Distinguished Scholars
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Alex Carter
Alex Carter joined Poly Prep Country Day School in 2018 in the History Department. During his tenure, he designed a curriculum on American and African American history. He created a core curriculum and courses: African American Women’s History, Black Power & Black Arts, Slavery and Resistance, and other courses that centered his training in Afro-American Studies on interdisciplinary approaches to explore the Black world. In 2022, he collaborated with Dr. Rebecca Hall and the Ida B. Wells Education Project to develop the curriculum and lesson plans for Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. In 2019, he received the Poly Prep Head of School Annual Teaching Award for outstanding and innovative teaching. He is currently an Upper School Dean at Poly Prep.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a Professor of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the African Diaspora Program in Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on the connections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, during slavery and post-emancipation. Her work has included interpreting captive African domestic spaces at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation in Nashville, Tennessee; School segregation in 19th century Boston and the Burghardt family homestead, also known as the W.E.B Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Her publications include the book, Black Feminist Archaeology (2011), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, a collection of the visual graphics Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University prepared for the 1900 Paris Exposition co-edited with Britt Russert (2019). She is currently the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, which was established to engage audiences in discussions and scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois and related archival collections. The Du Bois Center also raises awareness and promotes scholarship around issues involving race, labor, and social injustice throughout the world.
Stefan Bradley
Stefan Bradley is the Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College, and author of Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League and Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, which won the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize. Bradley is co-editor of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, The Demands of Transcendence. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Bradley has been featured on Cspan2 BookTV, MSNBC, CNN, as well as nationally syndicated radio stations such as NPR.
Placement African American Studies for the College Board.
James Smethurst
James Smethurst is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. He received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. His primary research areas are African American literature, culture, and intellectual history from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on black cultural and political radicalism. He is the author of five books and three edited volumes, including The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 2005) and SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, with John H. Bracey Jr. and Sonia Sanchez (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).
Anne Kerth
Anne Kerth is an Assistant Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and a B.A. in History from Williams College. Her research interests include the history of slavery and emancipation, labor history, the history of gender and sexuality, and carceral history.
Amilcar Shabazz
Amilcar Shabazz is a Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. From 2013 to 2016, he was the Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor for Diversity and Excellence, and, since 2016, he has acted as the department’s chair for an interim term. He is the author of Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas (UNC Press) and the co-editor of The Forty Acres Documents, one of the earliest scholarly works in the modern movement for reparations for slavery and the racial oppression of people of African descent in North America.