Chair of African American Studies
April Langley
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English
Past Director
Kimberly E. Simmons
Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies
Research interests include: identity formation, cultural construction of race and gender, women's organizations, international migration, immigration and immigration policy, African American culture, Black ethnic groups in the United States, African American - Latino relationships, and African Diaspora communities.
Advisory Committee
Bobby Donaldson
Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Civil Rights History
and Research
Areas of specialization is southern history and African American life and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research and writings explore African American intellectual thought, print culture, education and religion.
Todd Shaw
Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Researches and teaches broadly in the areas of African American politics, urban politics and public policy, as as well as social movements.
David Simmons
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Public Health
Research focus is in medical anthropology; interest in social responses to health issues in communities and the relationship to structural violence and making meaning. Current research: the relationship between human rights abuses and health outcomes for Haitian agricultural workers, or braceros, in the Dominican Republic.
Terrance Weik
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Research interests: cultural origins, social formations, and transformations that have shaped people of African descent, including both freedom and slavery in the African Diaspora of the Americas.
Qiana Whitted
Professor of English Language and Literature and African American Studies
Specializes in 20th century African-American literature and culture, Southern literature, and American comic books. She is the author of A God of Justice? The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature, as well as articles in African-American Review and the Southern Literary Journal.