2024-2025 Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Fellows

JORDAN CAMP

The Southern Question

National Endowment for the Humanities/Ford Foundation Fellow

Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Social Justice Institute at Trinity College, and a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the relationships between race and class, expressive culture, political economy, the state, social theory, and the history of labor and freedom struggles. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016); and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). At the Schomburg, he is working on a book entitled "The Southern Question," which argues that this growing white nationalist insurgency is unimaginable outside of what W.E.B. Du Bois identified as a counterrevolution against freedom struggles in the U.S. South. "The Southern Question" extends its analysis to places where racist authoritarian politics similarly proliferated like fascist Italy, apartheid South Africa, and imperial Britain. It draws on Antonio Gramsci, Ruth First, C.L.R. James, and Paul Robeson’s interventions to suggest alternative outcomes are possible.

JAMES CANTRES

In the Ashes of Babylon: Making Black Worlds in Britain and Beyond

Ford Foundation Fellow

James Cantres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, & Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the Department of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield, December 2020), a study detailing the social and political histories of community formation, race consciousness, anti-imperialism, and radical intellectual and artistic activism among Caribbean subject-citizens in Britain following World War II and through the period of decolonization, independence, and radical political action across Africa and the Caribbean. "In the Ashes of Babylon: Making Black Worlds in Britain and Beyond" is a critical study of the life of Trinidad-born Michael de Freitas, a hustler, activist, Black Power leader in Britain, and founder of a radical commune in Trinidad. The project explores radical syndicates, mobilizations, artists, intellectuals, and militants in London, Kingston, Port of Spain, Accra, Toronto, and New York that encountered, collaborated with, or rejected de Freitas.

SHANNA JEAN-BAPTISTE

Global Jim Crow South: Mapping Jim Crow Violence and Intimacies across Haiti and the U.S. South

National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Fellow

Shanna Jean-Baptiste is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching interests lie in Francophone West African and Caribbean literature, with a special emphasis on Haitian literature. At the Schomburg she is working on a book, "Global Jim Crow South: Mapping Jim Crow Violence and Intimacies across Haiti and the U.S. South," that contends that Jim Crow violence shaped and was shaped by the U.S. empire. It centers Haiti as a crucial focal point for understanding the global scope of Jim Crow violence and argues that the violence that structured the 1915-1934 American occupation of Haiti was not peripheral but integral to the racial violence of the Jim Crow South.

HAYLEY O'MALLEY

Dreams of a Black Cinema: How Black Women Writers Reimagined Filmmaking in the Twentieth-Century United States

Mellon Foundation Fellow

Hayley O'Malley is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Rice University. Her scholarship has been published in venues including the James Baldwin Review, Black Camera, Feminist Media Histories, and The Oxford Handbook of American Film History. In 2023 she co-organized a multi-day symposium on Black women's filmmaking for the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts at the University of Chicago, in tribute to the very first Black women's film festival of 1976. At the Schomburg, she is working on an archivally-driven history of the myriad ways that African American women writers experimented with film and worked to build a new Black women’s film culture from the 1960s to the 1990s. Authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, Kathleen Collins, Toni Morrison, and others embraced film as a crucial new site for aesthetic innovation, artistic legitimation, social empowerment, and mass movement politics, directing movies themselves, penning screenplays and film criticism, organizing film festivals, and theorizing film in their fiction.

AMADI OZIER

Humor Among Uppity Negroes at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Black Literary Study

National Endowment for the Humanities/Newhouse Foundation Fellow

Amadi Ozier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Social Text, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Early American Literature, and the Oxford Handbook of African American Humor. At the Schomburg, Ozier is working on a book entitled "Senses of Humor: Joking Etiquette in African American Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." The project recovers irony as a crucial artifact of black gentile self-definition by reclaiming subtlety, wit, and other mannered rhetorical gestures as overlooked features of black bourgeois art and performance that aim to discipline public representations of blackness. Ultimately, the book argues that black humorists used irony to index cultural anxieties about black representation for both intraracial and interracial readerships amid the development of an emerging black American middle class.

MADINA THIAM

The Inland Shore: an Intimate History of Revolution and Decolonization in Muslim West Africa, 1804-1960

Newhouse Foundation Fellow

Madina Thiam is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University, where she also holds an affiliation with the Institute of French Studies. Her work has been published in venues including the Journal of African History, the CODESRIA Bulletin, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, and the Revue d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Afrique. “The Inland Shore” uses the experiences of African Muslims from the Sahel to intimately connect the histories of the Atlantic and Saharan worlds. Between 1804-1960, waves of changes swept the Sahel, including the end of trans-Atlantic slavery; the trans-Saharan slave trade; African Islamic revolutions; and French colonialism. As these mutations unfolded, Sahelian Muslims lived and circulated in the lands tucked between the Senegal and Niger rivers, but also the expanse connecting the Caribbean and Red seas. The combined forces of Islamic revolutions, Atlantic-world capitalism, and Saharan commercial and religious networks, shaped the ways Sahelian Muslims approached belonging, mobility and intimacy.

