Noni Carter

Noni Carter

PhD Candidate, Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University

Noni Carter is a historical and speculative fiction author. She has published work in RSA Journal, Kweli Journal (forthcoming August 2019), and is the author of the YA historical fiction novel, Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2010), winner of the Parent’s Choice Gold award. She is a 2016 graduate of Voices of Our Nation and the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work-in-progress novel Womb Talk. 

Noni is currently finishing a PhD in French and Francophone studies with a focus on memory, gender, and slavery in the literary traditions of the Black diaspora, specifically the French Caribbean. She works as editorial assistant with Small Axe Journal and as rapporteur for Columbia’s Cultural Memory Seminar. She served as a 2018-2019 grad fellow for the Institute on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has a forthcoming essay in volume 2 of theComparative Literary History of Modern Slavery book project.

Working Group Affiliation

Transnational Black Feminisms
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Chloé Samala Faux

Chloé Samala Faux

Chloé Samala Faux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation, “African Renaissance as Primal Scene: Fantasies of Death and Rebirth after Apartheid,” interrogates the historical and emergent dilemmas of black reproductivity in post-apartheid South Africa by way of black critical thought,  political economy and the institutional and intellectual developments of anthropology and psychoanalysis. Remarking a homology between originary accumulation, the incest taboo, and Frantz Fanon’s elaboration Negro Myth, the manuscript turns ethnographic scrutiny to the specters of sexual violence, illegal abortion, and the occult that dominate contemporary thematizations of South Africa’s crises in social reproduction. By way of the conjoined and redoubling discourses of psychoanalysis and anthropology, she interrogates the psychosexual and sociopolitical (re)-structuring of the family, to understand both the failures of 'transition' in South Africa and the insufficiencies of the culturalism that animates much black radical criticism.  Chloé is also affiliated  with The Institutes for Comparative Literature and Society and the Study for Sexuality and Gender. 

Working Group Affiliations:

Recovery

Transnational Black Feminisms

Premilla Nadasen

Premilla Nadasen

Professor of History, Barnard Collge

Premilla Nadasen is professor of history at Barnard College, a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar, and president of the National Women’s Studies Association.  She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color have fought for social justice.  She is the author of two award-winning books Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005) and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon 2015) and is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba. Nadasen has been engaged with community and campus activism for many years, bridging academic and activist work by making her scholarly work accessible to people outside of the university. She has worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Scholars for Social Justice, and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. She writes for both academic and non-academic outlets and speaks widely on issues of social justice, feminism, public policy and anti-racist organizing.

Working Group Affiliations

Social Justice After the Welfare State, Project Director

Transnational Black Feminisms, Project Director

Celia E. Naylor

Celia E. Naylor

Associate Professor, Africana Studies and History, Barnard College

Celia E. Naylor is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies and History at Barnard College. She has taught at various institutions, and she was the Director of the Margaret Sloss Women’s Center at Iowa State University from 1993-1997. Her interests include African-American and Caribbean history; Indigenous history; women's history and literature in the African Diaspora; and colonialism and neocolonialism in the Caribbean. Most of her published work explores the multifaceted connections between people of African descent and Indigenous descent in the U.S. She was one of the coordinators of the historic conference, “‘Eating Out of the Same Pot’: Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories,” held at Dartmouth College in April 2000. Her book, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in May 2008 (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture). Her current book project is a microhistory of enslaved people’s experiences (with a particular focus on enslaved women’s lives) at Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica. It will include an interdisciplinary critique of the legend of the “White Witch of Rose Hall” and a digital component to present a counternarrative to this mythology. She also works with a non-profit organization, the Institute for Strategic and Equitable Development, that centers on philanthropy-focused initiatives grounded in racial equity and promotes impactful grantmaking, investments, and economic development in communities of color.  

Working Group Affiliations

The Digital Black Atlantic

Transnational Black Feminisms, Project Director

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert is a political anthropologist and a gender studies scholar. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Mashriq&Mahjar, Merip, Rusted Radishes, Kohl journal for Body and Gender Research, Jadaliyya, among other journals. She is currently working on two research projects. Her book manuscript Future Returns: Labor, Revolution and Sudan in the Middle East follows Sudanese migrant workers in Lebanon and migrant returnees in subsistence farming communities in Sudan during a time of economic and political upheaval in both countries. Her second project, “Sex and the Civil War”, examines the political economy of sex in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

Destiny Spruill

Destiny Spruill

Graduate Research Assistant, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University

Working Group Affiliation

Black Atlantic Ecologies

Brendane Tynes

Brendane Tynes

Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Columbia University

Brendane Tynes is a queer Black feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. She received her Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Education from Duke University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she studies the affective responses of Black people to multiple forms of violence within the Movement for Black Lives. Her scholarship receives generous support from the Ford Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is co-host of Zora’s Daughters Podcast, a Black feminist anthropological take on popular culture and issues that concern Black women and queer and trans people. Outside of academe, you can find Brendane dancing, singing, writing poetry, and creating healing spaces for survivors of interpersonal violence, who sit at the center of her commitment to Black feminist anti-oppression work.

Working Group Affiliation

Transnational Black Feminisms, Research Assistant