Donald Martin Carter wrote Navigating The African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility, published in 2010, and States of Grace: Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration, published in 1997. His research interests include culture theory, racial formation, visual culture, diaspora, invisibility and transnational cultural politics. Carter, who came to Hamilton from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, received a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Mark Cryer wrote and performs a one-act play, 99 Questions You've Always Wanted to Ask an African American But Were Too Afraid to Ask, which is a look at what we think and what we know about African-Americans. The play has been performed at the annual Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. and the Edinburgh (Scotland) Fringe Theatre Festival. Cryer appeared in the feature films Mighty Ducks 2, It Could Happen to You and The Peace Maker. He earned a master of fine arts in acting from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, Glasgow, Scotland, and studied Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Art, London.
Todd Franklin's research focuses on the existential, social and political implications of various critical and transformative discourses aimed at cultivating individual and collective self-realization. He teaches courses on existentialism, Nietzsche and critical cultural studies and is a past recipient of the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award. The author of several scholarly works on the social and political import of various forms of existential enlightenment, Franklin is also the co-editor of a volume titled Critical Affinities: Reflections on the Convergence between Nietzsche and African American Thought. He holds a doctorate from Stanford University.
Shelley Haley is an expert on Cleopatra and has discussed the subject on BBC and The Learning Channel programs. Haley was a distinguished visiting scholar at Washington University-St. Louis and participated in the Oxford Round Table. She has lectured widely on increasing the representation of students of color in Latin, ancient Greek and classics classrooms – and on her research about the role of a classical education in the lives and careers of 19th-century college-educated black women. She was chief reader for the AP Latin Exam and was appointed chair of the exam Development Committee.
Heather Merrill's research examines place, race, identity and the social transformation of Europe in relation to the African Diaspora. She is a critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy. Merrill is currently completing a book on anti-blackness and Blackness in Italy and the emergence of Black Spaces. Her book publications are Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (co-edited), 2015; and An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race. She came to Hamilton College from Dickinson College, where she taught and was executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. Merrill completed her doctoral work in human geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Angel David Nieves codirects Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative. He completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana studies at Cornell University. Nieves coedited the book, ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S., and is associate editor of Fire!!!: A Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, among other work. MSNBC.com and Newsweek have featured his digital research and scholarship. Nieves’ scholarly work and community-based activism 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.
Vincent Odamtten, who earned a doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, specializes in African, Caribbean and African-American literatures. Odamtten published an acclaimed book, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, and has contributed articles to a number of anthologies. He edited Broadening the Horizon: Critical Introductions to Amma Darko, published in England, and published an article "Not Just for Children Anymore: Aidoo's The Eagle and the Chickens and Questions of Identity" in Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70. Odamtten is researching Togbi Sri II, paramount chief of the Anlo-Ewes of Southeastern Ghana, as part of a multimedia narrative project.
Nigel Westmaas has published articles in numerous periodicals, including the Stabroek News, a Guyanese newspaper. Westmaas is co-editor of a UNESCO assisted booklet on a directory of Guyanese periodicals. His research for and contributing co-written article to the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Caribbean series project was published by the University of California Press. He also published a chapter in Black Power in the Post-Independence Anglophone Caribbean (University Press of Florida, 2014). 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. He earned his doctorate from SUNY Binghamton.
