2024-2025 AADS Dissertation Fellows

Ashley Everson

Ashley Everson

Ashley Everson (Brown University; Africana) is writing on Black women's organizing in the Tennessee Valley from local and internationalist perspectives, challenging some assumptions about women's globalized activism.

AADS5528 Black Transnational Feminism

This is a discussion-based, seminar-style course on the methodological and theoretical approaches to interpreting the significance of race, gender, sexuality, and nation in the rich literature on Black transnationalism. The course will explore how Black feminist thought has informed the development of the field, placing special emphasis on foundational and emergent scholarship. The course underscores the varied ways Black feminist scholarship has been crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of Black internationalist thought and praxis. The readings for this course are a combination of primary and secondary sources that reflect the geographical and cultural breadth of the African Diaspora.


Ashley Everson

Yasmina Martin

Yasmina Martin (Yale University; History) works on decolonization in Africa by examining the political and personal experiences of ANC exiles in Tanzania. Her approach complicates the growing literature on the Cold War from the vantage point of the Global South.

AADS5529 Visions of Freedom: African Decolonization and its Afterlives

This seminar is an introduction to the history of decolonization in Africa. We will study the underpinnings of anti-colonial thought particularly Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, and African nationalism before engaging with the historical process of decolonization on the continent, focusing on southern and eastern Africa. 1960 is remembered as the "year of Africa," the year when seventeen African nations won their independence. The years after 1960 brought a tumult of activity for the continent as independence movements and newly free nations dealt with the traumas of the past and the continuing struggles of the contemporary period. Moving thematically, we will analyze the different visions of freedom held by leaders of newly independent nations and of liberation movements, to discuss these and other critical questions: How did nations take part in a wider cultural and political Third World? What role would women and families be expected to play in developing new nations? And how can histories of decolonization inform contemporary African realities?