W.E.B. Du Bois Center for the Study of the Black Experience

Dr. Karen Cook Bell is the Founding Director of the Du Bois Center; Professor of History and Chairperson of the History and Government Department.  She received the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professorship to establish the Du Bois Center from the University System of Maryland in 2022.  She serves as Project Director for an NEH funded “Dialogues on the Experience of War Grant.” Her areas of specialization include slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; the Journal of Women’s History, Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008); Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012); Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013); and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014).  She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land  in Nineteenth Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award.  Her current book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, is published with Cambridge University Press and received the Afro-American Historical and Genealogy Award for Best Book in 2022. She is editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction which is under contract with Cambridge University Press and is co-editor of the Broadview edition of Twelve Years a Slave.  She is a contributor for Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.

Dr. Festus Cole is Assistant Professor of History.  Dr. Cole was educated at Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone), where he obtained a B.A. (Hons) in History, an M.A. in History, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE), and at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), from where he graduated with a Ph.D. in African History.  With a specialty on Africa and World War I, his teaching experience spans three continents: Africa, the United Kingdom, and the US. Dr. Cole has taught African History, Imperialism in Africa, Global History, World History, World Civilizations, Twentieth Century European History, Western Civilization, US History, African American History, and Social Anthropology, at Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone), The School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), Birkbeck College (University of London), The Ohio State University, The State University of New York, North Carolina Wesleyan College, Luther College (Iowa), and, more recently, at Bowie State University (Maryland).

Dr. William Allen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy.  Dr. Allen received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Memphis and M.A. in Philosophy from Georgia State University. He previously taught at Hood College as the Sophia M. Libman National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in which he served as an Assistant Professor and organizer of the institution’s Humanities Colloquium. Additionally, he taught several years at Morgan State University as a Lecturer. His areas of specialization are Social and Political Philosophy, African American Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race. His research and writing focus on critiquing the efficacy of liberal political philosophy in respect to racial justice. 

Dr. Sumanth Reddy is Assistant Professor of Geography.  Dr. Reddy received his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, M.S. from the University of North Texas, and Ph.D. from Kansas State University, all in Geography. He is the coordinator of the geography minor since his start at BSU in 2015. His research interests are in medical, cultural, population, and tourism geography with regional application in Africa and Asia.

Dr. Janelle Pryor is Assistant Professor of Art.  Professor Pryor is an award-winning scholar with more than 10 years of collegiate teaching experience for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. In addition to her teaching role, Professor Pryor serves as coordinator of the BSU Gallery of Art in the Fine and Performing Arts Center. She also has more than 10 years of professional curatorial experience, which includes art exhibitions at university galleries.

Dr. Monifa Love is Professor of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies.  Dr. Monifa Love Asante is Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bowie State University. She also serves as a Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies. Love Asante is a graduate of Princeton University and The Florida State University, where she matriculated as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and as an associate of the great philosopher and oppression theorist William R. Jones. Love Asante is the author of two collections of poetry, Provisions (1989) and Dreaming Underground (2003, Naomi Long Madgett Award winner). She co-authored two fine arts catalogs about the life and work of Ed Love and produced "….my magic pours secret libations," a fine arts catalog and video of an exhibition she curated of African American and Afro-Cuban women artists. She is the co-author of Romancing Harlem, a cultural memoir of Harlem, written with Charles Mills. Additionally, Love Asante co-authored the chapter "Deep-Rooted Cane: Consanguinity, Writing, and Genre" with writer Evans D. Hopkins who is the inspiration for the character of David Carmichael in Love Asante's award-winning novel, Freedom in the Dismal (1998) which will soon be translated into German and French. She recently completed a mixed genre collection, After the Rain: waking, walking, swimming, flying, and the novel Crownsville. Her essay, "Reflection, Affirmation, and Perpetuation: Ed Love's Visual Evidence of the Hueman Experience," appears in Exploring Presence: African American Artists in the Upper South (2021). Work in Obsidian and Persimmon Tree is forthcoming. She works with husband Nana Kweku Carr Asante on development projects in Ghana, West Africa.

Dr. Sheneese Thompson is Assistant Professor of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies.  She earned a B.A  in Afro-American Studies from Howard University, her M.A. in African American Studies from Boston University, and Ph.D. in African American and African Studies from The Ohio State University. She is currently Coordinator for Africana Literatures. Her research areas of interest include Black Popular Culture, African American literature, Comparative Diaspora Studies, Afro-Atlantic Religion, and most notably Lucumi’s cultural impact in the United States.  

Dr. Sammye Miller is Professor of History.  He holds a Ph.D. in Legal History from the Catholic University of America and received his M.A.T. (History) from Trinity University and a B.A. (History) from Delaware State University. He completed a post-doctoral experience at Stanford University in Constitutional Law and History under the direction of Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher. He has served as Humanist Administrator and Historian in the Division of Public Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also served as Assistant for Projects and Community Services at The Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (ASALH) in Washington, D.C. and later as its Executive Director. Dr. Miller also served as Assistant to the Vice-President for Planning and Development at Bowie State University in Maryland.

Dr. Roger Davidson is Associate Professor of History.  He is the son and nephew of World War II veterans and a civilian-track graduate of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). As a graduate student at Howard University, he served as a research assistant on the African American Civil War Sailors Project; a multi-year Department of Defense and National Park Service funded effort to identify all possible sailors of African descent that served in the United States Navy during the Civil War as well as document their service. 

Dr. Fred Mills is Professor of Philosophy.  He specializes in the philosophy of liberation; early Greek philosophy; modern philosophy; and existential phenomenology, with interests in Buddhism, Latin American Philosophy and Political Theory.  He has published an introduction to philosophy, a book on Enrique Dussel's ethics of liberation, and articles on the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Enrique Dussel, and Mario Bencastro. He has also published articles and lectured on US policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean and on the Bolivarian cause of regional independence and integration.

Dr. William Lewis is Professor of Government.  He is a graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he earned the following degrees: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (Political Science), and M. Div (Religion).  For the past thirty-five years, Dr. Lewis has taught various political science courses including Introduction to Political Science, U.S. National Government, Urban Politics and Policy Analysis, and African Politics.

Dr. Benjamin Arah is Professor of Government.  He has three M.A. degrees (in social science, public administration; in political science, concentrations in political theory/philosophy and political methodology; and in philosophy, general), with a Ph.D. in political science (political theory/philosophy, political economy and international relations/politics). He studied at both William Paterson College (now University) in New Jersey and Howard University.