Graduate Student Caucus | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Nia Akilah Wilson

rebsl — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:22:35 +0000

Nia Akilah Wilson (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities at 91��ɫ. She is a research associate with the YRC II in Black Sonic Cultures. Nia earned her MA in Human Geography from University of Toronto. Her SSHRC CGS-M funded thesis focused on the experiences of Black women with anti-black surveillance practices, especially in the wake of Toronto’s Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy. Her current research explores the implications of counterinsurgent surveillance policies on Toronto’s Caribana and London’s Notting Hill Carnival, with a focus on Black youth.

Keywords: Carnival, diaspora, Black youth, surveillance, counterinsurgency, resistance

Carlito Oliveira Junior

rebsl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:54:48 +0000

Carlito Lopes de Oliveira Junior is a PhD candidate in History at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) and holds a Master's degree in History from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), where he was advised by Prof. Dr. Luiz Fernando Saraiva. His doctoral research, supervised by Prof. Dr. Anita Correia Lima de Almeida (UNIRIO), investigates the internal slave market in the Recôncavo da Guanabara (Estrela, Iguaçu, and Magé, 1850–1888), using fiscal records, parish registers, and historical cartography. He also holds a Master's degree in History from UFF, with a dissertation on the spatial, economic, and political formation of Vila de Estrela (1846–1892). He is Director of Historical-Cultural Heritage Preservation at the Prefeitura Municipal de Magé (Rio de Janeiro) and founder of the cultural platform @historiademage. He is a member of the YSI/INET Economic History Working Group and a TEDx Countdown 2024 speaker.

Keywords: Internal slave trade, Atlantic slavery, second slavery, Recôncavo da Guanabara, nineteenth-century Brazil, historical demography, African diaspora, economic history, Atlantic capitalism, slavery, abolition

Zainab Osman Mahgoub Gaafar

rebsl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:16:03 +0000

Zainab Gaafar is an architect and project manager specialising in research and design. She is the founder of Studio Urban, a Khartoum-based research studio that explores urban studies at the intersection of culture and knowledge accessibility. The studio produces multimedia content and integrates community engagement tools into its research methodologies. In recent years, Zainab has shifted her focus toward heritage projects, namely serving as curator and exhibition designer for Safeguarding Sudan's Living Heritage (2023–2025), and leads the development of the SSLH museum. Her work investigates critical questions around the role of heritage during times of conflict and the importance of preserving heritage beyond institutional frameworks.

Keywords: Intangible Heritage, Urban space, Conflict and War

Amanda Nkeramihigo

rebsl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:43:33 +0000

Amanda Nkeramihigo is a scholar and theorist whose work bridges historical and critical psychology, Afrofuturism, and decolonial frameworks to explore Black subjectivity, epistemic justice, and liberation. She will be continuing at the PhD level at 91��ɫ, in the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies in Psychology in the summer of 2026. Amanda’s research interrogates the colonial coordinates of space, time, and narrative in psychology, while developing speculative, Afrofuturist methodologies that problematizes Psychology’s engagement with Black psychological life, and reconfigures this relationship through the Black gaze and Black radical thoughts and imaginaries.

Amanda is the co-founder of the Black Students Mentorship Program in the Faculty of Health and has contributed to initiatives such as the first Work-Integrated Learning course for Black students in Psychology at 91��ɫ. Her publications include a sole-authored article in Theory & Psychology (2025), a co-authored Oxford Bibliography entry on Mamie Phipps Clark, and a review in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. She has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to Watch (2023) by CIBWE and is a recipient of the Fancher-Bakan-Danziger Award for Excellence in Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology (2024). Born in East Africa and fluent in English and French, Amanda brings a transnational perspective to her work, and has presented at national conferences and engages in public scholarship to advance onto-epistemic justice and Black liberation.

Keywords: Afrodiaspora, Afrofuturism, Critical studies in Psychology, Black subjectivity

Sheba Abena Wiafe

rebsl — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:57:47 +0000

Sheba Abena Wiafe is currently completing her PhD at 91��ɫ in the Social and Political Thought Program. Her research focuses on investigating the migratory movements of African women to Europe against the histories of the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trade through Black critical theoretical and psychoanalytic approaches. Her written work is forthcoming with The Black Lexicon edited volume, and she is currently guest editing a special issue of SAQ focusing on the intellectual interventions of Christina Sharpe’s first monograph Monstrous Intimacies.

Keywords: Black Critical Theory, Migration, Slavery, Psychonanalysis, Continental Africa

Britney Andrews

rebsl — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:46:17 +0000

Britney Andrews is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Science at 91��ɫ. Her research examines gendered and racialized experiences of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence, with attention to the ways these experiences are complicated through various vectors of power and privilege. She is currently focusing on police violence, carcerality and approaches to addressing harm which move beyond traditional, institutional responses.

Taylar Carty

rebsl — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:59:39 +0000

Taylar Carty is a history PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the lives and experiences of enslaved and apprenticed Black girls in Barbados from 1750-1838. She is passionate about education and museums and has worked as a consultant and curator at various heritage sites in the UK.

Norman Smith

rebsl — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:57:39 +0000

Norman Smith is a Master’s student in the Graduate Education Program. His current project through the lens, is a cultural critique on the subtleties of racism that exist within Canadian culture, that utilizes photographic elements to bring to the forefront the hidden truth of the social norms we hide behind. His goal for his research is to be able to combine academia, with his artistic capabilities in order to leave the world with images and words that could be impactful to our present and future interactions with one another.

Keywords: Black male studies, Anti-black Racism

Erragab Eljanhaoui

rebsl — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 19:08:50 +0000

Erragab Eljanhaoui is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at Ibn Zohr University in Agadir, Morocco, and a Fulbright scholar at Salisbury University in Maryland, USA. Eljanhaoui’s focus includes Barbary captivity narratives, desert studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, and nomadism. With his background in comparative literature studies, he challenges how the Bedouin nomads of the Atlantic Sahara are portrayed in various texts across different genres. Eljanhaoui has presented at numerous national and international conferences in Morocco, Italy, England, and Turkey. He has also published articles on the Sahara and its nomads in international journals.

Keywords: Barbary Captivity Narratives, Nomadism, Postcolonial Sahara, Posthuman Desert, Sahrawi Culture, Cultural Memory

Daniel Richardson

rebsl — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:04:54 +0000

Daniel Richardson is a Ghanaian filmmaker and multimedia professional with over a decade of experience in television and video production. He is fascinated by the African story and narratives that have the potential to positively impact humanity. He holds a BFA in Film and Television Production from the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), Ghana, and an MA in Media Management from the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ). He is currently pursuing an MFA in Film at 91��ɫ, where his research and creative practice explore the intersections of identity, history, and memory. His current project, A Symbol of Remembrance, engages with audiovisual archives through an essayistic and experimental lens, mobilizing Sankofa both as a cultural symbol of return and recovery and as a framework to interrogate the politics of naming and renaming public space in diasporic and postcolonial contexts.

Keywords: Cultural memory, Diaspora studies, Urban cultural geography, Public memory, Postcolonial identity, Symbolic politics, Essay film