities are criminalized through intersecting logics of antiblackness, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant racism, revealing how Blackness is policed at the intersections of the various modalities through which it is lived. Her work has been published in journals including Annual Review of Sociology, City & Community, Social Currents, and Open Cultural Studies. Forthcoming works include the co-authored article Letter Writing as Counter Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice," to be published in Meridians.
Kelekay earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Sociology with a designated emphasis in Black Studies. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. As an Afro-Finland-Swedish scholar, Kelekay is publicly engaged in both Sweden and Finland, where she also continues to work with community organizations and activists.
Monica Miller
Monica L. Miller, Professor of English and Africana Studies, joined the faculty of Barnard in 2001. Professor Miller specializes in African-American and American literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American literature, film, and contemporary art; contemporary literature and cultural studies of the black diaspora; performance studies; and intersectional studies of race, gender, and sexuality.
Monica Miller
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and English, Barnard College, Columbia University
Monica L. Miller is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and English at Barnard College, Columbia University. A specialist in contemporary African American and Afro-diasporic literature and cultural studies, she is the author of the award-winning book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. A grantee from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, she is a frequent commentator in the media and arts worlds and teaches and writes about black literature, art, and performance, fashion cultures, and contemporary Black European culture and politics. She is at work on a book project, Blackness Swedish Style: Race and the Rhizomatics of Being, which considers cultural production by the emerging black community in Sweden and its connection to black European identity formation and cultural/political movements.
Working Group: Afronordic Feminisms
Books Edited:
Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity Duke University Press, 2009.
Ellen Nyman
Ellen Nyman is a trained actress and has a practice in theater, film, and television, in both Denmark and Sweden. Ellen is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts, in the Acting Department with a focus on how black actors in Sweden and Denmark create strategies to navigate within the white gaze, a perspective that surrounds cultural institutions, aesthetic norms and the audience in a historical and national context. The aim is to shed light on the interplay between the conscious work with the body as a symbolic tool and the site-specific influence on how race / ethnicity is constructed.
Nyman was a member of the Danish Arts Council 2007-2011 and returned to Stockholm in 2011. From 2016-18 she was an expert at the Nordic Culture Fund and at the moment, she is a member of the board of the Swedish Arts Council.
Nana Osei-Kofi
Nana Osei-Kofi
Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A critical feminist scholar, her current research centers on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally and Sweden specifically. Osei-Kofi has published a wide range of articles and book chapters on the AfroSwedish condition and has a forthcoming single-authored book titled Identity and Kinship: AfroSwedish Places of Belonging. Osei-Kofi is also the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Meridians that will be available in early May 2023, and that highlights scholarship on European BIPOC Feminisms and Queer of Color Critiques.
Lena Sawyer
Lena Sawyer
Lena Sawyer is a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the Department of Social Work at Gothenburg University, Sweden. I am interested in exploring creative and revolutionary pedagogies, methodologies, and collective knowledge-making practices. During the last few years, I have worked collaboratively on exploratory Arts-Based projects. For example one project with Nana Osei-Kofi, engaged the coloniality of Swedish public commemoration (a performance paper and video installation around the statue The Iron Well in Gothenburg). Another, together with the writing group Kollektiv Omsorg, co-created practices of black feminist care through letter writing.
Temi Odumosu
Temi Odumosu
Temi Odumosu is an interdisciplinary scholar and curator at the University of Washington Information School, with a teaching focus on critical and creative approaches to understanding information technology’s role within society, particularly how unfinished colonial histories and their inequalities haunt data, uses of information and technology design. Her research and curatorial work are engaged with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, racial coding in popular culture, postmemorial art and performance, image ethics and cultural heritage digitization. Overall, she is focused on the ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. Dr. Odumosu is author of the book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017).
Tess Skadegård Thorsen
Tess Skadegård Thorsen
Tess Skadegård Thorsen, PhD (she/her/hers), is a keynote speaker, researcher, educator, and consultant, specialized in representation in tech, media, and film practices. A former founding editor of the Danish decolonial journal, Marronage, and former managing editor of the Danish journal for gender research, Tess was awarded the 2022 Kraka Award for Danish gender research. Her research has been published internationally including in 'Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Practice & Power' and 'Black Film British Cinema II'.
Ayesha Verma
Ayesha Verma is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. She has a bachelor's in Biology and a prior master's in Gender and Sexuality. She has been a Commonwealth Youth and British Council Fellow [2013] for her work with sex workers in the red light district of Delhi. Ayesha is currently writing her dissertation on "Performing Stage Corpses in Early Modern British Drama" in which she particularly navigates the existing construction of binaries between subject/object, player/property, and how the stage corpse constantly defies, destabilizes, and dismantles these binaries.
This study, she feels, offers a way of reading early modern plays that are both feminist and queer; one that allows a re-reading of early modern histories as we re-read such plays.
Working Group Affiliation: