COURSES TAUGHT BY BLACK PROFESSORS

Focus: Sociology, Health Science

Biography: Dr. Dennis is a population health scientist and sociologist with cross-training in public health. Her research broadly investigates how and why structural and social stratification processes generate inequality in health and wellbeing. She is particularly interested in uncovering the mechanisms that give rise to health inequalities across and within racial/ethnic groups.

Email: alexis.dennis@mcgill.ca

Focus: Social Determinants of Health, Social and Health Inequalities; Racial and Ethnic Inequalities; Nutritional Health; Childhood and Adult Malnutrition; Population Health; Global Health and Population Change; Sexual and Reproductive Health; International Development and Globalization; Research Design for Policy, Health and International Development Programme Evaluation.

Biography:

Email: khandys.agnant@mail.mcgill.ca

Focus: Black Canada; Black North America; Race and Ethnicity; Modern Canada; Colonial North America; Black British Imperial Belonging; Intellectual and Social History.

Biography:

Email: melissa.shaw@mcgill.ca

Focus:

Primary Research Project: “Bad Mathematics: Black Experimental Poetry and Performance in 21st Century Diaspora.” This research explores how contemporary Black cultural producers incorporate analogies from math, physics, and material sciences to challenge and deconstruct formalizations of Blackness, humanness, and categories of difference.

Secondary Research Project: Inspired by Christina Sharpe’s question, “What does it take to keep breath in the Black body?” This project investigates the resilience of the Black body and the cultural and political forces shaping it.

Biography: Dr. Johnson is continuing and expanding her dissertation on Black experimental poetry and performance. She examines the intersection of Black cultural production and scientific concepts, particularly in the context of 21st-century diaspora.

Email: amberrose.johnson@mcgill.ca

Focus: Black Studies, Anticolonial studies, and Critical Race Studies in education.

Biography: Dr. Philip Howard examines the social, pedagogical, and epistemological processes that shape identities, communities, and agency, particularly in the context of colonialism, anti-blackness, and racial injustice. His research explores how racial violence is normalized in settler-colonial contexts and how education and knowledge production influence notions of identity, citizenship, and justice. Focusing on Black experiences in Canada, Professor Howard investigates how Black people resist and navigate these conditions, aiming to reshape society and challenge systems of oppression.

Email: philip.howard@mcgill.ca

Focus: Diversity, Identity and Indigenous Topics

Biography: Dr. Tabi completed his doctoral degree in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE/Univeristy of Toronto. He has also successful completed a post-doctoral appointment through the Black Child and Youth Studies Network at the University of Windsor. Further, Dr. Tabi holds an M.Ed degree in Human Development and Applied Psychology and has extensive teaching experience in sociology, community education and youth studies. Dr. Tabi’s intersectional Black Studies frameworks, strong arts-based and community-engaged scholarship with/in Black communities, and his wide experience working with school boards to address issues of equity, position him at the cutting-edge of crucial education conversations and school-community-university collaborations in Canada. Dr. Tabi has most recently been published within the Peabody Journal of Education, and has an upcoming article within the Comparative Education Review. Dr. Tabi is well-positioned to bring fresh perspectives to our teaching needs in both our teacher education and graduate programs.

Email: emmanuel.tabi@mcgill.ca

Focus: African architecture, African technicity and embodied spatiality, Race and architecture Post-phenomenology

Biography: Alan Dunyo Avorgbedor is an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. His research explores the ways in which African Technicities, as a suite of culturally embodied dwelling practices, informs sensorial, hodological, and ultimately epistemological relationships within natural and built environments in sub-Saharan Africa and across the diaspora. Avorgbedor’s research situates new frames for comprehending how architecture, post-phenomenology, and African epistemologies relate to black lived experience. As such, the interpolation of these analyses with contemporary and customary African dwelling practices helps to elucidate the complex set of spatial relations that constitute embodied expression in the natural and built environments of Africa and the diaspora. In addition to his scholarly development of issues of technicity, embodiment, and culture in natural and built environments, Avorgbedor is an artist engaged in a new media practice that encompasses audiovisual analog instrumentation, film-based photography, and modular synthesis. He performs and explores interference signals and their figural chromatic aberrations in correspondence with mechanical and analog transport systems to modulate the expressive character of the medium. Avorgbedor is currently working on a series of analog portraits of contemporary and historical African and diasporic figures oscillating at the margins of architectural, spatial, and mobilities discourse.

