People

American Studies Program

Tao Leigh Goffe

Received her A.B. in English with a certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University in 2009. Her academic interests include the study of disaporic literature and various forms of literary expression of dispossessed peoples. Her academic research explores the intersections and interactions between Asian and black subcultures in Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean. So far she has completed independent research on Chinese Caribbean Women’s literature, the poetics of British Islamic Hip-Hop, and postmodern blackface and yellowface.

Department of African American Studies

Jafari Allen

Jafari Allen is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. Professor Allen works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness—in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.

Hazel Carby

Hazel V. Carby, Ph.D., Birmingham University, England, 1984, is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: the introduction to the “Race” section of CCCS Working Papers in Cultural Studies: Volume 2 (London: Routledge 2007); “US/UK Special Relationship: The Culture of Torture in Abu Ghraib and Lynching Photographs,” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 20 (2007); “Postcolonial Translations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30/2 December 2006; “Becoming a Modern Racialized Subject: ‘detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew,’” Cultural Studies 2008 and “Lost (and Found?) in Translation,” Small Axe 2009. Her current book in progress is Child of Empire. Hazel Carby is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S.A.

Chris Miller

Christopher L. Miller, Ph.D., Yale University, 1983, is the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African American Studies and French. His latest book, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade, was published by Duke University Press in 2008. His other publications include: Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (1998); Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (1990); and Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985). At Yale since 1984, he has served as Associate Chair in African American Studies (1988–89), Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and Chair of the French Department. He is on the editorial board of Yale French Studies, French Forum, and other journals. He regularly teaches courses on African and Caribbean literatures in French; postcolonial theory; French literature; film, literary and anthropological theory; and comparative African literatures.

Ezra Griffith

Professor of Psychiatry and of African–American Studies. He has broad consultation experience in mental health service systems and has written extensively in the areas of cultural and forensic psychiatry. He has recently focused on the use of narrative in portraying the individual black life in the psycho–social context of the Caribbean. His latest books are: Race and Excellence: My Dialogue with Chester Pierce and I’m Your Father, Boy, a family memoir of Barbados. He is currently working on a book about the Spiritual Baptist Church, an indigenous religious group in the Caribbean that took root in Barbados about 50 years ago.

Chris Johnson

Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellow and a third-year doctoral student. Chris received an A.B. in English and history from Vassar College in 2005, and was a Neal-Marshall Fellow in Creative Writing at Indiana University, where he earned an M.F.A. in 2009. His current teaching and research interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and radicalism in black diasporas, theories of transnationalism and racial formation, Afro-Asian historiographies, and the politics of exclusion within the modern nation-state. His dissertation, a transnational history of black power in the Atlantic world, charts the migrations of two generations of Trinidadian students, teachers, and union organizers at the forefront of anti-imperial struggles in the UK, Canada, and the U.S from the mid-1930s to 1970.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Interests lie in the artistic and material cultures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with an emphasis on photography, painting and ideas of fashion and clothing in the British Empire and African diaspora particularly in, but not limited to, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Her research has been well supported by both departments here at Yale as well as other research centers including the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Yale Center for British Art and the Women, Religion and Globalization Project.  In her third year in graduate school, Anna co-curated the exhibition “Embodied: Black Identities in American Art,” from the Yale University Art Gallery on view from February 2011.  Prior to her graduate career at Yale, Anna lived and worked in Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom; she now resides in Brooklyn.

Yenisey Rodriguez

Received a B.A. with honors in History from the University of Chicago (2006).  I was recently awarded a Mellon and Ford predoctoral fellowship to pursue my graduate studies.  I am interested in pursuing avenues of research pertaining to the experience of Caribbean migrants across the 20th century. I am particularly interested in exploring citizenship below the legal institutional level in order to consider how cultural and racial boundaries played a significant role in the shaping of migrant communities.  By developing an understanding of U.S. immigration as a site of exchange and community formation I will be able to trace the political currents that have shaped Caribbean communities on the U.S. mainland.  My overall research interests include how the experience of migrants is connected to problems of work and nationhood as part of a larger critique of labor reform and social justice. Other interests include 20th Century U.S. History, Latin American History, transnationalism, comparative race theory and labor history.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is a third year doctoral student in African American Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation explores the ways in which emergent literary and visual forms in West Indian modernism charted connections between informal, urban dwellings such as the barrack yard and illicit or improper intimacies, and how representations of everyday life posed alternatives to national sovereignty. Kaneesha graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, with honors in English and distinction in Africana Studies. There, she was an a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and received the Rittenberg Prize for Best Undergraduate Student in English. She is a recipient of the 2013 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship. Kaneesha is also a co-convener of Critical Lime, the reading group in CaribbeanStudies, and the spring 2014 series “We Have Never Been Human: A Caribbean Studies Approach.”

Danielle Bainbridge

Danielle is a second year PhD candidate in African-American Studies and American Studies, and is pursuing the qualification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 with a B.A. in English and Theatre Arts cum laude. Danielle’s past research has included comparative work on African American and Caribbean theatre. Her senior thesis project focused on a dramaturgical reading of the Sistren Theatre Collective’s book of memoirs Lionheart Gal and Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven. The project received the Rose Award for outstanding senior thesis from UPenn’s Center for Undergraduate Research. In the summer of 2013 she was awarded a Beinecke Pre-Prospectus Fellowship to continue her work on the lives of Millie and Christine McKoy. Areas of interest include: African American & Caribbean Theatre, Postcolonial Theory, Performance, Literary Criticism, and Feminist Theory. Her current work ranges from 19th century to contemporary representations of black life in performance. She is particularly interested in the ways performance; postcolonial theory and feminism intersect in theatre to provide a forum for political discourse.

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