John Thabiti Willis is the inaugural Kesho Scott Endowed Chair in African Diaspora Studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. A scholar of African and African diaspora history, Dr. Willis focuses his research on performance, labor, heritage, and memory across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. His first book, Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2018), reimagines Yoruba political and cultural history through 19 months of fieldwork in southwestern Nigeria.
Dr. Willis is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, where he majored in accounting. He holds a master’s degree in African and African American studies from Cornell University and both a master’s degree and Ph.D. in African history from Emory University in Atlanta.
E
rica Edwards is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. Dr. Edwards joined the Yale faculty in 2022 and currently serves as chair of the department of Black studies. She studies the intersection of African American literature, politics, social movements, and popular culture, exploring how Black feminism creates generative insights about connections between these fields. Her most recent book is The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of the U.S. Empire (New York University Press, 2021).
Dr. Edwards received her bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish from Spelman College in Atlanta. She earned her Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Chipo Dendere was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She is a comparative political scientist with a focus on African politics. Dr. Dendere is the author of Death, Diversion, and Departure: Voter Exit and the Persistence of Autocracy in Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2026). She joined the Wellesley College faculty in 2019.
Dr. Dendere, a native of Zimbabwe, is a graduate of what is now Linfield University in Oregon, where she majored in political science and psychology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Georgia State University.
