DIRECTOR
Paul E. Lovejoy
Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at York University. He is a leading proponent of revisionist interpretations of the history of the African diaspora, the founding Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the African Diaspora, and editor of the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora with Africa World Press. His theoretical approach places Africa at the center of intellectual discourse on the African diaspora. His contributions to UNESCO include service on the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage (1996-2012), his continued involvement as co-editor of the on-line series of essays by committee members, and a co-editor of the UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 10, on Global Africa.
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
Damilola Adebayo
Damilola Adebayo, Assistant Professor, Department of History, York University is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2020. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three fields, namely social and economic history; science, technology and society (STS); and the role of international organizations in the African past. His current research investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in Africa since the 1850s. He is interested in the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication, and transportation technologies were adopted, appropriated, hybridized, reinvented, or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and the ways in which these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies.
CO-DIRECTORS
Caitlin Fisher
Caitlin Fisher has held a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Department of Film at York University. She is a co-founder of York's Future Cinema Lab and director of the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Internationally recognized for her research and creative contributions in digital culture, she is investigating the future of narrative, interactive storytelling, and interactive cinema in virtual reality research as represented by Augmented Reality (AR) environments. Her research-creation explores technologies to tell compelling stories that matter. She completed a hypertextual dissertation in 2000, and her hypermedia novella, "These Waves of Girls," won the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 Award for Fiction. Her augmented reality poem, "Andromeda," was awarded the 2008 International Vinaros Prize for Electronic Literature. Her current research interests include digital archiving, lifelogging, data visualization and experimental game structures for storytelling.
David V. Trotman
David V. Trotman is Professor in the Department of History at York University and cross-appointed with the Department of Humanities. He is a lifelong member of the Casablanca Steel Orchestra and has worked as a Community Development Officer in Trinidad & Tobago. As a foremost authority on the carnival tradition, he has been a judge for the Ontario Association of Calypso Performers (OCAP) and has also trained judges for the Caribbean Cultural Committee (Caribana). His research has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and SSHRC. He is currently on the Executive Committee of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at York. He also serves on the editorial board for Slavery & Abolition and the H-Net listserve H-Caribbean.
Melchisedek Chétima
Melchisedek Chétima is a Assistant Professor, Department of History, Université du Québec à Montréal and formerly a Banting Fellow at York University. He is Associate Director on the Islamic Protest, Terrorism, and Security in Africa (IPTSA) project. He has held the positions of: Lecturer at the Université de Maroua; Researcher-in-Residence at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies (2018-19); Researcher with the Gordon Henderson fellowship at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre University of Ottawa (2018-19); and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel (2016-17). He is co-editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies and African Economic History
Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah
Sonjah Stanley Niaah is Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies and a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of West Indies. She has been teaching and researching Black Atlantic performance geographies, ritual, dance, popular culture, sacred cultural studies theory, and Caribbean cultural studies for many years. She serves on numerous national and international boards, among them the Entertainment Advisory Board of Jamaica and academic journals such as Cultural Studies, Social and Economic Studies, Tout Moun, and Dancecult. She is the author of Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (2010) and Reggae Pilgrimages: Festivals and the Movement of Jah People (2020). She is a leading scholar on Jamaican popular culture and Caribbean Cultural Studies more broadly, having published over twenty articles and book chapters. Sonjah Stanley Niaah is also, now, Deputy Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of the West Indies.
LEADERSHIP
Kartikay Chadha
Kartikay Chadha is the President and CEO of Walk With Web Inc. His experience in full-stack web development and expertise in big data quantitative and qualitative analysis supports the technical side of the team. He is a Doctoral Student in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Toronto. His research aims to develop computational algorithms and databases and analyze large volume datasets for information retrieval. He is Research Analyst at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Project Manager and Research Assistant at the Visual Analytics Lab at OCAD University. He is developer of The Language of Marks Collaborative Web-portal, Freedom Narratives, and Regenerated Identities.