55th Anniversary Symposium

Taylor L. Bailey is a public historian interested in how marginalized people navigate life, seek liberation, and establish kinship. Taylor received a bachelor’s degree in English literature and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, which seeks to enrich UW–Madison’s historical narrative by centering the experiences of marginalized groups. Taylor is also an Emmy-nominated host of PBS Wisconsin’s “The Look Back,” an educational series for youth where historians and experts teach Wisconsin history through objects and artifacts. She currently serves as a member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Committee for the National Council on Public History and the Dane County NAACP’s 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. Brenda Gayle Plummer is a historian whose research includes race and gender, international relations, and civil rights. Her work ranges from essays on Haitian-American relations to studies of Afro-Americans, race, and foreign affairs. Plummer has taught Afro-American history throughout her twenty years experience in higher education. Plummer has taught at historically black Fisk University, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.

Plummer’s publications include articles and reviews that have appeared in such journals as Phylon, International History Review, TransAfrica Forum, Latin American Research Review, and Diplomatic History, American Historical Review, and the Journal of American History. She has contributed to a number of collections and reference works. Plummer is also the author of three books of original scholarship and the recipient of book prizes in Afro-American history and diplomatic history respectively from the American Historical Association, and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.

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.

Lilada Gee is an artist, muralist, healer, preacher, author and international inspirational speaker and podcast host. Drawing upon her experiences as a survivor of both childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence, Lilada founded a non-profit organization, Defending Black Girlhood, that specializes in advocating for Black girls being safe in their homes, schools and communities to live, learn, and be loved. Via her Black Woman Heal Collective, she has sparked an international healing movement throughout the African Diaspora that empowers Black women to create safe places for themselves and Black girls to heal.

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.

Dr. Christina Greene is a historian whose teaching and research focuses on African American women’s activism, the civil rights and Black Power movements, War on Poverty, and incarceration. During her time at UW-Madison, Greene was a faculty member in the Department of African American Studies and an affiliate in the UW History Department and Gender & Women’s Studies Department. Her latest book, FREE JOAN LITTLE: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence and Imprisonment (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) was selected as the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for the Best Book on Southern Women’s History in 2023, was a finalist for the 2023 Association for the Study of African American Life & History (ASALH) Book Prize, and the winner of the 2023 Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Prize for Best Book on the Fight for Civil Rights in U.S. 1776-Present. Greene earned her Ph.D. in History from Duke University and her M.A. in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College.

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.

Anthony Black is a Teaching Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He holds a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in visual rhetoric, race, new media, and the carceral system. With a background spanning studio art, art history, African American studies, and literature, Dr. Black teaches courses in literature, art history, visual culture, biography and autobiography, African American studies, and popular culture.

His research focuses on how Black incarcerated individuals produce and share visual images—and how those images influence broader societal perceptions and discourse.

Dr. Black has taught in a range of settings, from service in the U.S. Army to faculty appointments at UNC–Charlotte and Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. At UW–Madison, he teaches across multiple programs, including African American Studies, English, Integrated Liberal Studies, Continuing Studies, and the Odyssey Behind Bars program.

As a practicing artist, his work has been exhibited in Charlotte, North Carolina, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York, New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Holly McGee specializes in U.S. History and African American History, with an emphasis on black women’s intellectual history, comparative political activism in the United States and South Africa, and popular culture in the twentieth century. Her secondary specialties include local histories of the American South, South African women’s history, and oral histories. Before earning her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. McGee earned a BA in English from Dillard University, an MA in Applied Social Science from Florida A&M University, and an MA in Afro-American Studies from Wisconsin. In the classroom, Dr. McGee gladly specializes in the wholly uncomfortable. Difficult conversations about race, gender, class, and sexuality, are mainstays of her professional work, and she takes pride in empowering students with comprehensive instruction that enables them to enter into informed civic debate, dialogue, and conversation. Dr. McGee is passionate about creative service initiatives and community engagement programming. During her time at UC, she has raised more than $150,000 in on-campus programming funds, created dozens of experiential learning opportunities (domestic and international) for hundreds of students, faculty and staff, co-planned and hosted the 2019 Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Fall Symposium with Xavier University, hosted the 2025 Annual Conference of the National Council for Black Studies, and secured more than $1M in federal funds for non-profit entities in the Greater Cincinnati area. Dr. McGee is currently working on two manuscript projects (The Trouble Between Us: Race, Work, and the Memory of Kivie Kaplan in the NAACP; The Usual Suspects: Transnational Ties, Trends, and Backdoors to Black Women’s Activist Work in the United States and South Africa, 1930s-1960s), and last year publisher her first children’s book, It’s Just Skin, Silly! , which uses simple science and interactive activities to teach youth scientific facts regarding skin color as a social corrective to race-based stereotypes and misconceptions that lead to divisions in society. It’s Just Skin, Silly! won the 2024 Skipping Stones Honor Award, recognizing an outstanding book that promotes an understanding of cultures, cultivate cooperation and/or encourage a deeper awareness of nature, ecology, and diversity. It has been translated into four languages—German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Afrikaans.

