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.
Eve Powell
Fellow, History, University of Pennsylvania
Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002).
Eve Powell
Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). She has also written a number of articles on the history of African slavery in the Nile valley, and on Saint Josephine Bakhita, a former Sudanese slave canonized in 2000.
Troutt Powell received her B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught for ten years at The University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Troutt Powell is now working on a book about the memory of slavery in the Nile valley, which examines how slaves and slaveholders wrote, sang or talked about the experience of servitude and its meaning in their societies. Both her research and her teaching explore the relationship between Africa and the Middle East, and thus connect her closely to Africana Studies and African Studies at Penn.
Sherie Randolph
Fellow, History and Afro American and African Studies, University of Michigan
Sherie Randolph is assistant professor of History and Afro American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, Randolph received her Ph.D. from New York University in 19th- and 20th-century American history with concentrations in African Diaspora and women and gender history.
Sherie Randolph
Assistant Professor of History and Afro American and African Studies, University of Michigan
Sherie Randolph is assistant professor of History and Afro American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, Randolph received her Ph.D. from New York University in 19th- and 20th-century American history with concentrations in African Diaspora and women and gender history. She has received several grants and fellowships for her work, most recently being awarded fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Rutgers University’s Institute for Research on Women and the Center for Race and Ethnicity. Randolph’s principal teaching and research interests focus on the historical intersections of race, gender, class and empire in the United States. She is currently revising a book manuscript titledBlack Feminist Radical: Florynce “Flo” Kennedy.
Jon S. Sensbach
Fellow, History, University of Florida
Professor Jon Sensbach received his Ph.D. in 1991 in early American history from Duke University, his B.A. in 1980 from the University of Virginia. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 1998 after teaching at the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi. He teaches the Department’s foundation graduate course on early America and has recently taught a graduate seminar on the Black Atlantic as well as undergraduate courses on the Atlantic slave trade, colonial America, and the American Revolution.
Jon S. Sensbach
Professor of History, University of Florida
Professor Jon Sensbach received his Ph.D. in 1991 in early American history from Duke University, his B.A. in 1980 from the University of Virginia. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 1998 after teaching at the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi. He teaches the Department’s foundation graduate course on early America and has recently taught a graduate seminar on the Black Atlantic as well as undergraduate courses on the Atlantic slave trade, colonial America, and the American Revolution. Professor Sensbach has been an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center and an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. His most recent book is Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard, 2005), and he is also the author of A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (North Carolina 1998). He is at work on a study of religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world.
Carla Shedd
Fellow, Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center
Carla Shedd's work focuses on timely issues related to criminal justice; race, law and society; social inequality; and urban policy. Her current research centers on New York City’s juvenile justice system, specifically investigating how young people’s institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum. She is the author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), which explores obstacles facing urban adolescents in Chicago; the book received the 2015 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race, Gender, and Class. Shedd has been published in the American Sociological Review and Sociological Methods & Research. Shedd’s current research examines the juvenile justice system in New York City, investigating how young people’s linked institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum.
Carla Shedd
Associate Professor, Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center
Carla Shedd's work focuses on timely issues related to criminal justice; race, law and society; social inequality; and urban policy. Her current research centers on New York City’s juvenile justice system, specifically investigating how young people’s institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum. She is the author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), which explores obstacles facing urban adolescents in Chicago; the book received the 2015 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race, Gender, and Class. Shedd has been published in the American Sociological Review and Sociological Methods & Research. Shedd’s current research examines the juvenile justice system in New York City, investigating how young people’s linked institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum.
George Emilio Sanchez
Fellow, Social Practice Artist, Abrons Arts Center
George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social activist living and working on the ancestral homelands of the Lenapehoking, or Land of the Lenape, today known as Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he premiered XIV at Dixon Place in New York City in 2019. He recently was named the Keith Haring Fellow by the MacDowell in New Hampshire, and he is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York City.
George Emilio Sanchez
Performance Artist and Activist
George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social activist living and working on the ancestral homelands of the Lenapehoking, or Land of the Lenape, today known as Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he premiered XIV at Dixon Place in New York City in 2019. He recently was named the Keith Haring Fellow by the MacDowell in New Hampshire, and he is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York City. He teaches at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and is the Performance Director for Emergenyc, a program that explores the intersection between arts and activism. Following the premiere of his latest work In the Court of the Conqueror at Abrons Arts Center in March 2022, the piece will be presented at Su Teatro in Denver, Co. and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.
Working Group Affiliations
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project
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.
Alexei "Lex" Taylor
Alexei “Lex” Taylor (Independent) is an award-winning chef, cookbook author, TV personality, and explorer. Through BBQ, bushcraft, leather craft, knife making, and foraging, Lex explores traditional knowledge, skills, and how the understanding of these principles forges a strong bond and appreciation for the natural world. As a chef, he hosts private, forest-table tasting menus in alternative spaces such as in the forest, barns, and even abandoned castles. He is the author of Grill Fire (Sterling Epicure 2016) and The Unofficial Bridgerton Cookbook (Simon & Shuster, 2021). He has made several appearances on Food Network, Esquire, and Sponsored Media Tours. As an explorer, Lex has travelled extensively throughout the world, learning and working with cultures who still rely on ancestral knowledge for survival. From the Sahara and Atacama deserts, to the jungles of Central America, West Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and as far north as Inuit hunting villages on Baffin Island, his quest is not just to learn but to share that knowledge back home through field guides, workshops, and lectures with the outdoor company, Fjällräven (Field guide and spokesman since 2016).
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'.
Leti Volpp
Fellow, Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Leti Volpp
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Leti Volpp is Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Center for Race and Gender at University of California Berkeley Boalt School of Law. Volpp, is scholar of both law and the humanities, writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law(2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002),“Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review(2001), and many other articles.
Working Group Affiliation
Dubravka Žarkov
Fellow, Social Studies, The Hague
Dubravka Žarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Her fields of expertise are gender and its intersections with sexuality, ethnicity and religion; violent conflict, war and militarism, including gender based sexual violence and communalism, and visual and textual representations of war, violence, and soldiering. She also works on masculinity and sexual violence in wars against men. Among her publications are: Conflict, Peace, Security and Development: Theories and Methodologies (with Helen Hintjens, 2015); Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (with Marlies Glasius, 2014); Gender, Violent Conflict, and Development (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007); and The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, (with Cynthia Cockburn, 2002). One of her most recent articles is on faith and feminism.
Dubravka Žarkov
Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development, International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
Dubravka Žarkov is Associate Professor Emerita of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Her fields of expertise are gender and its intersections with sexuality, ethnicity and religion; violent conflict, war and militarism, including gender based sexual violence and communalism; and visual and textual representations of war, violence, and soldiering. She also works on masculinity and sexual violence in wars against men. Among her publications are: Conflict, Peace, Security and Development: Theories and Methodologies (with Helen Hintjens, 2015); Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (with Marlies Glasius, 2014); Gender, Violent Conflict, and Development (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007); and The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping (with Cynthia Cockburn, 2002). One of her most recent articles is on faith and feminism.
Working Group Affiliation