Email: alan.avorgbedor@mcgill.ca

Focus: Psychology

Biography: Dr. Christophe received his B.A. in Psychology from Washington College (2017), followed by an M.A. in Clinical Psychology (2019) and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology (2021) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. During his doctoral studies, he was a National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) T32 Predoctoral Fellow at the Carolina Consortium on Human Development. Prior to joining McGill, Dr. Christophe was an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University.

Email: keita.christophe@mcgill.ca

Focus: Anti-racism, Community-based child welfare, Practice with marginalized individuals, Social work education, Program evaluation

Biography: Dr. Alicia Boatswain-Kyte is a social worker with over ten years of clinical experience working with marginalized individuals, families and groups. The majority of this experience has been in the area of child protection. Her research interests center around the systemic oppression of racialized individuals and how this contributes to their unequal representation within systems of social control. Alicia advocates for transformative social change within our institutions and social policies to ensure that all individuals and groups are able to participate as full and equal peers within society. Her work seeks to identify innovative solutions to facilitating service accessibility to marginalized populations. She is involved with several community organizations aiming to improve the health and social outcomes for Black children and families in Montreal.

Email: alicia.kyte@mcgill.ca

Focus: African indigenous/traditional religions, Islam in Africa, Christianity in Africa, Afro-diasporic religions, African mythology, comparative religion, history of religion.

Biography: Professor Ogunnaike teaches interdisciplinary courses on Africa and the African Diaspora that center around the important role religion plays in these communities. His research focusses mostly on Yoruba oriṣa worship in Nigeria, but also addresses Islam in Africa, Christianity in Africa, and diaspora religions—Brazilian Candomblé in particular.

Having studied Ifa divination with a high priest and diviner in Nigeria, he has a keen interest in indigenous African intellectual traditions and mythology. His current book project, How Worship Becomes Religion (forthcoming with Duke university Press), analyzes how the worship of traditional Yoruba deities originally differed greatly from Western notions of “religion” but eventually became the most widespread and celebrated indigenous African religion through contact with modernity and mission Christianity. He is also currently working the first major anthology of Yoruba mythology with his brother, Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike and has been developing and curating an online library of Ifa orature.

Email: ayodeji.ogunnaike@mcgill.ca

Focus: History education (focus on African/Black histories), Black Studies in Education, African Education, Black/African Social Movements, Social Justice, Education Policy, Political Economy of Education, Youth Activism and Civic Engagement, Black/African Feminisms, Participatory Research, Critical Education Studies, Critical Policy studies 

Biography: Nanre Nafziger is an educator-organizer-scholar who serves her various communities through writing, research, teaching, and pan-Africanist organizing. Nanre’s research contributes to debates and collective knowledge production in the areas of critical education policy studies, Black/African Studies in Education, decolonial approaches to education, global critical race theory, critical youth studies, Black/Africana social movements, youth participatory action research; and the role of civil society in education and democratic nation-building in the Global South.

Email: nanre.nafziger@mcgill.ca

Focus: African architecture, African technicity and embodied spatiality, Race and architecture, Post-phenomenology

Biography: Alan Dunyo Avorgbedor is an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. His research explores the ways in which African Technicities, as a suite of culturally embodied dwelling practices, informs sensorial, hodological, and ultimately epistemological relationships within natural and built environments in sub-Saharan Africa and across the diaspora. Avorgbedor’s research situates new frames for comprehending how architecture, post-phenomenology, and African epistemologies relate to black lived experience. As such, the interpolation of these analyses with contemporary and customary African dwelling practices helps to elucidate the complex set of spatial relations that constitute embodied expression in the natural and built environments of Africa and the diaspora.

