James E. Newton Symposium

About the Panelists

Marquis Bey’s work focuses on thinking of blackness not as racial identification but as “paraontological,” and utilizes this understanding to recalibrate how we might move through questions of non normative subjectivity—via race, gender and personhood. Through black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, and abolitionist theory, Bey articulates a project of black trans feminism that is not beholden to a veneration of particular subjects but rather an assertion of the dismantling of the normative constraints that define the world—white supremacy, cisnormativity and heteropatriarchy as well as the categories of race and gender themselves.

Kimberly Blockett is Chair and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She is a literary historian interested in cultural geography, travel, and recovering the life and labors of 19th-century Black women creatives. Blockett’s archival work was supported by the Ford Foundation, Harvard Divinity School, Smithsonian, and the NEH. Her publications include Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Travels of Zilpha Elaw (Duke UP, forthcoming), a scholarly edition of the Memoirs of Zilpha Elaw (West Virginia UP, 2021), editor of Mapping Black Women’s Geographies (Routledge 2024), and chapters/articles in Cambridge History of African American Literature, MLA Approaches to Teaching Hurston, 19th-century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife, MELUS, African American Review, a/b: Autobiography Studies, and Legacy.

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer and Black Studies Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work interrogates historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black governance, Black/Native/Indigenous relationalities, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. She is author of the bestselling book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.

Alicia Fontnette ​is a scholar-activist who is dedicated to the freedom and liberation of Black and Brown people throughout the Diaspora. She believes that her responsibility is to help students encounter breakthroughs in thinking and acting in the interest of social justice. Fontnette’s pedagogical practice is rooted in the decolonization and humanization of all her students. In 2012, Fontnette became a board member for the National Council for Black Studies and currently serves as its director.

Chelsea Frazier is a scholar working at the intersection of Black feminist literature and theory and the environmental humanities. Her scholarship, teaching, and public speaking span the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, African art and literature, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript—an ecocritical study of contemporary Black women artists, writers and activists.

Kathryn Benjamin Golden is a historian committed to interdisciplinary research and teaching that urges critical connections between early histories of Black opposition and the unfinished business of freedom. Her work focuses on histories of marronage and rebellion in the U.S. South, as well as their legacies.Golden's areas of specialization include 18th and 19th Century U.S. Slavery, Comparative Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World, Public History, and Collective Memory. 

Kai Marshall is a shape-shifting Black Queer Feminist nerd; an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world; a scholar, poet, facilitator and filmmaker. Green explores questions of Black sexual and gender agency, health, creativity and resilience in the context of state and social violence. An interdisciplinary scholar, Green employs Black feminist theory, visual culture, performance studies and trans studies to investigate Black queer forms of self-representation and communal methods of political mobilization. 

Jamar Rahming has worked in the library industry for 20 years in eight different states including a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Wilmington Institute Free Library, an award winning institution – Recipient of the 2022 National Medal for Museum and Library Services, 2022 John Dana Cotton Award, and recognized by the Fodor’s travel as one of the most beautiful libraries in the nation. Rahming was recently celebrated by Library Journal. He was awarded the Movers & Shakers 2023 Community Builders award for his innovative efforts in facilitating some of the most fascinating programs the library industry has ever seen. Rahming is the 2024 CEO of the Year by Delaware Business Times

Barbara Savage is an historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies; she also was a member of the University’s History Department from 1995-2013.  In 2018-2019, she was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.  She remains a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford where a thesis prize in Black History is named in her honor. Savage has written three books and co-edited two others

Jorge Serrano is the Africana Studies Director of Undergraduate Studies. He researches African antiquity as presented in literary, historical, and archaeological forms. His work comprises analyses regarding interpretations of the civilizational past as perceived by various writers.

Carl Shaw, M. Ed. is the Assistant Director of Community Engagement and Programs at the Wilmington Public Library. The library’s goal is to “bring the world to Wilmington” by offering top tier programs featuring cultural icons including Levar Burton, Angela Davis, Debbie Allen and Ben Crump. The Wilmington Library was awarded the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Medal which is the highest honor and first for a Delaware library. Carl received his bachelor’s degree in education from Lincoln University and master’s degree in education administration from Wilmington University. 

Michael Tillotson earned a Bachelor of Arts in Classics in Liberal Arts, and he held on to those early impressions of the traditional educational mold as he earned a Master of Arts in Africana Studies from the University at Albany, and a Ph.D. from Temple University’s African American Studies Department, which is the birthplace of doctoral-level African American studies. Since Fall 2021, Tillotson has served as the first full-time faculty member in Cortland’s Africana Studies Department with a doctorate in the field. He also serves on the board of the National Council for Black Studies, which is the accrediting body for African American Studies.