55th Anniversary Symposium

Taylor L. Bailey is a public historian, literary scholar, and curator interested in how marginalized people navigate life, seek liberation, and establish kinship. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, which was formerly the Public History Project— a multi-year effort to uncover and give voice to histories of discrimination, exclusion, and resistance on UW-Madison’s campus. Taylor’s work with the Center for Campus History has allowed her to utilize the expansiveness of storytelling to generate knowledge around important social, political, and cultural issues to public audiences across campus in intellectual yet creative ways. Working with UW’s lesser told and known histories and imparting the knowledge of historical findings to the public has allowed Taylor the opportunity to model the ways history can be used as a tool for change.

Taylor studied English literature and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in African American Studies. She currently serves as a member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) Committee for the National Council on Public History and as a committee member for Dane County NAACP’s local ACT-SO committee.

Verlena L. Johnson earned her M.A. in Afro-American Studies (emphasis: Art History, 1996) from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Sculpture, 2001).

Her M.A. thesis, “The Image Text Composite in the Art of Faith Ringgold: Form and Narrative,” explores Ringgold’s art using WJT Mitchell’s Picture Theory to examine the meaning created by Ringgold combining images and text.  It also examines Ringgold’s “Picasso’s Studio” as a meta-picture or a picture about pictures, specifically focusing on Black female subjectivity.

Verlena co-edited the Journal of Lesbian Studies’ Special Issue on Lesbians of African Descent: Contemporary Perspectives and published a children’s picture book, The Adventures of Kai and the Magical Machines.  Currently, she is working on a number of paintings of queer African Americans as part of her “African American LGBTQ Historical Figures Series,” as well as writing a memoir and creating artwork related to childhood trauma.

She has exhibited her work in Chicago, Madison, New York City, Oakland and Los Angeles, amongst other places.

Joshua Wright is a Madison native and proud graduate of UW–Madison’s African American Studies department (Class of 2013). Currently serving as an Outreach Specialist for the UW Carbone Cancer Center, he works to advance cancer education and health equity across Wisconsin communities. Joshua’s career began with a deep commitment to youth and college access, shaped through roles with the PEOPLE Program, MATC Pre-College, and MSCR. His passion for uplifting young people continues through his work as a children’s book author, most recently with Boogie Builds a Clinic on the South Side—a story of imagination, empowerment, and community care. Rooted in Madison and guided by the values of African American Studies, Joshua’s journey reflects a lifelong dedication to service, education, and storytelling.

Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work in education draws on the discipline of Black Studies to explore how Black teachers create fugitive spaces to navigate and combat antiblackness at their respective school sites.

Sandrine Biagui is a Milwaukee native studying Biology at UW— Madison and obtaining a certificate in African American Studies. She practices a range of artistic mediums including singing, poetry, and playwriting where she articulates themes of community and the relationships within. Sandrine has had the privilege of opening for renowned RnB artist Mereba, and has performed in an ensemble with the poet Sri Vamsi matta through OMAI First Wave: a hip hop and urban scholarship program at UW-Madison. She is currently a member of the 16th cohort of First Wave.

Sophia Abrams is a filmmaker, curator and artist based in Brooklyn and Minneapolis. Abrams graduated from UW-Madison with degrees in Journalism and African American Studies. In May 2022, Abrams curated Black Expressions, Camouflage and Cologne, and Time(is) in spaces around Madison, Wisconsin. Sophia’s directed and produced art documentaries for PBS Wisconsin. She’s worked with the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. At Soo Visual Arts Center, Sophia currently serves on the curatorial board. She’s worked on projects for BET, Universal Pictures and an upcoming Issa Rae-produced HBO documentary on the history of Black television. She’s currently in post-production on her first film, Shifting Space.

Heaven Williams is a rising senior at UW–Madison majoring in Health Promotion and Health Equity, with certificates in African American Studies and Disability Rights and Services. Passionate about equity-driven, community-centered public health, she serves in multiple leadership roles—including Founder and President of Badgers Sign UW, a student organization dedicated to promoting American Sign Language and Deaf awareness, as well as Faculty Director’s Intern and Lead Operations Intern at the Morgridge Center for Public Service. This summer, she will intern with Wisconsin AHEC as a Youth Health and Fitness Coordinator, designing wellness programs for middle school students.

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Felker-Kantor teaches courses focused on Civil Rights and the police state.

