Christina Baker
Director | Associate Professor
Christina Baker (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Dr. Baker is also a faculty member in UC Merced’s Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate program. Dr. Baker’s scholarship and teaching focus on the intersection of race and gender, with an emphasis on Black feminism and explorations of the experiences of women of color in film/media, higher education, and other spaces. She is the author of Black Women Directors (Rutgers University Press, Quick Takes: Movies & Popular Culture series), Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (The Ohio State University Press, Black Performance and Cultural Criticism series), the edited collection Kasi Lemmons: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi), as well as several articles.
Steering Committee Member & Founding Co-Director | Associate Professor
Muey Saeteurn specializes in the history of decolonization, nation-building, socio-economic development, and agrarian change in twentieth-century Kenya and the world. The thread that runs through her research and the courses she teaches concerns the ways in which rural African women and men shaped large-scale historical processes while positioning themselves as central actors in the making of the modern globalized world. Her first book, Cultivating Their Own: Agriculture in Western Kenya During the “Development” Era, was published in 2020 with the Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora series at the University of Rochester Press. Her current book project is titled Custodians of Tea: A History of Kenya's Tea Producers in the Late Cold War Era.
Sabrina Smith
Steering Committee Member & Founding Co-Director | Assistant Professor
Sabrina Smith specializes in the history of the African Diaspora to Mexico and Central America. Her research and teaching examines the everyday experiences of African-descended people, and particularly women, in Latin America. She is currently working on her first book manuscript on African-descended women and men in colonial Oaxaca
Myles Ali
Steering Committee Member | Assistant Professor
Myles Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. He is a historian of Africa, who focuses on the history of slavery, emancipation, trade, and colonialism in British Sierra Leone in West Africa. Myles received his PhD in History at York University, and he is a former University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Captive Lives: Experiences of Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone.
Kevin Dawson
Steering Committee Member | Associate Professor
Kevin Dawson is associate professor of history at the University of California, Merced, and the recipient of the 2022–23 Kemble Fellowship in Maritime History at The Huntington. He is the author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Nigel Hatton
Steering Committee Member | Associate Professor
Nigel Hatton is an associate professor in the Literatures in English section of the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Merced. His research and teaching span the areas of literature and philosophy, human rights and literature, critical refugee studies, and narrative medicine. His scholarship has appeared in the James Baldwin Review, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought, Globalization in Literature, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, and other publications. He is a contributing author to Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (2022) and co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies Book Series from University of California Press.
Maria Martin
Steering Committee Member | Assistant Professor
Maria Martin is an Assistant Professor of African History with the Department of History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She holds a PhD in African American and African Studies with a concentration in history and women’s studies from Michigan State University where she is known for her hip hop teaching methods. Dr. Martin has also taught internationally in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan in the Gender Studies program. Prior to teaching in Nigeria, she conducted research there using oral histories and archives that centered building an intellectual history of Nigerian women’s activism in the nationalist movement.
Nicosia Shakes
Steering Committee Member | Assistant Professor
Nicosia Shakes is a scholar and artist specializing in African Diasporic political activism, race, gender and sexuality, and theatre and performance. Her book is titled, Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space. It won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize in 2017 and was published by UIP in 2023. The book examines the critical interventions made by theatre projects formed and operated by African and African-descended women. Through performance, these groups theorize about racial, gender and economic justice in Jamaica and South Africa.
Daniel Thompson
Steering Committee Member | Associate Professor
Daniel Thompson an anthropologist and geographer who is committed to rigorous and critical ethnographic research and community collaboration. His current project is focused on how diaspora businesspeople from the Horn of Africa think about climate change as they pursue transnational investment across the US-Africa connection. Since 2015, he has been conducting research on the intersections between cross-border smuggling and diaspora investment in the Ethiopia-Somalia border regions, especially in the city of Jigjiga, Ethiopia. His book Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands was published in 2025 with Cambridge University Press.
