Faculty

Meet the Africana Studies Faculty

The major and minor in Africana Studies draws upon Knox faculty expertise in several areas related to African and African-descended peoples worldwide -- history, language, literature, economics, women's studies, psychology, chemistry, and art history. Their research interests are listed below, with additional information and e-mail contacts on each person's linked profile page:

Program Committee

Fredrick L. Hord, Chair
Professor of Africana Studies
Ph.D., Union Graduate School, 1987
"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."

Caesar Akuetey
Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures
On-site Director, Besançon Program
Ph.D., Université de Franche-Comté, 1989
"My research focuses on General Linguistics, notably on the construction of my mother tongue; the Ewe language (a language spoken in Ghana, Benin and Nigeria)."

Steven Cohn
Professor of Economics
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1986
"In addition to my work in the political economy of nuclear power, which I wrote about in my 1997 book, Too Cheap to Meter, I am interested in environmental economics and in fundamental philosophical questions involved in the economics curriculum."

Mary Crawford
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Ph.D., Purdue University, 1999
"My laboratory uses kinetic and mechanistic approaches to determine the products formed and the rate constants of reactions of the hydroxyl radical and the chlorine atom with various anthropogenic substances. Of particular interest at this time is the study of fuel additives."

Jessie Dixon
Associate Professor of Modern Languages
On-Site Director, Barcelona Program
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1998

Magali Roy-Féquière
Associate Professor of Gender and Women Studies
Ph.D., 1993, Stanford University
"My book reviews selected texts of the Generacion del Treinta suggesting that cultural institutions, publications, and literary works provided the means through which class, racial, and gender alliances were played out in the context of U.S. political and economic hegemony over the island."

Tony Gant
Associate Professor of Art
M.F.A., Yale University, 1988

Konrad Hamilton
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1998

Karin D. Wimbley
Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2012

Nikki Malley
Instructor of Music
M.A., Washington University - St. Louis, 2002
"As a director, I emphasize a broad knowledge of both classic jazz repertoire and new innovations in jazz composition."

Kelly Shaw
Instructor in Psychology and Gender and Women's Studies
Ph.D. candidate, Purdue University