Discussants and Moderators

Sawyer Seminar discussants and moderators

Assistant Professor

Maria Hamilton Abegunde is the inaugural recipient of the Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Dr. Abegunde is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking about the 2001 disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley in Chicago. Anthologized poems are included in Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, and Catch the Fire. Her poetry has also been published in Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Cogzine, and Rhino.

Assistant Professor

Nana A. Amoah-Ramey holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor at the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department (AAADS) and African Studies program (ASP) at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also a Study Abroad consultant in Africa, specifically Ghana, West Africa. She is the coordinator of Students Services for the Hutton Honors College’s Ghana ‘Culture and Health’ Study Abroad program and Lead Faculty for the OVPDEMA Overseas Study Abroad Program on Historical and Contemporary Cultures of Ghana. 

Associate Professor

Penelope Anderson is Associate Professor of English. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender, and political theory, her scholarship and teaching investigate how stories of societies’ origins and histories solidify into seemingly inevitable versions of why things are the way they are. Her first book, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), provides an alternative account of state formation in which women writers refashion themselves as central, rather than marginal, to civic life. 

Assistant Professor

Dr. Patricia Basile is an urban and political geographer with a research focus on the uneven racialized geographies of housing and urbanization. Specifically, her work engages with questions about communities’ organizing around housing rights, alternative forms of property ownership, such as community land trusts, poverty and housing displacement, urban insurgencies, and the historical development of housing informality and dispossession in the Global South.  

Associate Professor

Liza Black examines the motivations of territory and the intersections of representation and violence. As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, Black developed a lifelong interest in studying Native identity and struggle and in advocating for protecting Native people from violence and exploitation. Recently, Black was featured in Perspectives on History discussing the recent surge of Native-centered television representation in Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs. 

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Dr. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas is professor and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (IU), an Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC) Advisory Expert on the World Council for Intercultural and Global Competence, past president of the World Communication Association, and a 2023-24 Kovener Teaching Fellow. She is author of Empathy in the Global World: An Intercultural Perspective, coauthor of Intercultural Communication: A Text with Readings and Intercultural Communication Roots and Routes, as well as coeditor of Dr. Martin Luther Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse.  

Assistant Professor

Thomas Chan is an interdisciplinary historian of modern China specializing in the intertwined histories of medicine, cultural production, political violence, and state formation. Thematically, his work examines how governments use science and culture to turn marginalized people into expendable populations and persuade people to participate in intra-communal violence. His current book project, From Users to Criminals: Creating, Pathologizing, and Killing ‘Drug Criminals’ in Twentieth Century China, analyzes how from 1906 to 1953 the Republic of China and People’s Republic of China dehumanized drug users and traffickers to encourage collective identity formation and promote state-building.

Associate Professor

Arlene Díaz is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. She has published numerous articles on the history of Venezuela, the Spanish Caribbean, and Brazil, and is currently working on a new book about the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Her recent teaching focuses on slave societies in the Caribbean and Latin America, which she examines in dialogue with notions of coloniality, Eurocentered capitalism and racial systems, and the gendered control of labor and resources.

Associate Professor

Konstantin Dierks is Associate Professor of History. His first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (2009), focused on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing and communications in the early anglophone Atlantic World. His current project is tentatively titled Globalization of the United States, 1815-1861, and traces the shift in American understandings of and relationships to the wider world between the American Revolution and the American Civil War.

Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor

Olivia Ekeh is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on 20th Century Black history, specifically music and popular culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript focusing on the historical and aesthetic significance of the soul era on the larger Black music tradition.

Assistant Professor

Bonnie Ernst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. She is a historian of gender, race, and punishment in the United States. Her first book, Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons (NYU Press, 2023), analyzes how twentieth-century women’s movements sparked protest, organizing, and reform that was led by incarcerated women and coalitions of attorneys and activists.

Assistant Professor

Carlos Colmenares Gil studies the Spanish-Caribbean, continental Caribbean, and Brazil, specifically how the cultural expressions (literature, film, music) from these areas are immersed, or resist to be immersed, in a cosmopolitan logic which translates and creates a simplified structure of critical reception for them. Currently, he is working on a project focused on poetry, landscape, and class in contemporary Venezuela, where he analyzes the work of Igor Barreto, Yolanda Pantin and Armando Reverón, among others.

Professor

John H. Hanson is professor in the Department of History and the African Studies Program at Indiana University at Bloomington. His scholarship concerns the religious imagination and social initiatives of West African Muslims. His most recent book, The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast: Muslim Cosmopolitans in the British Empire (2017), explores the African contributions to the arrival and expansion of a South Asian Muslim reform movement in colonial Ghana. 

Associate Professor

Benjamin H. Irvin is an associate professor of history at Indiana University and past executive editor of the Journal of American History. A social and cultural historian of British North America and the early United States, he researches primarily in the era of the American Revolution. He is particularly interested in questions of national identity, popular protest, disability, gender, federalism, and law.