Short-Term Fellows

NICOLE COOKE

Catalysts for Change, Building Radical Empathy

Newhouse Foundation Fellow

Nicole Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and an Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. She was a practicing librarian for 13 years before completing her Ph.D. The founding editor of American Library Association Neal-Schuman's Critical Cultural Information Studies book series, she is also the co-editor of the journal Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, for which she co-edited a special issue on Black women librarians in 2022. Her scholarship appears in journals including the Library Quarterly, the Journal of Information Ethics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. At the Schomburg she is working on a book-length study on the work of Black women librarians, including those who have worked at the Schomburg Center.

MERVE FEJZULA

Negritude and the Afro-Black Public Sphere

Mellon Foundation Fellow

Merve Fejzula is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. She is a historian of modern Africa and its diaspora, specializing in twentieth-century West Africa's global connections. Her scholarship has been published in venues including Historical Research, History: Journal of the Historical Association, and Historical Journal. At the Schomburg she is working on her book manuscript, which examines the transformation of the Black public sphere between 1947-77 through a history of negritude - the philosophy of Black humanism most associated with the francophone Black world. This study reconstructs a network of francophone and anglophone West African and diasporic intellectuals, artists, and institutions crucial to negritude's dissemination and conceptual reinvention. It argues that this history pushes us to reexamine conventional understandings of the development of public spheres.

CAMILLE GOLDMON

On the Right Side of Radicalism: Black Agrarian Radicalism and Tuskegee Institute in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1965

Ford Foundation Fellow

Camille Goldmon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2022-24, she was a Shelby Cullom Davis Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. At the Schomburg she is working on "On the Right Side of Radicalism," an exploration of African American rurality that textures historical interpretationsof radicalism in the US South, particularly among Black farmers, farm families, and agriculture-focusedorganizations in the Alabama Black Belt, especially the historic Tuskegee Institute. Accompanied by an open-access archive of images and data visualizations, the book emphasizes aspirations of widespread Blacklandownership as radical undertakings. It challenges dichotomies of conservative and progressive ideassurrounding Black uplift from the late nineteenth century through the civil rights movement, inviting readers toreimagine Black agrarians in a larger political and intellectual history of the plantation South.

MAXINE GORDON

Quartette: Stories from the Lives of Four Women Jazz Musicians–Maxine Sullivan, Velma Middleton, Melba Liston, Shirley Scott

Ford Foundation Fellow

Maxine Gordon is an independent researcher, oral historian, and jazz scholar. She earned an MA in African diaspora history from New York University, where she received a Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship. She is the author of Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon (University of California Press, 2018), a biography of her late husband, the jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon. The book won a Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the ASCAP Foundation, taking home the Timothy White Award for Outstanding Music Biography. At the Schomburg Gordon is working on a book about the musicians Maxine Sullivan, Velma Middleton, Melba Liston, and Shirley Scott. The book will be presented in a context that is described as “jazz geography,” using a close look at the element of place as a factor in the artists’ lives.

DEIRDRE LYONS

Slavery, Emancipation, and Family Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Antilles

Ford Fellow

Deirdre Lyons is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor of History in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences program at the University of Chicago. She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships from, among other institutions, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Chicago, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship. Her book project, provisionally entitled "Slavery, Emancipation, and Family Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Antilles," draws on over two years’ of archival research in France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to examine the intimate, gendered lives of enslaved and freed peoples who helped to shape the contours of slavery and emancipation, while shedding new light on how French reformers, colonial authorities, and planters tried to remake a post-slavery society by disciplining and reforming the family lives of the laboring populations.

CUNY Dissertation Fellow

MIA CURRAN

Of Shadows, Specters, and Semblances: Aaron Douglas’s Figurative Returns, 1925–1975

CUNY Dissertation Fellow

Mia Curran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research addresses the entanglements of modernisms and race, with a particular focus on diasporic and transnational networks of exchange in the Americas, the production of history and futurity in the visual field, and theories and practices of Black visuality. Mia has taught at Hunter College, Fordham University, and City College, and she has held positions in the curatorial departments at the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her dissertation is a monographic study of the work of Aaron Douglas.