Crystal Leigh Endsley was previously an instructor in the Women’s Studies Department at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she also served as interim assistant director for the Paul Robeson Cultural Center. Endsley completed her graduate studies at Penn State’s main campus where she earned a dual Ph.D. in women’s studies and curriculum & instruction.
She is internationally recognized as a spoken word artist, performing and presenting workshops and lectures in the U.S. and abroad. Her performances and current research focus on issues of performance and identity and the ways they intersect with feminist pedagogy, race and popular culture; hip hop and cultural production as activism; and the connections between academic/home communities, motherhood and knowledge production.
Heather Merrill came to Hamilton College from Dickinson College where she taught from 2000-2009 and was executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues from 2006-2008. She completed her doctoral work in human geography at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. Merrill also has a master's degree . in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in history and education from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University. Her research examines place, race, identity and the social transformation of Europe in relation to the African Diaspora. A critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography in Italy, her current research is focused on African diasporic identity and politics, refugees from the Horn of Africa and the emergence of Black Spaces in Italy. Merrill was the Distinguished Visiting Irwin Scholar in Women’s Studies at Hamilton from 2009-2011 and joined the Africana Studies department faculty in 2011. She is the author of An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota, 2006) and has published numerous articles in edited volumes and journals of geography.
Angel David Nieves currently co-directs Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) an $800,000. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant-funded project. He taught in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2003-2008. Nieves completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana Studies at Cornell University in 2001. His co-edited book, ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. (2008), examines African American efforts to claim space in American society despite fierce resistance. Nieves has published essays in the Journal of Planning History; Places Journal: A Forum of Design for the Public Realm; Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies; and in several edited collections, most recently in Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing With Difficult Heritage (2009). In 2010 he received The John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award. He is also associate editor of Fire!!!: A Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, an online journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. His digital research and scholarship have also been featured on MSNBC.com and in Newsweek. Nieves’ scholarly work and community-based activism critically engages with issues of memory, heritage preservation, gender and nationalism at the intersections of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South.
Nigel Westmaas, assistant professor of Africana studies, joined the Hamilton faculty in 2006. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton and bachelor’s degree from the University of Guyana. He has published articles in journals and magazines, including Against the Current, Small Axe, Emancipation Magazine, Caribbean Studies, Guyana Art Forum and An Introductory Reader for Women’s Studies in Guyana. He is the co-editor of a UNESCO assisted booklet Guyanese Periodicals: 1796-1996. Westmaas also contributes guest articles to the Stabroek News, one of the national newspapers of Guyana. His research work for and contributing introduction to the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Caribbean series project (University of California), is forthcoming.
His other research interests include the history of the newspaper press, pan-Africanism, and the rise and impact of political and social movements mainly in the Anglophone Caribbean.
Back to Africana Studies overview.
The Africana Studies Department's emphasis on research and the senior project gives top students the opportunity to publish their work in scholarly journals and present it at research conferences such as the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Curacao. The department offers a course devoted entirely to research skills and methods.
The emphasis in the department is on small classes, one-on-one student-teacher interaction and continual attention to writing and speaking skills. Participation and engagement are crucial in every Hamilton course, but they are especially valuable in the study of other cultures — culture is a conversation.
Africana studies provides a window on some of today's most fascinating topics and emerging issues: world music; film and representation; gender, sexuality and feminism; and the blending of popular and political culture in hip-hop.
The Africana Studies Department brings together distinguished faculty members from a range of disciplines and interests, from African philosophy and development to contemporary African-American political and social thought to classical history and literature. The interdisciplinary breadth of the department makes it not only a valuable and important major, but also an attractive minor for students seeking greater historical and cultural perspective in their own fields.
The Africana Studies Department's emphasis on research and the senior project gives top students the opportunity to publish their work in scholarly journals and present it at research conferences such as the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Curacao. The department offers a course devoted entirely to research skills and methods.
The emphasis in the department is on small classes, one-on-one student-teacher interaction and continual attention to writing and speaking skills. Participation and engagement are crucial in every Hamilton course, but they are especially valuable in the study of other cultures — culture is a conversation.
Africana studies provides a window on some of today's most fascinating topics and emerging issues: world music; film and representation; gender, sexuality and feminism; and the blending of popular and political culture in hip-hop.
The Africana Studies Department brings together distinguished faculty members from a range of disciplines and interests, from African philosophy and development to contemporary African-American political and social thought to classical history and literature. The interdisciplinary breadth of the department makes it not only a valuable and important major, but also an attractive minor for students seeking greater historical and cultural perspective in their own fields.
The Africana Studies Department's emphasis on research and the senior project gives top students the opportunity to publish their work in scholarly journals and present it at research conferences such as the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Curacao. The department offers a course devoted entirely to research skills and methods.
The emphasis in the department is on small classes, one-on-one student-teacher interaction and continual attention to writing and speaking skills. Participation and engagement are crucial in every Hamilton course, but they are especially valuable in the study of other cultures — culture is a conversation.
Africana studies provides a window on some of today's most fascinating topics and emerging issues: world music; film and representation; gender, sexuality and feminism; and the blending of popular and political culture in hip-hop.
The Africana Studies Department brings together distinguished faculty members from a range of disciplines and interests, from African philosophy and development to contemporary African-American political and social thought to classical history and literature. The interdisciplinary breadth of the department makes it not only a valuable and important major, but also an attractive minor for students seeking greater historical and cultural perspective in their own fields.
The Africana Studies Department's emphasis on research and the senior project gives top students the opportunity to publish their work in scholarly journals and present it at research conferences such as the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Curacao. The department offers a course devoted entirely to research skills and methods.
The emphasis in the department is on small classes, one-on-one student-teacher interaction and continual attention to writing and speaking skills. Participation and engagement are crucial in every Hamilton course, but they are especially valuable in the study of other cultures — culture is a conversation.
Africana studies provides a window on some of today's most fascinating topics and emerging issues: world music; film and representation; gender, sexuality and feminism; and the blending of popular and political culture in hip-hop.
The Africana Studies Department brings together distinguished faculty members from a range of disciplines and interests, from African philosophy and development to contemporary African-American political and social thought to classical history and literature. The interdisciplinary breadth of the department makes it not only a valuable and important major, but also an attractive minor for students seeking greater historical and cultural perspective in their own fields.
