Garry Bertholf is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate and William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the A.M. degree in Jazz and Popular Music Studies; he received his B.A. with honors in Music and African-American Studies from Colby College and has studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town. His dissertation, Black Sophists: A Critique of Demagoguery, examines the aesthetics of demagoguery as practiced by African-Americans c.1897-2008. Alongside demagoguery, his research interests include rhetoric, etymology, jazz historiography and improvisation, postcolonial theory and literatures, literary theory, the practice of freedom, and the intellectual and cultural history of the African diaspora. In his spare time, Bertholf is a promiscuous reader and avid tenor saxophonist.
Email: bertholf@sas.upenn.edu
Ashley Freeman is a first-year Ph.D. student and William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; she graduated magna cum laude from Delaware State University with a B.A. in History and received her M.A. degree in African American Studies from Temple University. She is a member of Alpha Chi- and Phi Alpha Theta National Honor Societies. Her research interests include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the retention of Africanisms in African-American culture, and African-American literature.
Email: afree@sas.upenn.edu
Khwezi Mkhize is a first-year Ph.D. student and William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; he received his B.A. with honors and M.A. in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright- and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and is a recipient of the Nelson Mandela Scholarship of the Rhode Island School of Design. Mkhize’s most recent work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Social Dynamics (forthcoming). His research interests include African, South African, and Black diaspora literatures, and the intellectual history of Black South Africans.
Email: khwezimkhize@hotmail.com
Krystal Smalls is a second-year Ph.D. student in Educational Linguistics and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; she studied Cultural Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and received her B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, where she was awarded a Cornell National Scholarship. She is a recipient of the Carmen T. Middleberg Scholarship and Stephen Peck Award. Her research interests include the intersections between selfhood, language ideology, and race ideology among minority-language youth (e.g., Gullah, West African creoles, Sheng). This July she will present her most recent work on identity and hip-hop languaging at Kenyatta University.
Email: ksmalls@upenn.edu
Savannah Shange is a first-year Ph.D. student in Higher Education and Africana Studies; she received her B.F.A. in Acting from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and M.A.T. from Tufts University. Before coming to Penn, Shange taught at the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco. Her research interests include the intersections of race, nation and sexuality, the development of diasporic consciousness in youth of color, and school design for progressive social change. Weekends find her baking vegan cinnamon rolls, practicing yoga and meditating on freedom.
Email: savannah.shange@gmail.com
Keon McGuire is a first-year Ph.D. student in Higher Education and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; he received his B.A. in History form Wake Forest University. McGuire’s most recent work on racism in American higher education will appear in The Journal of Negro Education (forthcoming). His research interests include, but are not limited to, the engagement and retention of students of color at predominantly white institutions and the experiences of African-Americans in higher education.
Email: Keon@gse.upenn.edu
Marina Bilbija is a second-year Ph.D. student in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; she received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Sarajevo and completed the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith College. Her research interests include literatures of the black Atlantic, the long nineteenth century, futures of freedom and utopias.
Email: marinabi@sas.upenn.edu
