Register here for a Kitchen Table Talk on the State/Future of Black Women’s Studies!

The event is open to the public and there is a $5 cover charge. All proceeds go directly to supporting the work of the Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association.

Speakers will include: Erica Williams, Jacinta R. Saffold, Stephanie Andrea Allen, and will be moderated by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead. 

Erica Lorraine Williams is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology department at Spelman College. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. Her first book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018), and Contributing Editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Brazil section). She has published peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography; as well as several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: 1) an ethnography of black feminist activism in Salvador, Brazil; and 2) a black feminist autoethnographic travel memoir. Winner of the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award in 2013, she teaches courses in anthropology on gender and sexuality, race and identity in Latin America, globalization, and feminist ethnography. She currently serves as the Secretary of the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA), a section of the American Anthropological Association.

Jacinta R. Saffold is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. She researches 20th and 21st century African American literature, Hip Hop Studies, and the Digital Humanities. Currently, she is working on her first manuscript, Books & Beats: The Cultural Kinship of Street Lit and Hip Hop and the Essence Book Project, a computational collection of popular African American Literature. Saffold has extensive experience as a scholar-administrator with emphases on enrollment management, inclusive diversity, and student success. Ultimately, she is committed to widening access for minority students and shifting the culture in higher education to be more inclusive through a prism of African American literature and culture.

Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is a Black lesbian writer, southerner, scholar, and publisher. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University and her scholarship examines how Black lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Dr. Allen holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University, where she also earned a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Allen is also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and is co-founder of the Black Lesbian Literary Collective. Her work can be found in various online and print publications, and in her collection of essays and short fiction, A Failure to Communicate. Her collection of speculative short fiction, How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions, is forthcoming March 2021.