Oluwatosin Philip Adeyemi is a second-year Graduate School Fellow at the Department of African-American Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Studies from Adekunle Ajasin University, Ondo State, Nigeria. His research interest is focused on the history of America’s lynching legacies and how contemporary African American artists’ artwork has helped remediate and reconfigure lynch images. He is particularly interested in contemporary African American arts and how some of these artworks acknowledge historical trauma while creating space for black joy, resistance, and futurity. Oluwatosin loves traveling and visiting the arts, galleries, museums, and archives during his leisure hours and holidays.
Griffin Granberry (they/them) is a first-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. In their free time, Griffin enjoys reading whatever they can get their hands on – prioritizing stories with dragons, of course – and visiting their many feathered friends at the nearby International Crane Foundation. Find Griffin snuggled up with their three cats or studying with a chilly coffee in the Graduate Student Office!
Forrest Ashworth is a second-year Graduate School Fellow in the African American Studies Department. He graduated with distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017 with a B.A. in Art History and concentrations in the Modern and Contemporary periods. His research interests surround 21st century African American artistic production and representation and their connections to the history of racism throughout the United States from slavery to the present. Forrest has a particular interest in Contemporary public sculpture based on the Minimalist conception of art as object, especially work that encourages interaction with viewers. His belief in history as a means of explaining the present and in art as a possible enactor of social change drives his study and writing.
Sebastian Asahel Melmoth (he/him or they/them) is a second year Master’s student in the African American Studies and Library and Information Studies programs. He recently graduated from Alverno College with a Bachelor of Arts in English and History and concentrations in postcolonial literature and the History of Western Imperialism, Colonialism, and Atlantic Slavery. His research interests engage methodologies from the fields of African American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Library Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Film and Visual Studies to build a nexus of inquiry that complicates our impressions of the past and its scholarship. Lately, his academic interests are motivated by archival tensions with its objects, ideologies, and researchers. The advocacy and forming of accessible archive and special collections spaces for Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ communities is his guiding objective.