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Visiting Fellows 2008-09

Judith Casselberry

Ph.D., Yale University - African American Studies and Anthropology

MA, Wesleyan University – Ethnomusicology

Bachelors of Music, Berklee College of Music - Music Production and Engineering

Professor Casselberry’s research and teaching interests include the anthropology of Black Americans in the United States, exploring “racial” authenticity, identity construction, and Black public cultures as they change over time; women, gender, and religion, examining ways women negotiate power within religious institutions that incorporate doctrines of female submission ; and music and social movements, analyzing intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of religious, spiritual, political, and social consciousness and the production of musical genres . Her dissertation, entitled “‘Blessed Assurance’: Belief and Power Among African American Apostolic Women,” examines the workings of spiritual authority within a New York based Holiness-Pentecostal denomination and if, when, and how it enables a particular form of female power.

Professor Casselberry, as a vocalist/guitarist, performs nationally and internationally with Toshi Reagon and BigLovely. Over the past seven years she has participated in European tours of “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” directed by Robert Wilson with book and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Selected Publications:

• “Koko Taylor,” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The

Black Experience in the Americas, 2nd edition. Colin Palmer, Editor in Chief. (Macmillan Reference Books, USA: Michigan, 2005).

• Book review: Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age by Jerma A. Jackson. The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History. Vol. 7, No.2. Spring (2005).

•Book review: Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith by Marla F. Frederick. The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History Vol 7, No. 2. Spring (2004).

Courses Taught:

• “Black Womanist Spirituality in Popular American Music,” (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Performance Studies Department, Vassar College, and Wesleyan University).

• “Ethnography of Black Americans in the United States,” (Barnard College)

• “A History of African American Music,” (Barnard College and Vassar College)

Kobena Mercer
PhD in Sociology - Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora and is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. He was Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught at New York University and University of California at Santa Cruz, and has received fellowships from Cornell University and the New School University in New York. Educated in Ghana and England, he obtained a BA in Fine Art at St Martins School of Art, London, in 1981, and a PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London in 1990.

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994) opened new lines of enquiry in art, film, and photography and his writings feature in several landmark anthologies, including Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (1990), Cultural Studies (1992), Art and It’s Histories (1998) The Visual Culture Reader (2001) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). His monographs include studies of James VanDer Zee, Adrian Piper, Issac Julien, Keith Piper and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. He is series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, co-published by MIT and inIVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (forthcoming 2008).

Hiram Perez
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2002

 Hiram Perez specializes in African American literature, Latina/o literature, critical race theory, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, and film. His research interests include constructions of citizenship, theories of affect, American melodrama, global queer cinema, spectatorship, the psychoanalysis of race (and the race of psychoanalysis), and intersections of race and sexuality. An Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College, Professor Perez is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship for the 2008-2009 academic year. At present, he is completing a book on gay cosmopolitanism that traces the circulation of homosexual desire within the erotic economies of both capitalism and the nation.
 

Courses he has taught recently include Black Cultural Studies, African American Literature, Feminist Theory, Nonfiction Film and Video, Comparative Race and Ethnicity, Theoretical Approached to Literature, Narratives of Passing, The Sexual Outlaw, and Literature of Immigration: Memory, Culture, Pedagogy. Professor Perez has also conducted seminars and workshops on “Teaching Literature of Immigration” for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and for the Save Ellis Island Foundation.

 
Selected Publications:


  •    “Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification,” Camera Obscura 67 (Spring 2008): 112-143.

  •     “Gay Cowboys Close to Home: Ennis Del Mar on the Q.T.,” ReadingBrokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film, ed. Jim Stacy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007): 71-87.

  •   “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Social Text 84/85 (2005): 171-191.

  •   “If You White, You Write: Teaching Race Consciousness” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 16:1 (2005): 83-102.

  •   “How to Rehabilitate a Mulatto: The Iconography of Tiger Woods,” East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, eds. LeiLani Nishime, Shilpa Dave and Tasha Oren (New York: NYU Press, 2005): 222-245.

  • Review of Paul Justman’s Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Cineaste 28 (Summer 2003).

 

Jose Emmanuel Raymundo
PhD from the Joint Program in African American Studies and American Studies - Yale University. 

Jose Emmanuel Raymundo is a specialist in 20th century US cultural history with particular attention to issues of race, nationalism, empire and biopolitical governance.   His dissertation explored the intersection of racial, medical and nation-building discourses through the Culion Leper Colony that was established by the US occupational government in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century.   His research and teaching interests include race, ethnicity, migration, diasporic communities, immigrant experiences and colonial literary production, especially autobiography and scientific writing.  Born in Manila and raised in New York City and Toronto, he received his PhD from the Joint Program in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.