Africana Ph.D.s enjoy flexibility, rigor in new program

Nadia Sasso
Jason Koski/University Photography
Nadia Sasso is one of four students currently enrolled in the new Africana Studies doctoral program.

Last year, as grad student Nadia Sasso considered universities for her doctoral degree, Cornell’s new program in Africana Studies attracted her because its professors specialized in issues related to both African-Americans and Africans living in the U.S. and other countries; its support for her social entrepreneurship ventures, focused on education in her home country of Sierra Leone; and its newness, which would allow her to combine her academic interests with her work in film, multimedia and social media.

Sasso is one of four students now enrolled in the inaugural class of Cornell’s new doctoral program in Africana Studies, with another three to five students expected to join next fall.

An activist, blogger, academic and filmmaker, Sasso said Cornell’s program was “the perfect place to bring my research. I like to mix my academic work with creative influences so I thought a new program would be open to that,” she said.

Kanyinsola Obayan, another grad student, said being a member of the first class also carries a responsibility.

“We will set the pace and standard for classes to come,” said Obayan, who was born in Nigeria and did her undergrad work at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s a feeling that you’re building something together with professors and the administration. That’s something to be proud of.”

Noliwe Rooks, associate professor of Africana Studies and director of graduate studies, said Africana has been able to attract top Ph.D. scholars because of the diversity of its faculty research.

“Other programs tend to cluster around one region of the world,” she said. “But here, students can go in depth in multiple regions, and we can support them.”

Africana has been preparing for the program for the last several years by adding seven new faculty members. As part of the program, students assist faculty with research, teaching and organizing programs, and participate in formal and informal study groups. In their third year, she said, doctoral students will have the chance to design and teach freshman writing seminars or become teaching assistants.

Sasso was born in the U.S. but became “infatuated” with Sierra Leone during her senior year in college. As an undergrad, she founded a nonprofit to provide birthing kits to women there and traveled to Sierra Leone every three to six months.

“I think that African-Americans and Africans or people from the diaspora don’t really understand each other’s history,” Sasso said. “There’s a lot of interracial tension.”

Obayan moved to the U.S. from Nigeria when she was a young girl and is focusing her research on her home country and the ways gender, femininity and sexuality are constructed today. She is particularly interested in the continued use of naked protests by women as a tool for social change.

The most prominent example of this protest occurred in 1929, when women used it to oppose British colonial taxation, Obayan said. Today, the protests are used against corporations or the government.

“I wondered why women would resort to this,” she said. She discovered that the protests draw from indigenous thoughts about motherhood and its power.

Rooks said some benefits of the doctoral program are already evident.

The first class of doctoral students has come together – as hoped – as friends and colleagues. “They’re a tightly knit group,” she said.

“And during the program development, faculty have become much better acquainted with the work of our colleagues both in the department and in the larger field. That was an unexpected but much appreciated benefit,” Rooks said.

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