Event

Join us for our 10th Annual Graduate Student Symposium!

Symposium Title: Exploring Africana Methods

Meet the Speakers:

Celina Davidson de Sà, Ph.D.

(Penn Africana Studies and Anthropology 2018)

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

University of Texas at Austin

Talk Title: "Atlantic Gaps: Forgetting and Reimagining Race in Black Performance"

Bio:

Celina de Sá is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department as well as the Tereza Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on performance and race through grassroots social networks in West Africa. She received her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in a joint program between Africana Studies and Anthropology. Dr. de Sá teaches courses on social difference, postcolonial urban life, popular culture, and migration. Her first book manuscript, Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of West African Regionalism in Black Performance, is currently under contract with Duke University Press. She has also written thinkpieces for American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology. Dr. de Sá is also a capoeirista who thinks and writes about the tension of being a Black anthropologist and co-conspirator in artistic community building.

Eziaku Nwokocha, Ph.D.

(Penn Africana Studies, 2019)

Assistant Professor, Department of Religion University of Miami

Talk Title: “A Dagger and a Demand: Lessons from Ezili Danto and the Field”

Bio:

Eziaku Nwokocha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies. Previously, Nwokocha held a position as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Religion at Princeton University and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton. She obtained a Ph.D. with distinction in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s degree in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s degree in Theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor’s degree in Black studies and Feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nwokocha was a Ford Predoctoral Fellow during her PhD and Ronald E McNair Scholar as an undergraduate. She is the author of Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), an ethnographic study of fashion, spirit possession, and gender and sexuality in contemporary Haitian Vodou, exploring Black religious communities through their innovative ceremonial practices. The book is featured within the series Where Religion Lives.

Moderator:

Grace Sanders Johnson

Assistant Professor, Africana Studies University of Pennsylvania

Bio:

Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a historian, visual artist, and assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of study include modern Caribbean history, transnational feminisms, oral history, and environmental humanities. Sanders Johnson has been awarded fellowships including the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Andrew C. Mellon and Ford Foundations, the Canadian Embassy Scholars Award, the Haitian Studies Association Emerging Scholar Fellowship, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship. Sanders Johnson has worked with various archival projects including Concordia University’s Oral History Project Histoire de Vie - Haiti Group (Montreal) and was a 2020-2021 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Fellow. Her most recent work can be found in several journals and books including Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (2022), American Anthropologist (2022), Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (2018), Caribbean Military Encounters (2017), and Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History (2016). Sanders Johnson is the author of White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and Political Wayfaring in Haiti (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).