Two Black Scholars Join the Humanities Faculty at Cornell University

Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has hired two Black scholars to its faculty in the humanities.

Naminata Diabate has joined the department of comparative literature. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Dr. Diabate earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing a book entitled Naked Agencies: Novel Histories of Genital Power in West African Literature and Film.

C. Riley Snorton is a new assistant professor in Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell. He was an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Snorton is a graduate of Columbia University in New York City. He earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).