Dr. Markeysha Davis is assistant professor of Literature and Africana Studies in Hillyer College at the University of Hartford. She also chairs the campus’s Africana Studies program. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Dr. Davis completed her bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Africana Studies at Wayne State University (2007). She earned her masters and doctorate in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2011, 2016). She is currently working on her first manuscript, based on her research on critical consciousness-raising in black poetry and drama during the Black Power Movement, as well as a co-edited volume on international Black Art Movement connections and collaborations. She received an Esther Terry Award for a “Distinguished Dissertation in Afro-American Studies” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for her study Daring Propaganda for the Beauty of the Human Mind in 2017. She is currently a University of Hartford Humanities Center Faculty Fellow (2019-20) for her research on singer/actor Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer album and its accompanying “emotion picture.” Her research interests include art and social change; African-American literary movements, music, and visual media; women’s liberation studies; and Afro-futurism.
Rachel Walker
Rachel Walker is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hartford. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2018 and is currently working on her first book project, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of the Human Mind in Early America. As both a scholar and a teacher, Walker focuses on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in America. Her research has been supported by numerous archives and institutions, including the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has also received awards for teaching and mentoring, including the University of Maryland’s Mary Savage Snouffer Fellowship, which was designed to facilitate innovative scholarship by female scholars. Within and beyond the classroom, Walker is committed to empowering women and advocating for gender equity.
Rebecca Mark
Rebecca Mark, the former Chair of the English Department, Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Academic Equity at Tulane University is now taking on the role of Director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) at Rutgers University. Professor Mark is a scholar and professor whose research addresses southern writing and cultural representations of trauma. Her books include: The Dragon’s Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (University Press of Mississippi 1994), and Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and Mending of Democracy (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Professor Mark is presently completing The Radical Welty: A Private Address and Owl Eyes, a book of original graphic inscriptions. Professor Mark was a Posse Mentor (2010-2014), the founding Executive Director of the Newcomb College Institute (2006-2008), and a founding member of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center (2001-2003). Professor Mark received the Public Humanities Achievement Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council for directing the civil rights conference Unsettling Memories (2004), the Weiss Presidential Fellow for teaching in 2014, and the Greenberg Family Professor in Social Entrepreneurship 2014-present.
Barbara Riley
Barbara M. Riley’s B.A., M.A. and M.Phil in American Studies are from Yale University, where she worked as a research assistant on the Frederick Douglass Papers and as an editor of historical papers at Sterling Memorial Library. Areas of academic concentration include 20th-century American public policy, 19th-century American literature, and African-American history. She served as Head of School at Hopkins School in New Haven, where she also taught in the History Department, before returning to Yale to tutor and teach writing in the English Department.