Staff
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Oneka LaBennett is an anthropologist and a leading scholar of Black girlhood studies, the African Diaspora in the U.S., Caribbean migration and Afro-Asian intimacies, popular culture and hip hop studies, Black feminism, and gender and environmental catastrophe in the Caribbean. LaBennett is the author of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press 2024), She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press 2011), and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (UC Press 2012). Her Op-eds and public commentary on figures such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj have appeared in platforms such as Ms. Magazine, Newsweek, The Guardian, Politico, and NBCNews.com. Elle Magazine ranked her course, “Women in Hip Hop,” among the top ten in a list of “College Classes that Give Us Hope for the Next Generation.
Maya McKeever, Graduate Research Assistant
Maya McKeever studies contemporary homelessness in California. Her work explores media depictions, anti-homeless policies, displacement methods, and oral history interviews to examine how carcerality, colonial history, and race contribute to the U.S. policies and social rhetoric that devalue unhoused individuals. She is motivated by her experiences working with unhoused populations throughout Los Angeles County, and is currently a Ph.D. student in USC’s American Studies and Ethnicity Department. As the Graduate Research Assistant for BSI since Spring 2024, she has helped organize an introductory Open House, jumpstarted BSI’s community network on campus, and plans to continue building a strong foundation for the Black Studies community at USC.
Edwin Hill
His book Black Soundscapes White Stages appeared with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013. Recent scholarship appears in the edited volumes: Sounds Senses (Liverpool UP, 2021), The New Modernist Studies (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool UP, 2021). Public facing scholarship includes editorial pieces in 33 Carats, a limited-edition hip hop fanzine. He is also the creator, host, and executive producer of Dance Hubs, an audio docu-series about street dance and spaces of creative movement. https://dornsife.usc.edu/consortium/podcasts/dance-hubs/
Lydie Moudileno
Her research focuses on literary and cultural productions from the Francophone world, in particular the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa, as well as postcolonial France.
Francille Rusan Wilson
Wilson is an intellectual and labor historian whose current research examines the intersections between black labor movements, black social scientists, and black women’s history during the Jim Crow era. Her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950, was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book in African American Women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians. Wilson was the inaugural director of USC’s Black Studies Initiative/Emerging Center. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Carter Godwin Woodson Scholars Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).