School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • Vaughn Rasberry

    Vaughn Rasberry

    Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies

    BioVaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, Race and the Totalitarian Century, questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, the defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.

    His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English.

    An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

    Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies.

  • Darion Aaron Wallace

    Darion Aaron Wallace

    Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
    Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
    Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
    Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Spring 2023
    Other Tech - Graduate, African and African American Studies
    Student Employee, Other Advising Programs

    BioDarion A. Wallace, from Inglewood, CA, is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Education in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education, History of Education, and Sociology of Education programs. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in International Education Policy Analysis from Stanford University. As a Black Education Studies scholar, Darion’s research draws upon Black Studies, Sociology, and History, while employing mixed methods, to interrogate the ways K-12 American schools cohere logics of (anti)blackness and structure the life and educational outcomes of Black students across temporal and spatial bounds. Moreover, he is interested in how abolitionist praxes, pedagogies, and epistemologies rooted in the Black radical and intellectual tradition have and continue to serve a liberatory function in the project of Black education. To this aim, Darion is interested in partnering with public schools and libraries to develop secondary students’ historical literacies and archival skills to help them better understand the localized sociopolitical context that undergirds their lived experience. Previously, he has worked with the Learning Policy Institute as a Research and Policy Associate, the Service Employees International Union as an Organizer, and San Francisco State University as an Africana Studies Lecturer on Black Masculinities and Black Social Science.