People

Naseemah Mohamed

Social Studies and African Studies

Class of 2012

Rhodes Scholar

As a Harvard Michael C. Rockefeller Fellow Naseemah Mohamed ’12 is currently learning Bharatnatyam (Indian classical dance) at Kalamandalam Arts University in Kerala, India. Projects Zilolonge Arts-Literacy Project The Zilolonge Arts-Literacy Project...

John M. Mugane

mugane@fas.harvard.edu

Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures and Director of the African Language Program

John M. Mugane is the Director of the African Language program in the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a linguist specializing in African languages and is the Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard...

Laurence Ralph

lralph@fas.harvard.edu

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences

Laurence Ralph is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago...

Yasmin Rawlins

African American Studies with a Secondary Field in Human Evolutionary Biology

Class of 2015

Now a medical student at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons,Yasmin Ama Rawlins concentrated in the African-American Studies track of African and African-American Studies, with a secondary in Human Evolutionary Biology. She wrote her...

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko

ndaliko@unc.edu

Ph.D. in African Studies, with a primary field in Music

Class of 2012

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies radical arts interventions in conflict regions of Africa through ethnomusicology, film studies, and cultural theory. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at...

Samuel "Gus" Ruchman

Class of 2015

Gus Ruchman is a senior in Pforzheimer House from Cos Cob, CT. A lover of languages, he speaks conversational Kiswahili and Wolof. He is currently researching and writing a thesis about the late-Victorian construction of the Uganda Railway, examining...

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

shelemay@fas.harvard.edu

G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies

Mather House SCR Associate Member

Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States, she received her Ph.D...

Doris Sommer

dsommer@fas.harvard.edu

Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies

Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University

Professor Sommer's research interests have developed from the 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate new republics in Latin America through the particular aesthetics of minoritarian literature, including bilingual virtuosity, to her current more...

Iman Taylor

Class of 2012

Founder of Project MUSE Projects Project Muse MUSE aims to introduce students to multiple aspects of education through the use of creative curriculums and seminars taught by undergraduate college students, and also promotes youth leadership and...

Kristina Tester

African Studies

Class of 2014

Kristina Tester is a 2014 graduate of the Department of African and African American studies at Harvard. She currently works as a research assistant and program coordinator for the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Massachusetts General...

David R. Williams

dwilliam@hsph.harvard.edu

Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

David R. Williams is the Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Sociology at Harvard University. His first 6 years as a faculty member were...