Assistant Professor

Rhi Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, specializing in Iberian cultural production across the 18th and 19th centuries. Johnson is the editor and translator of the ecocritical anthology of poetry by Galicia’s premier Romantic poet Because I Want to See the Sea: Poems by Rosalía de Castro (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2021), and has a bilingual critical edition of the rediscovered early 20th-century Floridian-Cuban-Galician poet Feliciano Castro in production with the University of Florida press: Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West, slated for release in October of 2024. 

Assistant Professor

Sang Eun Eunice Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington. Her current research project,Digesting the Empire: Embodying Life beyond Militarized Circulations across the Pacific Ocean, brings together Asian diasporic literatures and literatures of the Pacific to explore the physical and metaphorical digestions of militarized circulations of imperial matters. 

Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is currently Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of History. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2011 and received numerous awards including the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the 2011 Anna Julia Cooper-C.L.R. James Book Prize from the National Council for Black Studies. Her new book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (Ferris & Ferris Books, 2023) is now available for pre-order at all online retailers.

Graduate Student

Jakob Myers is a second-year PhD student in IU's Department of History. Their research focuses on histories of slavery and unfreedom in 19th century Zanzibar within an interoceanic context, with particular regard to commercial networks, marronage, and ideological currents among American visitors to the Indian Ocean. Jakob holds a BA in History, Arabic, and Geographic Information Science from Michigan State University.

Graduate Student

Uzoamaka Nwachukwu is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington, focusing on historical research from 2022 to the present. She holds a BA and an MA in History from the University of Ibadan, completed in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Uzoamaka actively participates in the "Africans Abolition" (AFRAB) project coordinated by Benedetta Rossi at the University College London. Her research is focused on expanding knowledge on African history and the persistence of (un)freedom. Her research interests lie in examining the historical and socio-political dynamics of Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria's colonial and post-colonial periods.

Professor

Diana Ojeda is a Colombian activist-scholar working at the intersection of feminist political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and political geography. She is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of International Studies, and Director of the Commons Program at the Ostrom Workshop. She is also a member of the Latin American collective Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo. 

Assistant Professor

Carolina Ortega is Assistant professor of History. She specializes in migration, labor, religion, and Latinxs in the modern United States and Mexico. Her current project, The Sending State: How the Mexican State of Guanajuato Shaped Twentieth Century U.S. Migration, is a multi-sided history that traces guanajuatense migration to the United States across the twentieth century, forcing us to recalibrate our understanding of the sustained cycles of Mexican migration by examining migratory journeys that have rarely been the object of scholarly study or popular discourse.

Professor

Solimar Otero is the Director of the Latino Studies Program, and Professor of Folklore and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, performance, literature, and ethnography. She is the author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (Columbia University Press 2020), which won the 2021 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.

Graduate Student

Ashtyn Porter is a first-year history PhD student. Her research focuses on histories of racialized environments and colonial waste in 19th-20th century United States, with an emphasis in comparative and postcolonial methodologies. She received her BA in international relations and creative writing from Roanoke College, where she helped co-found the Center for Studying Structures of Race.

Assistant Professor

Judith Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and the Latino Studies Program. Judith specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to Black critical theory, Afro-Latinx Studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought. Specifically, her work draws together research in Puerto Rican aesthetics and performance studies with Black studies and Black feminist theory, Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies.

Assistant Professor

Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa is a cultural theorist focused on Indigeneity, Blackness, and trans feminism in the Americas. Her book project “Sadistic Cholas. Sex and Violence in Contemporary Peru” examines popular and experimental music, visual arts, performance, literature, and grassroots organizing by people and colectivas who identify as chola(urban indigenous), negra (Black woman), travesti, trans, non-binary, and queer feminists. 

Professor

Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington.  In 2018-2019, she was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in International Relations at the University of São Paulo and in 2017-2018, a fellow at the Harvard University Charles Warren Center for Historical Studies.  Micol is the author of Violence Work:  State Power and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018) and Uneven Encounters:  Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke, 2009; finalist mention for the Lora Romero first book prize of the American Studies Association) and editor of three collected volumes.  

Associate Professor and Director of the Islamic Studies Program

Ron Sela is Associate Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Director of the Islamic Studies Program. He studies the history and historiography of Muslim peoples and communities, primarily in Central Asia, but also in adjacent regions (in Russia, India, China, and parts of the Middle East), since the Mongol conquest to the present. 

Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor and Chair

Dr. Jakobi Williams is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History at Indiana University-Bloomington.  He is a Civil Rights, Black Power, Social Justice, and African American history scholar.  His most recent book, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago, was published by the University of North Carolina Press under the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series and the book was the foundation for the script to the multi-Oscar award winning Warner Brothers film, Judas and the Black Messiah.  

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This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.