Secretariat
Secretary of Rastafari Thought (2022-2024)
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies with a focus on the Black Experience in the Americas in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She completed her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University. Alhassan specializes in Rastafari Studies, Black radical thought, Africana gender theory and decolonial research methods. Her current work on Africana women's radical epistemologies focuses on the ways Rastafari women use their livity to build Pan-African communities and combat anti-black gendered racism, religious discrimination and racial capitalism in Ghana, Jamaica, and Ethiopia. Her forthcoming manuscript, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women's Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World is the winner of the 2019 National Women's Association and the University of Illinois Press First Book Prize.
Secretary for Black Feminism and Performance Art (2020-2023)
Lisa M. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where she also serves as the Associate Director for Graduate Studies for SST. She is a semiotician by training, whose interests include the political economy of black women in television production, afrofuturism, queer black women’s lived experience of disease, and black feminist thought more broadly. Her undergraduate degree was in political theory, and she received her PhD from University of Washington-Seattle in Drama. She has published on African American theatre, black women playwrights and filmmakers, and is currently completing a book on black women in television. She teaches courses on feminist theory, feminist phenomenologies, intersectionality, black feminist thought, and race gender and sexuality in science fiction.
Secretary of Francophone African Philosophy and Philosophy of Science (2022-2024)
Hady Ba is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cheikh Anta Diop University. Trained, in Dakar as a philosopher M. Ba holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from The Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Before coming back to Dakar, Hady Ba has worked on the development of Natural Language Processing tools that uses open source resources like the web to detect and anticipate security threats. At Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dr. Ba teaches logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and cognitive science and has written papers in epistemology, computer science and cognitive science. Hady Ba is one of the officers of the Senegalese Philosophical Association and has helped organize The Caribbean Philosophical Association conference in Dakar in 2018. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Turin in 2016 and an invited Professor at The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2019. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Connecticut writing a book about the Epistemology of the Global South. Read more.
Co-Secretary of LGBTQ+ Affairs (2023-2025)
Allyson Duarte is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient with interest and experience in Immigration Policy analysis, campaigning, and advocacy at the municipal, state, and national levels. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy focusing on the study of nation-states and their borders. Her philosophical work is primarily informed by Social and Political Philosophy, Latinx, Mexican, and Latin American Philosophies.
Secretary of Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean Culture (2018-2024)
Rosemere Ferreira da Silva is Associate Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia / UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. She is a specialist in Brazilian Literature, Afro-Braszilian Literature, Comparative Literature and Ethnic and African Studies. Her research focuses on Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean Literature. She is the coordinator of Literatura and Afrodescendência research group at UNEB. She is currently writing a book about black intellectuals. Dr. Da Silva is a Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs and part of the editorial team of Black Issues in Philosophy. Read more.
Secretary of Outreach Across African American and African Communities (2018-2024)
T.D. Harper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute of Social Sciences and Africa is a Country.
Secretary for Graduate Outreach (2020-2023)
ज्योतिस् /ജ്യോതിസ് / Jyothis James is a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and Philosophy from Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL in 2012 and then he pursued a Masters in Syriac Studies at St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute (SEERI), Kottayam, Kerala, Republic of India. James is interested in the topics of whiteness, racialization, diaspora, anti-colonial studies.
Secretary of Nature and Culture Critical Studies (2022-2024)
C. Olivier Lozano Villanueva es investigador independiente y gestor cultural. Licenciado en Humanidades, en el área de Filosofía por la Universidad de Quintana Roo. Se dedica al desarrollo de proyectos orientados a contribuir a la sensibilización de una cultura crítica, mediante la creación de redes de trabajo con académicos, colectividades y universidades. Forma parte de la coordinación del Programa de Estudios Críticos Ambientales (PECA) en la península de Yucatán que tiene como objetivo el fomentar análisis que permitan visibilizar la relación entre ambiente, capitalismo y sociedad desde un enfoque interdisciplinario. En la actualidad impulsa Lecturas del Trópico (LDT), plataforma pedagógica orientada a sistematizar talleres y cursos sobre filosofía ambiental, pedagogía y literatura en el Caribe. Su intención es generar espacios de formación entorno al ensayo literario y problemáticas relacionadas con las identidades, la crisis ecológica y las formas de habitar el mundo desde una perspectiva que nos permita resignificar nuestra presencia ambiental. En su proyecto de investigación está desarrollando la categoría de Caribeallien; misma que permite indagar sobre la relación entre racismo, imaginarios sobre la naturaleza y el turismo en el caribe quintanarroense.
Secretary for Institutional Memory and Archiving (2020-2023)
Thomas Meagher is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He works in the areas of social and political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism, with particular interest in questions pertaining to race, gender, and coloniality and their capacity to shape and re-shape human values. He earned his doctorate at the University of Connecticut where he completed his dissertation, “Maturity in a Human World: A Philosophical Study.” He has also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, and as a Du Bois Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Secretary of Critical Theory and Social Thought in Latin America and the Caribbean (2023-2025)
Stephanie Mercado Irizarry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literature, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. She also holds an M.A. in Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies from said institution, and received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Her areas of interest include decolonial thought, Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Caribbean literature and social movements, and Latinx Studies. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary Puerto Rican literature as well as insular and diasporic muralism.
Secretary of Digital Outreach and Chair of Architectonics (2020-2023)
Dana Francisco Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a Research Associate for the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and psychosocial studies. His current book manuscript, “The Coloniality of Happiness,” investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression, and wellbeing for members of the African Diaspora. He also currently serves as a Faculty Research Fellow for the Applied Ethics Center (University of Massachusetts Boston). Read more.
Secretary of Physics, Technology and Philosophy (2023-2025)
Jacob “Jake” Stanton is a recent graduate of Brown University where he earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematical Physics and Africana Studies. In Jake's undergraduate thesis, "Ọrúnmilà ní ó ò wàá bá ní", he looked to the traditional philosophy of the Yoruba people in order to suggest solutions to unanswered questions in Quantum Mechanics. Drawing from this experience, Jake is interested in bridging a connection between indigenous knowledge systems, science, and the natural environment.
Secretary of Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin American Outreach (2022-2024)
Vialcary Crisóstomo Tejada is an Assistant Professor in Spanish and Hispanic Studies, and an affiliated faculty in African and African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Earlham College. She received her PhD from the University of Connecticut in Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures. Her areas of specialization include Afro-Caribbean Studies, Latinx Studies, Latin American Literature, Decolonial Feminism, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her current book project, titled Spaces of Resistance, analyzes representations of Black and gendered non-binary bodies in feminist Caribbean literature as contestations to hegemonic notions of race, gender, sexuality, and to the naturalizing effects of space endorsed by the State. Her current research focuses on Black and feminist popular movements in the Caribbean; particularly on the political and epistemic work of decolonial Afro-Feminist collectives in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico.
Co-Secretary of LGBTQ+ Affairs (2023-2025)
Anwar Uhuru is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Their research interests include Black Existentialism, Africana Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black Intellectual Thought. They have publications in the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, The APA Newsletter: Philosophy and the Black Experience, and Radical Philosophy Review. Their forthcoming book, The Insurrectionist Case for Reparations: Race, Value and Ethics, will be published through SUNY Press.