2023-2024 Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Fellows

The Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program offers long-term and short-term fellowships to support artists, scholars, and writers working on projects that would benefit from access to the Center's extensive resources for the study of African diasporic history, politics, literature, and culture.

Long-Term Fellows

LENA BURGOS-LAFUENTE

What's Left? Communist Poetry Networks and Cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean, Spain and New York, 1925-1956

Ford Foundation Fellow

Lena Burgos-Lafuente is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University (SUNY). She is the author of A la escucha del destiempo: poéticas de la posguerra en el Caribe transatlántico (Iberoamericana Vervuert), an alternative map of the political and literary encounters between exile intellectuals fleeing the Spanish Civil War in the mid 20th century and Caribbean writers. At the Schomburg, she is conducting archival research on Black transnational Communist networks in the early twentieth century Caribbean within the larger expanse of Black Communisms.

 

AMELIA HERBERT

"Caste education throughout the world”: The Racial Politics of US-South Africa Educational Policy Borrowing 

National Endowment for the Humanities/Ford Foundation Fellow

Amelia Simone Herbert is Assistant Professor of Education and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her current book project is an ethnography that examines how youth, families, and educators navigate the racial and spatial politics of aspiration in the increasingly marketized schooling landscape of Cape Town, South Africa. At the Schomburg, she is conducting archival research with the Phelps-Stokes Fund Records to investigate promotion of and dissent against racialized US-South Africa educational policy borrowing during the Interwar period.

KAREN JAIME

The Anachronistic Butch: Queering Time, Challenging Extinction
Mellon Foundation Fellow

Karen Jaime is Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (New York University Press, 2021) which argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. At the Schomburg, Karen is conducting archival research on the activism, staged performances, and life of butch lesbian male impersonator, Stormé DeLarverié, a central figure in the 1969 Stonewall Riots.  

BRIONA JONES

Black Lesbian Aesthetics

National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Fellow

Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a multi-award-winning writer, scholar, and editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (The New Press, 2021), the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian Thought to date. At the Schomburg, Jones is conducting archival research in Black lesbian poet and scholar Cheryl Clarke's papers to explore the personal and political contours of her work.  Photo: Khyree Pleasant

NANA OSEI-OPARE

Socialist De-Colony: Soviet and Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization & Cold War Projects, 1957-1966

National Endowment for the Humanities/Ford Foundation Fellow

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Center for African and African Studies at Rice University. His work has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, the Journal of West African History, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy Magazine. He’s coediting two edited volumes: Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsburg Publishing) and Cambridge History of African Political Thought (Cambridge University Press). At the Schomburg, he will be writing and conducting research for his first monograph, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects (under contract with Cambridge University). 

EVAN TURIANO

The Politics of Fugitive Slave Rendition and the Coming of the Civil War
Lapidus Fellow

Evan Turiano is a historian of slavery, abolition, politics, and law in the United States. His research on the role of freedom seekers in political debates that led to the American Civil War was published in the September 2022 issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. At the Schomburg Center, he is completing revisions on his first book (LSU Press), which will examine the politics of fugitive slave rendition and the contested legal rights of people accused of having escaped slavery in the United States.
 

BENJAMIN TWAGIRA

Things to Remember: Urban Militarization and Material Culture in Kampala, ca. 1966-86

Newhouse Foundation Fellow

Benjamin Twagira is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. His primary research interest is African social history with special emphasis on modern East Africa and 20th century urban Africa. His publications include articles in Gender & History and in the edited collection Gender and Trauma Since 1900 (2021). At the Schomburg he is research his book project on the social history of militarized Kampala, the capital of Uganda, between 1966 and 1986, which explores the ways the materiality of things – in everyday consumer goods, mundane household objects, buildings and both public and private urban spaces – was at the center of how Kampalans experienced urban militarization.

 

Short-Term Fellows

LISA BIGGS

George Houston Bass: Radical Black Dramaturgy
Ford Foundation Fellow

Lisa Biggs is the John Atwater and Diana Nelson Assistant Professor of the Arts and Africana Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation (Ohio State University Press, 2022), which investigates the impact of theatre programs for women incarcerated in the U.S. and in South Africa. At the Schomburg, she is conducting archival research into the life, scholarship, and creative work of pioneering playwright and Black theatre scholar George Houston Bass.
 

NICHOLAS BOGGS

Side of the Mountain, Edge of the Sea: A Study of James Baldwin and Four Figures Who Shaped his Life and Art

Mellon Foundation Fellow

Nicholas Boggs, a writer and independent scholar, is co-editor with Jennifer DeVere Brody of a new edition of James Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke). He has published in James Baldwin Now, Callaloo, and The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, with an essay forthcoming in A Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke). His current project, a Baldwin biography under contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale. Photo: Jonathan Blanc/NYPL

 

LOIS ELAINE GRIFFITH

Come to Terms – Llegar a un Acuerdo

Ford Foundation Fellow

One of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café, Lois Elaine Griffith is a playwright, poet, and novelist. She recently retired from her position as a professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She is the author of the novel Among Others (1998) and the co-editor with Miguel Algarín of Action: The Nuyorican Poets Café Theater Festival (1997). At the Schomburg she is working on a poetry collection and a memoir of her work at the Nuyorican Poets Café. 

 

 

 

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO

Harry Belafonte: Significations

Ford Foundation Fellow

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Names of New York, Nonstop Metropolis (with Rebecca Soling, and Island People: The Caribbean and the World. He is a scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, and his work appears regularly in publications including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He also serves as the Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works. At the Schomburg, he is working on a book about the life of legacies of Harry Belafonte for Penguin Press. Photo: ©Mirissa Neff

 

TAYLOR PRESCOTT

Cooperation, Contestation, and Identity Formation: A History of Interethnic Exchange in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Freetown (1792-1850)

Lapidus Fellow

Taylor Prescott is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently completing a dissertation entitled "Cooperation, Contestation, and Identity Formation: A History of Interethnic Exchange in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Freetown (1792-1850)."

 

 

ZOHRA SAED

Langston Hughes in Soviet Turkestan, 1932-1933

Ford Foundation Fellow

Zohra Saed is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College in the City University of New York. She is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (2010) and the editor of Langston Hughes in Turkestan, 1932-1933: Notebooks, Photos, and Poems (2015), which was published in the Lost & Found initiative at the Center for Humanities of the CUNY Graduate Center. At the Schomburg she is working on a book manuscript about Langston Hughes’s trip to Soviet Central Asia in the 1930s. 

 

 

MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN

Another Set of Worlds

Newhouse Foundation Fellow

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of three books: the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; a short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary; and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. At the Schomburg, she is working on a novel about language and Black queer history. 

 

CUNY  Dissertation Fellow

STEPHANIE MAKOWSKI

From Riot to War and Back Again: Interracial Relationships in Britain 1919-1959 

CUNY Dissertation Fellow 

Stephanie Makowski is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation uses interracial relationships in Britain from 1919 to the early Windrush era to explore how gender, race, and sexuality shaped national and cultural identities, sparked battles over public space, and determined the shifting boundaries between tolerance and exclusion.