Melissa Cooper
Melissa Cooper received a PhD in History from Rutgers University. She specializes in African American and African Diaspora history. Cooper's book manuscript is an intellectual and cultural history that examines Sapelo Island, Georgia's black community relative to the construction of the Gullah identity during the 1920s and 1930s. "
Tanji Gilliam
Dr. Gilliam received her doctorate in History of Culture from The University of Chicago. She also received her Masters in Fine Art in Film, Video and New Media from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Dr. Gilliam worked as a high school English and film teacher for three years in The District of Columbia Public Schools; she founded the video program at the nation’s premier arts high school Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Following that, Dr. Gilliam has spent the last three academic years as a postdoctoral fellow and College House Fellow at University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University.
Mio Matsumoto
Came to the United States in 1992. He received an associate degree from Tompkins-Cortlan Community College, Ithaca, New York, in 1994 and a Bachelor's degree in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton, 1996. He received a Master's degree in US history from Binghamton in 1998 with a thesis on the thought of African American communist Harry Haywood. He recieved a fellowship for doctoral study in US history at Columbia University, and completed his dissertation on African American social scientists and the concept of race in 2004. He has been teaching for the IRAAS since 2005. The courses taught inclde Introduction to African American Studies, Black Intellectuals, and African and African American Thought. He is currently writing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled "Poverty of Race: an Intellectual War in Social Science and African American Politics, 1919-1968."
Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Interests: African American philosophy; philosophical perspectives on race and racism; German Idealism; Modern Philosophy. Vivaldi Jean-Marie is the author of Kierkegaard: History and Eternal Happiness (University Press of America, 2008) and Fanon: Collective Ethics an Humanism (Peter Lang, 2007). He is currently working on a book manuscript: Caribbean Cosmologies in the Imagination of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press). Other representative publications include “Blackness in the Haitian Paintings of Ellis Wilson’ in The Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Winter 2006); “Cézanne: Painter of the Flesh” in Gnosis Vol. 6 No. 1 (Fall 2002).
Vivaldi Jean-Marie earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in 2005, his M.A. at Brock University in 2001, B.A. Honors at Concordia University in 2000, and Diplôme d’Études Collégiales from Dawson College in 1998.
R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy
R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Black Studies program at the City College of New York – CUNY. As a scholar, his research concentrates on educational inequality in American public schools. His most recent research concentrates on the experiences of low income and racial minorities’ attempts at accessing school-related resources. As a scholar-activist, he is engaged in projects relating to the reformation of education, Hip-Hop culture activism, and race-conscious policies. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan.
Education
Ph.D. Public Policy and Sociology - University of Michigan
B.A. Sociology - Morehouse College
