“Lens of Blackness: Scholarship Meets Digital Storytelling with Journeys of Belonging 2 Blackness” – Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot, PhD
Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot, PhD, is a writer, sociologist, public scholar and digital creator. She is the 2020 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award Recipient from the American Studies Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality.
A senior lecturer in sociology in the College of Professional Studies since 2001, Dr. Lorick-Wilmot was also the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Northeastern University’s John D. O’Bryant African American Institute (2018-2020).
“Black Feminist in Public” – Janell Hobson
Janell Hobson is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she currently serves as Department Chair. She is the author of Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005, 2nd ed. 2018) and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012).
“Public Scholarship: Maneuvering Pop Culture Media while Balancing Academia” –Dr. Kinitra Brooks
Dr. Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade.
“A Map and a Dream: Reflections on My Life as a Black Woman Scholar” – Dr. Gordon-Chipembere
“Joy and Pain: Surviving Academic Life” – Dr. Vilna Bashi Treitler
Dr. Vilna Bashi Treitler is a sociologist and visual artist, as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Black Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the 2020 recipient of the Cox-Johnson-Frasier award bestowed by the American Sociological Association for scholarship in service to social justice. Her book, The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions, a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization, was honored by inclusion in the Zora Canon, a list of the best 100 books written by an African American woman. Bashi Treitler’s scholarship theorizes about the dynamics and hierarchies involved in socioeconomic processes like nation, race, ethnicity, and migration. She is currently at work on a memoir and a self-portrait series about her life as a black woman in public schools and institutions of higher education in the USA.