Dr. Stanlie M. James’ areas of intellectual interest and teaching include International Human Rights and Black Feminisms. Her most recent publication Practical Audacity: Black Women and International Human Rights (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). She has co-edited three anthologies including Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies with Frances Smith Foster and Beverly Guy Sheftall (Feminist Press, 2009). With Clare Robertson she edited Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics (University of Illinois Press, 2002). The first anthology she co-edited with Abena Busia was Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (Routledge, 1993). It emerged from one of two Black Feminist seminars. The first seminar was held at U.W. Madison and the second at Spelman College. Aili Tripp and she also spent about a decade co-editing the “Women in Africa and the Diaspora” book series for the University of Wisconsin Press. Several of the books from the series received awards.

James served as Vice Provost for Inclusion and Community Engagement at Arizona State University from 2016-2021. Prior to that assignment, she held several administrative positions at both U.W. Madison and ASU including Chair of the Afro American Studies Department for five years and later Director of the Women’s Studies Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

She was recruited to Arizona State University in 2006 to direct the African and African Studies Program and was also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program. She was deeply involved in the formation processes of the new School of Social Transformation (SST), the first of its kind in the country. Because her scholarship and teaching have been deeply interdisciplinary, it was entirely appropriate for her to be closely involved in the development of the innovative new, interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary school whose central focus was Social Transformation. Once it was established, she served on the Leadership Team in her capacity as the African and African American Studies lead in the school.

Bryah Lewis is a dedicated activist and emerging leader with a strong academic foundation in Community and Organizational Development and a growing interest in Nuclear Engineering. As the founder and co-chair of two organizations—For the Fems and SOUL—Bryah brings a strategic and compassionate approach to advocacy, event planning, and community engagement. In both organizations, she serves as Event and Outreach Coordinator, creating inclusive spaces and driving impactful initiatives that center marginalized voices. Bryah is passionate about leveraging both social and scientific knowledge to foster equity, sustainability, and systemic change.

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.”

Dr. Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis, MA, MFA, Ph.D., Emerita faculty, and former Evjue-Bascom Professor, co-built the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in the Department of African American Studies. She founded African and African American art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and curated the first exhibition of African art at the ChazenMuseum of Art (then Elvehjem), Traditional African Art: A Female Focus (1981). An artist and art historian, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, consulted for USIA in Germany and for the Ford Foundation of West Africa (Nigeria). She is most known for her publications on Black feminist art, coining the term, Afrofemcentrism, in 1984. She is also Emerita faculty of the Departments of Art and Gender & Women’s Studies, faculty of African Studies Program, and co-founder of Visual Culture Studies. Among her many awards, including the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, she is recipient of the 2021 James A. Porter Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University and the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Wisconsin Visual Artists Award from the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Visual Artists, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. She is co-founder of the Bronzeville Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2020), and the first Chair of its Collections Committee.

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.

Alexander Shashko is a Lecturer in the Department of African American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches classes on the history of Black popular music from the blues to hip-hop, and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. He is currently the longest-serving member of the department. He is a Wisconsin native and a voter for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara is a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725—1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-Black race relations in the Midwest.

Clark-Pujara is committed to both academic scholarship and public history. She works closely with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Development, where she teaches community history courses. Her public history work also includes writing blogs and op-eds like, “Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence,” for the Smithsonian American History Magazine and “The 1539 Project: Why Black Midwest and Iowa History Matters“. Des Moines Register. Clark-Pujara is also a Segment Producer, for an in-progress documentary “African American Midwest” (Kartemquin Films and Democracy Films Co-Production distributed by PBS).

Dr. Michael C. Thornton is a Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989-2020), retiring, coincidentally, at the first whispers of COVID’s devastation. He held courtesy appointments in Sociology and Asian American Studies and served as the Director of Asian American Studies from 1993 to 1994 and from 2000-2003. He was involved in the founding of the PEOPLE Program and First Wave (2007-2016). From 2010 to 2015, he served as the first Faculty Director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service, the primary campus unit dedicated to mutually beneficial partnerships with the world. While serving as Director of the MCPS, he helped secure a $10,000,000 endowment boost to support the Center’s goal of sharing its human and intellectual resources. With his wife Nora, he established an endowment through the Center in 2015 called the Michael C. Thornton and Nora Medina Social Innovation Award. To promote the Wisconsin Idea, this award provides $2,000 annually to support student community-based learning and off-campus collaborations with nonprofits in Dane County.

“My research agenda has focused on giving voice to communities of color. I have emphasized how we tap into a base of inherent assets to fashion resourceful, protective, and progressive strategies of engagement to resist the social forces aimed at demoralizing us and eroding our basic human rights. My work centers around three main themes. An early project examined how families and religion serve as infrastructure for informal health care networks that help elders remain in their homes; it also looked at how Black communities (re)adapted hospital emergency rooms to address the lack of medical insurance and primary care doctors,” Thorton shares, “Another project investigates cross-racial solidarity, with a focus on African Americans: the racial identities formed by people of African American and Asian (American) parentage; perceptions of closeness among African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans; and how religion influences these connections. More recently, this project also explored how Black media perceive Japanese Americans, and how Japanese media (both in Japanese and English) essentialize Blackness. In retirement, my focus is on uncovering (anti)blackness in Japan, Thailand, China, and South Korea, but I have also expanded to include explorations of race as reported on in left-wing white media and in English-language Asian media coverage of policing.”