Herman Bennett, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has been selected for a year-long fellowship at the Library of Congress. As the Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of History and Cultures of the Early Americas, he will explore questions surrounding dominion and sovereignty during the early modern period of the Americas. At CUNY, Dr. Bennett is director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. He is currently working on a new book, Bones of the Dead: Blood, Kinship, and Legitimacy in the Making of Early Modern Blackness, which will be published by Duke University Press. Another book from Dr. Bennett, The African Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction, is expected to be published in 2027 by Oxford University Press.
Dr. Bennett is an honors graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in Latin American history from Duke University.
Mouhamédoul Niang was promoted to professor of French and Francophone studies at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Dr. Niang joined Colby’s faculty in 2009. He is a scholar and writer who studies representations of gender, body, and space in Francophone African cinema and literature. His work focuses on narratives of identities and ideologies, as well as innovative literary aesthetics, the African couple, and alternative modernities.
Professor Niang is a graduate of the Universite Gaston Berger in Senegal, where he majored in English language and literature. He holds a master’s degree in English language and literature from East Tennessee State University and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in French and Francophone studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Elizabeth J.A. Siwo-Okundi has joined the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary faculty as an assistant professor of congregational studies and leadership. Most recently, Dr. Siwo-Okundi was a visiting researcher with the Boston University African Studies Center. As a scholar, she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of the “small voice” — the unnoticed and unnamed, silenced and marginalized, rejected and neglected voices within Biblical texts and social contexts, particularly orphans, widows, immigrants, and victims of violence.
Dr. Siwo-Okundi is a graduate of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she majored in Black studies. She earned a master of theology degree from Harvard University and both a master of divinity degree and Ph.D. in practical theology and homiletics from Boston University.
Angela Lynn Tucker was named assistant professor of photo and video in the School of Art at the University of Houston. Tucker’s work in photography and moving image explores representation, memory, narrative, and lived experience through documentary and experimental approaches. She previously directed a documentary about Houstonian Barbara Jordan, a former Texas State Senator and U.S. Congresswoman.
Tucker is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She earned a master of fine arts degree in film from Columbia University in New York City.
