Tekla Ali Johnson earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005. Dr. Johnson served as Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University from 2004-2006. She is presently an Assistant Professor of History at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she serves as the Coordinator of the African & African American Studies Program, Coordinator of the History Program; and is the co-founder of a Program in Public History. Dr. Johnson has published articles on race in the Journal of Contemporary American Studies, and the Black Scholar, and has authored a chapter on Frederick Douglass in Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, John R. Wunder, Ed., the University of Nebraska Press, 2008; and co-authored a chapter in Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: How African American History, Culture, and Studies Can Transform Africana Public Policy, in the Contemporary Black History Series, at Palgrave Macmillan, Ed. Manning Marable and Peniel Joseph, 2008-2009. She co-edited a textbook, Africana Legacy: Diasporic Studies in the Americas, (Tapestry Press, 2006) with Dr. Cecily B. McDaniel. Dr. Johnson was recently named an Exemplary Diversity Scholar for 2008-2009, by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. While in residence at the Johnson Institute, she will complete her book Defender of the Downtrodden: a Political Biography of Ernest Chambers, currently under review with Texas Tech University Press. Professor Johnson is in residence at the Johnson Institute under the auspices of the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residency Program.
Robbie Lieberman received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She is currently Professor of History in the Department of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois. The working title of her current project is “`Peace and Civil Rights Don’t Mix, They Say’: Division, Repression, and Resistance, 1945-1963.” Her research will examine the relationship between the peace movement and the African American freedom movement from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, before Vietnam became a major public issue. The project explores some of the ways in which pressure on individuals and organizations to distance themselves from ideas and organizations associated with the Left contributed to dividing civil rights from peace, but it will also highlight examples of activists who resisted these constraints.
Dr. Trimiko Melancon is an Assistant Professor of English, Women’s Studies and Africana Studies at Auburn University. She received her B.A. in English from Xavier University of Louisiana and her M.A. and Ph.D. in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Melancon’s teaching and scholarly interests lie primarily in African American and American literature and culture; black women’s literature and feminist theory; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and African American and Black German Studies. During her residency at the Johnson Institute, she will complete her manuscript Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women and the Politics of Representation, which examines, through the trope of sexuality, post-civil rights novelists’ subversion of representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination. Foregrounding selected texts, this study analyzes these writers’ characterizations of black women who not only diverge from stereotypical images imposed by ideologies of “whiteness,” but also rebel unapologetically against constructions of female identity imposed by nationalist discourse generally and black nationalism particularly. Drawing upon black feminist, critical race, and performance theories, as well as gender and sexuality discourse, Unbought and Unbossed examines these characters’ transgressive behavior, particularly with regard to their sexuality, as, in part, a means to create a modern black identity.
Joshua M. Price is Associate Professor in the Program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Areas Studies. He received his doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1998. From 2004 – 2007, he directed the NAACP’s Broome County Jail Health Care Project. This university-community collaboration, which he co-founded, monitors the health care of incarcerated people at the county jail, primarily through training students and community members to conduct interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated people. In 2006, he co-founded the Southern Tier Social Justice Project, composed of formerly incarcerated people and their allies, to advocate for formerly incarcerated people in the face of discrimination in housing, employment, health care, at the hands of parole officers, the police, and in other areas. For his efforts he has been honored as Citizen of the Year by the Broome/Tioga County NAACP. He has also received a citation by the New York State Assembly for ‘Outstanding Commitment to the Civil Rights of New Yorkers.’ He writes on institutionalized gendered and racial violence. While at the Johnson Institute, he will study the history and contemporary viability of a civil rights struggle to combat the social exclusion and discriminatory treatment of currently and formerly incarcerated people. He is at work on a manuscript tentatively entitled Incarceration and Social Death.
