2023 SIAH Teaching Team
Habiba Ibrahim
Habiba Ibrahim is Professor and Associate Chair of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her scholarship engages African American literary and cultural studies, the theoretical traditions of Black studies, Black feminist thought, and gender studies. To account for histories of the present, she studies modern formations of blackness by examining social and literary forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (2012) and Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (2021). Black Age received the honorable mention for the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association in 2022. She co-edited the January 2022 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly entitled, “Black Temporality in Times of Crisis.” Among other venues, Ibrahim’s work appears in African American Review, American Literary History, and Keywords for African American Studies. Recent publications include the essay, “Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed” in the November 2022 special issue of Anthropology and Humanism entitled, “The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional.”
Jasmine Mahmoud
School of Drama, Assistant Professor
Jasmine Mahmoud is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington, with an affiliate appointment in Art History. Her research and teaching engage contemporary performance and art practices, and their relationships with critical race studies, feminist and queer of color critique, public policy, and geography. She focuses particularly on performance theory, minoritarian aesthetics, performance ethnography, cultural policy, racial capitalism, and processes of urbanism. She is co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2021) with Megan Geigner and Stuart Hecht, which was awarded the 2020 ASTR Collaborative Research Award. Her current book project is Avant-Garde Geographies: Race, Public Policy, and Experimentation in the Urban Frontier. This critical cultural history investigates the trend of experimental art practices — such as avant-garde theater, experimental dance, and social practice works — taking space in urban margins (often called “frontiers”) in early 21st century New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. Mahmoud has arts writing in Art Forum, ASAP/J Online, Canadian Art Review, Common Reader, Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies project, Howlround, Hyperallergic, LitHub, South Seattle Emerald, and Variable West. She has curated three exhibitions — Abstractions of Black Citizenship: African American Art from Saint Louis; Northwest Black; and After the Quiet: On Black Figures and Folds — with attention to Black aesthetics.
Bianca Dang
History, Assistant Professor
Bianca Dang is Assistant Professor and Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair of American History at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the histories of Black freedom movements and state coercion in the Americas during the nineteenth century. Currently, she is working on her first book, tentatively titled: Making Meaningful Freedom: Land, Labor, and Migration in Struggles for Autonomy in Haiti and the United States after Emancipation. This project traces how Haitians and African Americans emphasized autonomy, at times individual and at other times community-based, as they worked toward making freedom more than a legal status across the nineteenth century. It focuses especially on how Black women, both Haitian and American, enacted legal, diplomatic, and religious strategies to combat racism and misogyny in such pursuits. Professor Dang’s research is rooted in the nineteenth century but speaks to recent trends in historical scholarship and, more broadly, to the ongoing struggle for a more equitable world. Her research agenda is guided by Black women’s history and Black feminist theory. In particular, she looks at the history of Black women’s activism and the intersections between gender and Black movements for freedom throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Chari Glogovac-Smith
Ph.D. Student, Digital Arts and Experimental Media
Chari Glogovac-Smith is a NY Emmy nominated composer, a performer, and digital media artist. Using an evolving mixture of traditional and experimental techniques, Chari is dynamically exploring and illustrating various counterpoints between human experience and society, presenting art works nationally and internationally. Chari’s recent works have posed questions about land and power, the archive, relational aesthetics and black art practice, machine learning and satellite technology, the technology of care, and institutional critique. As a composer, Chari is known for creating progressive experimental soundscapes, and experimental orchestral compositions. They have composed and created commissioned recent works for The Center of the Art of Performance at UCLA, Emmy nominated Black Iris Project Ballet Company (NY, USA), New Music USA, the multi-award winning independent film “Miss Alma Thomas: A Life in Color: As a digital media artist, Chari’s work includes video, data art, live sound processing, and systems art installations.