Meet Our New DAAS Faculty
Earl Lewis
Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies; Director, Center for Social Solutions
Earl Lewis, noted social historian, author, former director of the Center for Afroamerican & African Studies returns to DAAS this summer, having completed his term as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Lewis will serve as director of the U-M Center for Social Solutions, a new center that will address three core areas of social concern: diversity and race, water, and the future of work.
Lewis will continue the “Our Compelling Interests” book series that he launched at the Mellon Foundation, which investigates how diversity and social connectedness are imperative to our shared success and prosperity, as an important part of the new center’s work.
More information on Professor Lewis’ return and the Center for Social Solutions.
Lydia Kelow-Bennett
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies
Lydia Kelow-Bennett joins the DAAS faculty as Assistant Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies this fall.
She received her PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University in 2018. Her research examines Black women’s intellectual history and Black feminist thought in the post-civil rights era, as well as Black popular culture.
She’ll be teaching a First-Year Seminar on Black Women and Popular Culture as well as seminar on Black Queer Theory this fall.
SaraEllen Strongman
Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow
SaraEllen Strongman joins the DAAS faculty as a LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.
Her research interests include African American literature and intellectual history, women’s and gender studies, Black feminisms, and queer theory. Her current project “The Sisterhood: Black Women, Black Feminism, and the Women’s Liberation Movement” traces the development of U.S. Black feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bénédicte Boisseron
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies
Bénédicte Boisseron, joins the DAAS faculty as Associate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies, specializing in the fields of black diaspora studies, francophone studies, and animal studies.
She received an M.A. in English from Université Denis Diderot (Paris, France) and a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (UP of Florida, 2014), 2015 winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is also the co-author of La culture Francophone (Focus Publishing, forthcoming) and co-editor of Voix du monde (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011).
She is the recipient of an Alexander Von Humboldt Research Fellowship (Berlin, Germany) and of an Animals & Society Institute and Animal Studies Program Research Fellowship (Wesleyan University, CT).
This fall she will be teaching a seminar on Black Studies and Animal Studies.
