Visiting Scholars 2009 - 2010
Daphne Brooks - Fall 2009
Daphne A. Brooks is a specialist in African-American literature and culture, performance studies, cultural studies, and popular music culture. Her research interests include nineteenth-century African-American literature; black theatre history & culture; popular music Studies; black satire; African-American literary & cultural theory; black feminist criticism and Theory; and contemporary black bohemian culture. Professor Brooks is the recipient of the 2007 Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American Theater Studies (for her book Bodies in Dissent). She is also the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement, the U.C. President's post-doctoral fellowship and was a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. She serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Center of African American Studies.
Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.
Dr. Obery Hendricks has been called one of the most provocative and innovative commentators on the intersection of religion, politics and social policy in America today. A widely sought lecturer and media spokesperson, Dr. Hendricks’ media appearances include C-SPAN, PBS, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera Television, NHK Japan Television, Air-America, Radio One, Fox News, the Bloomberg Network, among others. He is a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee, a member of the National Religious Leaders Advisory Committee of the Barack Obama presidential campaign, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress (a Washington, DC think-tank) and a featured writer for Godspolitics.com and Faithfuldemocrats.com. He is also an editorial advisor to the award-winning Tikkun magazine, a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, and a principal commentator in the The Oxford Annotated Bible.
“Essential reading for Americans” is what The Washington Post called Dr. Hendricks’ most recent book, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Social critic Michael Eric Dyson describes it as “an instant classic” that “immediately thrusts Dr. Hendricks into the front ranks of American religious thinkers.” The Politics of Jesus was the featured subject of the C-SPAN program “Class, Politics and Christianity.” The Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation calls Hendricks’ postmodern “guerrilla” approach to biblical discourse “the boldest post-colonial writing ever seen in Western biblical studies.” A former Wall Street investment executive and past president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological seminary in the United States, Dr. Hendricks is currently Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary. He holds the Master of Divinity with academic honors from Princeton Theological Seminary, and both the M.A. and Ph.D. in Religions of Late Antiquity from Princeton University.
E-Mail: oh2151@columbia.edu
Robert Hill
"Robert A. Hill has been a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1977, before which he taught at Dartmouth College and Northwestern University. He moved to America from Jamaica in 1971 and was a senior fellow at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. He is the editor-in-chief of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (1983–), ten volumes of which have been published thus far by the University of California Press. He served as executive consultant to the making of the PBS-WGBH documentary film Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind for the American Experience series in 2001. He is also the editor of numerous historical editions, among them Marcus Garvey’s Black Man, Cyril Briggs’s Crusader, The FBI’s RACON, and George S. Schuyler’s Black Empire and Ethiopian Stories. In addition, he is the literary executor of the C. L. R. James Estate. In October 1992 he was awarded the Gold Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica for Distinguished Contribution to history."
E-mail: rh2445@columbia.edu
Adjunct Professors 2009 - 2010
Zaheer Ali
Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University, where he is focusing his research on twentieth-century African-American history and religion. His dissertation is on the history of the Nation of Islam in Harlem, and is part of a broader intellectual project examining the historical relationship between Islam and Black America. Under the direction of Dr. Manning Marable, he has served as project manager and senior researcher of the Malcolm X Project (MXP) at Columbia University--a multi-year research initiative on the life and legacy of Malcolm X--and he also serves as Senior Advisor for /New Muslim Cool/, the first full-length documentary film project to explore the formation of indigenous American Muslim culture which had its broadcast premiere on PBS television in June 2009. In addition to teaching "Islam in the African American Experience" at Columbia, he also teaches "The American Experience," a survey course in American history, at New York University.
Email: za22@columbia.edu
C. Daniel Dawson
A multi-talented artist, Prof. Dawson has worked as a photographer, filmmaker, curator, arts administrator, consultant and scholar. He has served as Curator of Photography, Film and Video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Director of Special Projects at the Caribbean Cultural Center (NYC) and Curatorial Consultant and Director of Education at the Museum for African Art (NYC). As a photographer, he has shown in over 25 exhibitions. In addition he has curated more than 40 exhibitions including Harlem Heyday: The Photographs of James Van Der Zee and The Sound I Saw: The Jazz Photographs of Roy DeCarava. Prof. Dawson has also been associated with many prize winning films including Head and Heart by James Mannas and Capoeiras of Brazil by Warrington Hudlin. He has worked as a consultant for the Cooper Hewitt Museum, International Center for Photography, Lincoln Center, Ralph Appelbaum Associates and three different divisions of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. As a scholar, he has lectured at the House of World Cultures-Berlin, the Kit Tropenmuseum-Amsterdam, the University of California-Berkeley, University of Texas-Austin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Princeton University and the Federal University of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro-Brazil. Prof. Dawson has also taught seminars on African Spirituality in the Americas at the University of Iowa, New York University and Yale University.