In addition to his scholarly development of issues of technicity, embodiment, and culture in natural and built environments, Avorgbedor is an artist engaged in a new media practice that encompasses audiovisual analog instrumentation, film-based photography, and modular synthesis. He performs and explores interference signals and their figural chromatic aberrations in correspondence with mechanical and analog transport systems to modulate the expressive character of the medium. Avorgbedor is currently working on a series of analog portraits of contemporary and historical African and diasporic figures oscillating at the margins of architectural, spatial, and mobilities discourse.

Email: alan.avorgbedor@mcgill.ca

Focus: North America (including Caribbean) History, Africa

Biography: Dr. Adjetey is working on his second and third book projects on warfare and African-led abolitionism on the Gulf of Guinea Coast, and revolutionary Black organizing and state repression in the United States and Americas, respectively.

Dr. Adjetey’s first monograph is Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America(UNC Press, Jan. 2023). It situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, revolution, counter-revolution, imperialism, and neo-colonialism—within a diasporic North American and transatlantic frame. Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is the 2024 winner of The Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research, marking the first time that a Black author has earned this commendation. It won the Canadian Historical Association’s Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, which is awarded to a “work of history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past.” Cross-Border Cosmopolitans earned Honourable Mention from the Organization of American Historians for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, which is given to the best book in American history by a first-time author. It was Finalist for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, and designated one of the “Best Black History Books of 2023” by the African American Intellectual History Society. Reviewers have described Cross-Border Cosmopolitans as “a remarkable scholarly achievement,” H-Net; “sophisticated, ambitious, and compellingly argued,” CHOICE; “well researched and makes tremendous contributions to Black Atlantic…history,” American Historical Review; an “innovative approach to understanding the development of global movements for Black freedom,” Journal of American History.

Email: wendell.adjetey@mcgill.ca

Focus:

Biography: As a social scientist, she has a background in Anthropology from the University of Nairobi. Dr. Nyariro completed her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education and Institute of Sexuality, Feminism, and Gender Studies at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Claudia
Mitchell. Her dissertation explored the challenges to school completion for young mother living in urban low-resources settings in Kenya. Her postdoctoral research evaluates
integration of equity, diversity and inclusion in the design, development, and implementation of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. From this work, a team of experts, academics and diverse stakeholders are anticipated to collaborate in developing best practices for integrating Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in AI-healthcare.

Email: milka.nyariro@mail.mcgill.ca

Focus: Latin American History, Caribbean History

Biography: Sabine Cadeau is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching interests include the early modern Atlantic World as well as modern Latin American and Caribbean history. Her first bookMore Than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands was published by the University of Cambridge Press Afro-Latin America series. The book traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American occupiers, accelerated in 1930, with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians. More than a Massacre reframes the 1937 Haitian Massacre as a genocide and demonstrates the importance of this event for understanding statelessness and citizenship in the twentieth century. In 2023 More than a Massacre was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide.

Her second manuscript, Bonds and Bondage: Financial Capitalism and the Legacies of Atlantic Slavery at the University of Cambridge is forthcoming with the University of Cambridge Press. This manuscript emerged from the commissioned University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry that began in 2019. It is a study of the University of Cambridge’s multiple relationships with slave trading companies such as the East India Company, The Royal African Company, and especially the South Sea Company. This book illustrates the ways in which the University of Cambridge accumulated wealth from Atlantic Slavery through colonial financial instruments. Through this study she demonstrates that the University of Cambridge benefitted economically from enslavement at multiple levels and was transformed by the colonial capitalism of the early modern era in multiple highly visible ways.

Sabine is also currently preparing another monograph on the 1937 Haitian Massacre titled Victims in Their Own Words: Remembering the Forgotten 1937 Haitian Massacre. This book project builds on her oral history fieldwork on the 1937 Haitian Massacre and centers survivors’ detailed accounts and interpretation of the event.

Email: sabine.cadeau@mcgill.ca

Focus: Ethnomusicology

Biography: Althea SullyCole is a multi-instrumentalist and ethnomusicologist from New York City. Althea received her PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in February of 2023; an MA in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2018; an MA with distinction in Music in Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2016; and a B.A. in ethnomusicology at Barnard College in 2012.

