International Visiting Professors
Each year, an International Visiting Professor was appointed by a faculty committee to teach within the African American African Diaspora Studies Department. The professor appointed relocated to the United States to teach two courses per year and to be an active member of our community. They are provided office space and library privileges.
Isabel Cristina Ferreira dos Reis (2023-2024)
Isabel Cristina Ferreira dos Reis received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History from the Federal University of Bahia (1998) in Brazil. She was awarded a doctorate in Social History from the State University of Campinas (2007) where she successfully defended a dissertation on the subject of “The Black Family in Slavery: Bahia, 1850-1888.”
Ferreira dos Reis has been teaching at the university level since 1996 and is currently an associate professor in the History Department of the Federal University of the Bahian Recôncavo, in the Center of Arts, Humanities and Languages in Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil. She is also a member of the Graduate Program in Africa History, African Diaspora and Indigenous People, where she directs courses in Afro-Brazilian Studies, Imperial Brazil, African Diaspora in the Americas, and Historical Research Methods. Additionally, Ferreira dos Reis is also a member of the Afro-Brazilian and Bahian Recôncavo Studies Group, a region-wide organization of scholars.
It is important to mention her participation in the Extended Workshop on Social History in Dakar, Senegal (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and The South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development in 2002; and the 9th annual Cultural Studies Workshop in Bangalore, Karnataka, Índia (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus) in 2003.
Her current research interests include the Black family and slavery; African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture; slave resistance and the history of the African Diaspora. She has published several scholarly articles and a book, "Histórias de vida familiar e afetiva de escravos na Bahia do século XIX" (Edufba, 2001) which examines the experience of the slave family in 19th century Bahia. In addition, she also co-edited two books of essays, one on regional and local history in northeastern Brazil, “História regional e local: discussões e práticas,” (Quarteto, 2010) with Ana Maria Carvalho dos Santos Oliveira from Bahia State University, and another one with Solange Pereira da Rocha from Federal University of Paraíba, “Diaspora Africana nas Américas” (Fino Traço Editora & Editora da UFRB, 2015).
Ferreira dos Reis’ current proposal of research is a comparison of black family life in the context of 19th century slavery in Brazil, U.S. and Caribbean, discussing the extent to which Black families in the Atlantic world places were influenced by African cultural matrices and analyzing their differences and similarities.
Her two previous fellowships in the United States includes one as a Scholar in Residency at Dillard University (New Orleans Louisiana, (2002-2003), with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation; and the other in 2013-2014, where she spent a sabbatical year at the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver, with support of a fellowship from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES - Ministry of Education of Brazil). Both fellowships are important foundations to support academics research in Brazil.
Courses offered include:
"African and Afro-Descendent in the Brazilian Slavery Society Labor, Culture, and Resistance" in the Fall 2023. This course introduces students to African and Afro-Descendent in the Brazilian Slavery Society Labor, Culture and Resistance with a focus to study slavery in colonial and imperial Brazil.
“The Making of Contemporary Brazil:History, Struggles, and Protagonism of the Afro-descendant Population" in the Spring 2024. This course aimed at exploring a range of contemporary and historical themes in Afro-Brazilian social, economic, political, and cultural life.
Q&A With International Visiting Professor Isabel Cristina Ferreira dos Reis
Maboula Soumahoro (2022-2023)
Professor Maboula Soumahoro is the 2022-2023 International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Based in France, Soumohoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours. She has previously taught at Bennington College, Barnard College, the Bard Prison Initiative, and Columbia University. In 2020, her recent work titled "Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire" (La Découverte, 2021) received a special distinction from the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize. From 2013-2016, Soumahoro was an appointed member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in France.
Courses offered include:
The course, encompassing various modalities of expression: historical, political, cultural, artistic, and intellectual, offers a rhizomatic exploration of the African diaspora of the Black Atlantic (Europe-Africa-Americas) through a selection of its productions. Using my book Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) as a point of departure, this seminar is an invitation to embark on a series of peregrinations in an attempt to capture the elusive, numerous, and intricate layers of blackness that have manifested throughout history and geography. Participants to this course will be invited to ponder the perpetual, unsettling movement going between the personal, the intimate and the public and political. How does this tense motion is articulated and translated?
Learn more about "Black is the Journey, Africana the Name"
Watch Q&A with International Visiting Professor Maboula Soumahoro
Salim Washington (2021-2022)
Salim Washington was the inaugural International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. Washington is also a cluster leader/ HOD (head of department) of Performing Arts, and a professor at University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Durban, South Africa). Composer and reedsman, he performs on the flute, tenor saxophone, oboe, and bass clarinet. He also studied other instruments including mbira and hand drums.
Washington is a widely-published scholar of black culture and music. His interests include the Black Atlantic, Afro futurism, Jazz and other vernacular music, Diasporic film and literature. Washington is now completing the following titles: Beautiful Nightmare: John Coltrane, Jazz, and American Culture and Notes from Mzansi: The South African Jazz Imaginary.
Courses offered include:
Exploring the musical and social history of jazz in South Africa along with the ways in which artists have engaged this history in their literary and artistic imagination. Special attention will be paid to the special relationship between South Africa and Afro-America, and to South Africa’s engagement with the Black Atlantic. We will focus on the time period of late Apartheid until the current literary and musical scene of post-Apartheid South Africa. In addition to the history of the music itself, we will consider literary evocations of jazz and mbaqanga within South Africa, and the contribution of South Africa to the jazz imagination worldwide. In each class we will listen critically to various South African jazz artists from different generations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries., including Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Feya Faku, and Bheki Mseleku. We will also discuss South African novels that treat jazz as important to their content and literary strategies. Finally, we will also read historical and critical accounts of the South African jazz scene.
Read Q & A With Inaugural Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor Salim Washington
Watch Salim performing at the Pan African Space Station in Cape Town, South Africa 2021