E-mail: cd2277@columbia.edu
T.K. Hunter
Dr. T.K. Hunter is a historian (M.A. & Ph.D., Columbia), art historian (M.A., Hunter College Graduate Art History Division), writer (African-American novelist Gloria Naylor masterclass participant, Madeleine L’Engle writing workshop attendee), consultant and public historian. She has been active in the discipline in a variety of public history capacities such as acting as a consultant on Episode 2 (“Revolution”) for Boston’s WGBH-TV history production Africans in America aired on public television stations nationwide, and as a speaker for Black History Month. In addition to receiving a variety of fellowships including one from the University of Glasgow, Scotland and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, Dr. Hunter has presented numerous conference papers, and written extensively. Her essay entitled “Geographies of Liberty” can be found in Prophets of Protest, published by the New Press, in 2006, a re-examination of the history of American Abolitionism. Her book, tentatively titled “Publishing Freedom”, is in revision. A law review article “Transatlantic Negotiations,” can be found in the Texas Wesleyan Law Review (December 2007). Her work underscores the intellectual and foundations of the struggle for liberty that is central to the African Diaspora experience in the earlier periods – prior to the mid-19th century. Dr. Hunter has taught at a variety of universities including Columbia University, NYU and Princeton University. Among her many projects, T.K. Hunter is currently working on a historical novel about the free African-American community in New York City in the early 1800s.
Email: tkh4@columbia.edu
Patricia G. Lespinasse
Patricia G. Lespinasse obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from St. John’s University, 2002. She received a fellowship to Columbia University, where she has earned an MA and MPhil degree in English and Comparative Literature. At present, she is completing her dissertation at Columbia, tentatively titled "Jazz, Improvisation, and Power: Reconstructing Gender in 20th Century African American Literature and Painting." Her research interests include twentieth century American and Caribbean literature; African American literary and cultural studies; popular music studies; feminist criticism and theory; and African American art history. She served as an Associate Editor of "The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies," edited by Manning Marable. She is currently the Graduate Student Representative for the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD) at Columbia University.
Email: pgl2002@columbia.edu
Timothy Mangin
(BA in music from Bowdoin; two years of MFA studies in world music and jazz at Cal-Arts; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute for African Studies at Columbia; MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote his MA thesis on "Giant Step: Innovation, Technology and Performance in a Jazz Inspired Dance Club" which examines the appropriation of a jazz ideology in an underground New York hip hop club.. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Senegalese Urban Popular Music: Jazz, Mbalax, and Rap" based on fieldwork in Senegal supported by the Ford Foundation, and holds a pre-doctoral writing fellowship at Saint Lawrence University. His academic service included research on the Malcolm X project at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia. He was also a pre-doctoral fellow in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Globalizing City Cultures at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society and participates frequently in the activities of the Center for Jazz Studies. His review of the CD "Keepers of the Talking Drum" appeared on Ethnomusicology Online (EOL). He presented a paper based on his research in Senegal at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Email: trm8@columbia.edu
Mio Matsumoto
Mio Matsumoto came to the United States in 1992. He received an associate degree from Tompkins-Cortlan Community College, Ithaca, New York, in 1994 and a Bachelor's degree in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton, 1996. He received a Master's degree in US history from Binghamton in 1998 with a thesis on the thought of African American communist Harry Haywood. He recieved a fellowship for doctoral study in US history at Columbia University, and completed his dissertation on African American social scientists and the concept of race in 2004. He has been teaching for the IRAAS since 2005. The courses taught inclde Introduction to African American Studies, Black Intellectuals, and African and African American Thought. He is currently writing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled "Poverty of Race: an Intellectual War in Social Science and African American Politics, 1919-1968."
E-Mail: mm936@columbia.edu