From 2024-2026, Althea will be performing research on an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States, which, among other things, will fund fieldwork in Mali and Guinea in support of her scholarship on historical collections of musical instruments from the Mandé region of West Africa. Previously, Althea was a West African Research Association Post-Doctoral Fellow (2023), a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020-22) and Dean’s Fellow in the Music Department at Columbia University (2017-22). She is currently the co-chair of the Organology Special Interest Group and Secretary of the African and African Diasporic Music section at the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her publications include articles in Ethnomusicology, the World of Music, the Galpin Society Journal and the American Music Instrument Society Online.

Althea studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed West African harp, under korists Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She spent 3 years studying the instrument in Dakar, Senegal, where she was a resident artist at Bois Sakre studios. In addition to her solo work, she has worked with Billy Harper, Billy Bang, Fred Ho, Sahad Sarr, Daara J Family, Faada Freddy, Royal Messenger, LaFrae Sci, Lisette Santiago, Joseph Daley, Craig Harris and father Bill Cole (in his Untempered Ensemble), among others. In 2015, Althea formed the duo 42 Strings alongside traditional Chinese zheng player, Muqi Li, with whom she performed at Royal Albert Hall and on BBC 3 Radio. More recently, she performed at the Apollo Theatre in New York City with LaFrae Sci’s Groove Diplomacy Orchestra; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. with Lisette Santiago’s project “In Her Voice”; and at the John L. Tishman Auditorium at the New School in New York City with Craig Harris’s project “Festac ’77′”.

Althea has also worked as an FCC licensed radio programmer in the jazz department at WKCR; interned in the Public Programming department at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; worked as an archivist Association for Cultural Equity (home of the Alan Lomax Archives); hosted and produced The Earfull, an audio podcast that explores the lives of musicians through music; performed field and archival research at the Musee de Thies in Senegal; worked as a music specialist at the International School of Dakar; and was Music Programs Editor at SOAS Radio. At Columbia University, she was a Diversity Fellow (2017-18), Teaching Observation Fellow (2018) and Research Assistant in the African Languages Studies Department (2018-20). She was the Associate Editor of Current Musicology from 2019-20 and a contributing editor to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, from 2018-2020. Althea has given a number of talks and facilitated panels at the Society for Studies in Africana Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center, the People’s Forum, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Left Forum, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the African Studies Association.

Email: althea.sullycole@mcgill.ca

Focus: Strategy & Organization

Biography:

Email: anicet.fangwanantcho@mcgill.ca nicoleta.anton@mcgill.ca

Focus: Organizational Behaviour

Biography:Jeraul Mackey is an assistant professor of Organizational Behaviour in the Desautels Faculty of Management. He joined the faculty in 2023 after completing the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management. He completed his PhD in Education at Harvard University.

Jeraul studies how organizations hire new workers with an emphasis on racial, gender, and class inequality and their intersections. His work investigates how evaluators decide who has competence and the role cultural capital, merit, and supply-side characteristics play in shaping employment decisions. He uses ethnographic and qualitative methods, administrative records, and original field experiments to examine the consequences of these evaluative processes.

Email: jeraul.mackey@mcgill.ca linda.foster@mcgill.ca

Focus: Canadian Politics, Public Policy

Biography: Tari Ajadi is a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University, and recently completed a Predoctoral Fellowship in Black Studies at Queen’s University. His research compares how Black activists in mid-sized municipalities strategize to prompt change in policing and in health policy. His focus is specifically on the ways that these activists use and sometimes reject coalition-building across difference to exploit the political and discursive opportunities that arise in municipal and provincial governing institutions.

As a British-Nigerian immigrant to Canada, Professor Ajadi’s goal is to produce research that supports and engages with Black communities across the country, and stands in solidarity with Indigenous peoples across what we now call Canada. He has published articles in The Globe and Mail, The Chronicle-Herald, University Affairs, Canadian Government Executive, Canadian Diversity, and The Tyee. He is a co-author of the Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM report released January 2022.

He is co-founder of the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group, a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Association of African Canadians, as well as a Board Member with the East Coast Prison Justice Society.

Email: ifeoluwatari.ajadi@mcgill.ca