Department of African American Studies
College of Letters & Science

Graduate Students

Abidemi Abass

Abidemi Abass is a first-year graduate fellow in the department of African American Studies. He graduated from Lagos State University with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology. He also has a master’s degree in Investment and Risk Finance from University of Westminster, London. His research interest entails racism, African diasporas, migration, African identity, Afrobeats, economic sociology, racial and ethnic theory, inequality and stratification. He is also interested in exploring the financial stereotype and discrimination of African migrants in the UK. Outside of his studies, he creates contents on YouTube discussing African finances and also a show promoter of “Afrobeats” in London.

 

Oluwatosin Philip Adeyemi

Oluwatosin Philip Adeyemi is a first year graduate fellow at the Department of African-American Studies. He has a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Studies from Adekunle Ajasin University, Ondo State, Nigeria.
His research interests are African American culture, African Diaspora History, and Pan-Africanism. He is particularly interested in African Diaspora History, the reflection of African cultures on the African American community, the preservation and practice of the African culture among African Americans/African Diaspora society despite being in a strange cultural habitation different from their indigenous homes in Africa. He loves traveling, visiting the arts and gallery, museums, and the archives during his leisure hours and holidays.

Forrest Ashworth

Forrest Ashworth is a first-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 Melmoth

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.