Dr. Sandra Adell is an Emerita professor of literature and theater history in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to several books, articles and reviews on African American literature and theatre, she is the author of a 2010 memoir titled Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen. Her current project is titled And then the Casinos Came: Black Women’s Narratives of Gambling, Addiction, Recovery. She also is adapting her memoir for the stage.

Micah Sagers is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, majoring in Biology with a certificate in African American Studies. Her academic and personal interests lie at the intersection of health, medicine, social justice, and community well-being. Micah is currently a research fellow with the SoulFolk Collective, the African American Studies Department’s first research group, where she contributes to a project examining Black culture and geographies in Madison.

Dr. Charles L. Hughes is Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Department of African American Studies at UW-Madison, where he also earned his Ph.D. In U.S. History. He’s the author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South and Why Bushwick Bill Matters, along with a wide range of articles for both scholarly and general audiences. He is the co-founder of the digital music newsletter No Fences Review, co-editor of the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press, and a former contributor to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Hard History podcast. He is a native of Wisconsin.

Dr. William Sturkey is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and researches the history of the United States, especially race in the American South. He is the author of two books and the editor or a third, To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools, which, unbeknownst to him at the time, he began researching while an M.A. student in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His writings have appeared in popular venues such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, and he is currently writing a narrative history of America in the 1960s.

Dr. Sabrina Thomas is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at UW-Madison. Her research takes a transnational approach to the intersections of race, nation, and war and examines questions of citizenship, identity, and diaspora through the legacies of children born from international conflict. Her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) considered the issue of U.S. citizenship for the Amerasian children of Vietnam. Scars of War was awarded the 2021 “Best First Book” prize from Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and was nominated for the Bancroft Prize.

Dr. Andrene Wright-Johnson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UW-Madison. She teaches courses on Black political theory and Black women in politics.

Dr. Miya Williams Fayne is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison. Her research investigates the Black press in the new media age via qualitative methodology and analyses of web metrics. She is particularly interested in how Black communal discourse circulates in the digital Black public sphere. Williams Fayne holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in media, technology and society, an M.A. from Emerson College in publishing and writing and a B.A. from the University of Southern California in print journalism. Dr. Williams Fayne’s work has been published in journals such as Digital Journalism, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and Journalism Studies. Her book, The Blackish Press: Content, Ownership and Audience of Digital Black News Outlets, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

De’Kendrea Stamps is a community-centered leader with nearly two decades of experience across the nonprofit, government, and utility sectors. Her career has focused on expanding access to essential resources—managing millions in grant funding, leading statewide food security efforts, supporting national digital inclusion initiatives, and overseeing a 20,000-square-foot transformation of the East Madison Community Center through the Design for a Difference campaign. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Alcorn State University and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also pursued graduate studies in African American Studies. De’Kendrea currently serves as Customer Engagement and Community Services Manager at Madison Gas and Electric, where she leads culturally relevant outreach and builds partnerships to support historically underserved communities.

Brittney M. Edmonds is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on Black literary and cultural production after 1945, with special attention to African American satire, humor, and the political work of literary form. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Who’s Laughing Now?: Black Experimental Satire and the Aesthetics of Decipherment, which traces a genealogy of Black experimental satire from the 1960s to the present. Her work argues that satire in this tradition functions as a method of critical reading, disrupting the racialized conventions of narrative, genre, and literary recognition. Her writing has appeared in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, MELUS, and Post45: Contemporaries, among others. She is co-editing two forthcoming projects: The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies (with Danielle Fuentes Morgan) and a special issue of African American Review titled “Black Literature+: Reading African American Literature in Dialogue with the Other Arts” (with Hayley O’Malley). Dr. Edmonds’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the UW–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. Beyond her academic work, she contributes to public-facing scholarship through podcasting on the New Books Network and holds leadership roles in several professional organizations. At UW–Madison, she teaches courses on African American literature, Black feminist theory, and the long and rich tradition of Black humor and performance.

T.J. Braxton graduated with Honors from Columbia Law School in 2025, earning prizes for trial advocacy and clinical advocacy. At Columbia, T.J. was a Racial Justice Fellow, the Executive Forum Editor of the Columbia Law Review, President of the Public Defender Students, and the Public Interest Committee Chair of the Black Law Students Association. T.J. interned at the Center for Appellate Litigation, the Federal Defenders of New York, and the capital defense unit of Squire Patton Boggs. T.J. will begin his career as a clerk for Judge Orelia Merchant at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and will then be clerking for Judge Amalya Kearse at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After his clerkships, T.J. intends to pursue a career in public defense in New York City.

