Faculty
Dr. Amani Morrison (Principal Investigator) is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in GU’s English Department. A Virginia native, she earned her Ph.D in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, her M.A. in African American Studies from UC Berkeley, and her B.A. (magna cum laude) from University of Richmond. Morrison was an inaugural CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation in 2019-20 at the University of Delaware with the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and was a 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis in African and African American Studies.
Dr. Morrison holds expertise in 20th-century African American literature, race and space studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and the urban and digital humanities. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Bancroft Library, the University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections, the University of California Consortium for Black Studies, and others. Her research has been awarded by the National Council for Black Studies and was shortlisted for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, Meridians, Environment and Society, African American Review, and The Common Reader. Dr. Morrison is writing the first cultural history of Chicago’s mid-twentieth-century kitchenette apartments.
Dr. Rosemary Ndubuizu is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Ndubuizu is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology. Her untitled manuscript-in-progress historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city’s reduction and privatization of affordable housing.
Dr. Ndubuizu’s teaching interests include social policy, post-civil rights black politics, the black radical tradition including black feminism, social movements, the political economy of non-profits, and women of color feminisms. Originally from Inglewood, CA, Dr. Ndubuizu relocated to the Bay Area to complete her undergraduate studies at Stanford University. In 2006, she relocated once again to D.C. and eventually became a community organizer with Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC, which is a D.C.-based community organization that organizes long-time Washingtonians of color to campaign for more local and federal investments in affordable housing and living-wage jobs. To complete her graduate studies, she enrolled into Rutgers University’s Women’s and Gender Studies.
Dr. Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and sociologist working at the intersections of race, gender, popular culture, and the U.S. South. A native Memphian and classically-trained violinist, Robinson earned the Bachelor of Arts in Literature and African American Studies and the Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Memphis and the Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Robinson’s first book, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second monograph, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter (UCLA), won the 2018 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title and the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Her next monograph, Soul Power: Race, Place, and the Battle for the Memphis Sound (University of North Carolina Press) examines race, culture, and neighborhood change in South Memphis, former home of the renowned soul music factory Stax Records.
Dr. Robinson’s teaching interests include Black feminist theory, Black popular culture, urban sociology, and Afro-futurism. She is President-Elect of the Association of Black Sociologists, a member of the editorial board of Southern Cultures, and a contributing editor at Oxford American. Her work has appeared in Issues in Race and Society, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Annual Review of Sociology (with Marcus Anthony Hunter), Contexts, Rolling Stone, Scalawag, Hyperallergic, Believer, Oxford American, and The New York Times.