Blackademia is a space dedicated to people of color and academic spaces at all levels.
autumn griffin, cofounder
Autumn is not a carefree Black girl, although, she hopes that one day she will be able to be. Autumn holds more degrees than your president and is more qualified than your secretary of education. She is a lifelong educator who loves and believes in the potential of Black and Brown children, especially girls. Autumn is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at the University of Maryland in the Language, Literacy, and Social Inquiry Program. Autumn is one of the founding members of Blackademia and serves as one half of the Blackademia podcast. Follow her on twitter @AutumnAdia.
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tiffany lee, cofounder
Born and raised in the great city of Philadelphia, PA! Full-time, Tiffany serves as a higher education professional focusing on institutional effectiveness. She aspires to serve marginalized communities through teaching personal finance to improve financial literacy. She wants us all to have the knowledge and tools on how to build wealth! In her free time (not that I have any or even know what that is) she serves as one half of the Blackademia podcast.
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ArCasia James, Social Media Coordinator
ArCasia--Texas born and bred-- is a former domestic and international secondary humanities teacher. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the Education, Policy, Organization, and Leadership department, where she studies Critical Race Theory, Black Feminisms, oral history, and the gendered dimensions of school desegregation. When she’s not longing for warmer weather while reading and writing her life away in graduate school, you can find her living #radicallyeverafter, figuring out how to wonder the globe for cheap, and devising schemes to annihilate oppression.
Lorry Henderson, Book Club Coordinator
Lorry is a former Special Education teacher and recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studied Race, Urban Education and Individuality. She currently works at the Center for Individual Opportunity, where she partners with organizations that are planning for what’s next in education and helps them foreground equity in their program design. She’s also the world’s proudest auntie, plant mama, painter, and meditation queen.
Augusta Irele, Book Club Coordinator
Augusta Atinuke Irele is a third-year Ph.D. student in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves as the Graduate Student Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program through which she mentors a cohort of students committed to pursuing their doctorates and entering academia. Additionally, she is the co-chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fontaine Society, an organization dedicated to supporting current Ph.D. students from underrepresented group across the university’s nine schools.
Augusta’s research focuses on transnationalism in contemporary African and African-American literature and music. She is interested in a recuperative reading of Afropolitanism to trace the contours of contemporary ideas of Africa. Her research is driven by interest in the utility of an essentialized and utopian idea of Africa that emerges in contemporary literature and music. Further, she is interested in the ways both African-American and continental African authors and musicians contribute to discourse about Africa, releasing works that combine to craft a productive idea. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and has presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference and
at NeMLA in the past. She is also a founding board member of the Blackademia blog, where she has published about her own experience and is the coordinator of the website’s digital book club.
Augusta’s research focuses on transnationalism in contemporary African and African-American literature and music. She is interested in a recuperative reading of Afropolitanism to trace the contours of contemporary ideas of Africa. Her research is driven by interest in the utility of an essentialized and utopian idea of Africa that emerges in contemporary literature and music. Further, she is interested in the ways both African-American and continental African authors and musicians contribute to discourse about Africa, releasing works that combine to craft a productive idea. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and has presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference and
at NeMLA in the past. She is also a founding board member of the Blackademia blog, where she has published about her own experience and is the coordinator of the website’s digital book club.