Dr. Simon Balto is an Associate Professor of History and College of Letters and Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of the multi-award-winning Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). He is a regular contributor for The Guardian, and has written for multiple scholarly and popular publications, including TIME, TheWashington Post, The Baffler, American Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, and The Journal of Urban History. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and most recently, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He is currently at work on two new projects. White Innocents: Terror, Racism, and Innocence in the Making of Modern America (contracted with Norton) is a history of white mob terrorism in the United States from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, and of the refusals and incapacities of the nations’ assorted “criminal justice systems” to reckon with it. “I am a Revolutionary”: The Political Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton (contracted with Haymarket) is a biography of the life and political afterlife of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department in 1969 at the age of twenty-one.

Dr. Catasha Davis, Ph.D., is a research and communication strategist with experience spanning the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. Her academic foundation in African American Studies deeply informs her approach, grounding her work in cultural insight and critical perspective. She has led national initiatives to improve clinical trial recruitment among historically underrepresented groups at the National Institute on Aging, developed messaging strategies for federal and nonprofit partners, and pioneered qualitative methods that center lived experience in decision-making.

Today, she is building a strategic research and communication consultancy that helps organizations use data to think clearly, act strategically, and move with purpose.

Catasha is a proud four-time Badger, holding a Ph.D. and M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, an M.A. in African American Studies, and a B.A. in African American Studies and International Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Adam Donahue is entering his fourth year of undergraduate studies in History, Political Science, and Environmental Studies. He is also doing archival research and oral history interviews for the Center for Campus History, where he focuses on student and community organizing in Madison over several decades, particularly divestment movements and the Palestinian liberation movement. His research interests include social movement organizational structure, anticolonial theories of change, and the effects of confined geographies on oppression and resistance within sites like prisons or apartheid states. He hopes to put his research into publicly accessible and useful channels such as public history so that activists and non-activists alike can build on the work of previous generations.

Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Educational Psychology – Science of Psychology, Data, and Research in Education program. She joined the OU faculty in August 2023. Dr. Washington earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (Higher Education Research) with a minor in African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Dallas, Texas native, Dr. Washington is a proud first-generation non-traditional student, community college graduate, and a two-time alumna of The University of Texas-Austin receiving an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction – Cultural Studies in Education, and a B.A. in Government (Honors).

Her overarching research explores the historical and contemporary inequities in higher education and how issues of race and gender intersect in ways that impact the experiences of Black women in academia. Her most current ethnographic research project, entitled: “Let Love Lead,” utilized Black feminist theorizing through a bell hooksian approach to examine relationships, intersectional identities, and notions of love between Black women collegians and Black women student affairs professionals at a predominately white institution. Dr. Washington was recently awarded $22,000 by her college and the OU Institute for Community and Society Transformation and to extend her current reach investigating the identities of Black college women through visual elicitation methods and focus groups. Additionally, she was selected as a Semi-Finalist for Dissertation of the Year by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division J. She has presented research at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), The National Association for Student Affairs Professionals (NASPA), and The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), and AERA. Her most recent scholarship was published in The Journal of Higher Education, The International Journal of Qualitative Research, and Teachers College Record.”

Catrina J. Sparkman is the Artistic Director of the Creator’s Cottage, a maker studio space for artists and writers in Madison, Wisconsin. Catrina is also the founder and CEO of The Ironer’s Press Ministries, a non-profit that serves the needs of women, children and families of color in Wisconsin through the use ofsocial action theater, publishing and the creative arts. As a professional artist for over 25 years, Catrina has carved out a successful career niche as a grassroots theater artist and authorpreneur of several works of fiction and non-fiction. She also works as an instructor of Theatre and Drama, a content creator, public speaker, publisher, book coach, and creative consultant for various national and international organizations. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Creative Writing, and Masters in African American Studies.

Griffin Granberry is a second-year Graduate Fellow in UW’s African American Studies Department. They attended the University of Wisconsin for their undergraduate studies as well, graduating in 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies and German Language. As a Master’s Student, their research situates the archive as a site of violence in order to critically investigate our dominant historiographical practices and expose their inherent anti-Black and anti-Queer tendencies.