Department of Africana Studies

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She formerly taught in the Department of Africana Studies at The College of Wooster. Dr. Shakes completed her Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown in May 2017, with specializations in gender and sexuality studies and literary and performance cultures. Her book manuscript, Gender, Race and Performance Space: Women's Activism in Jamaican and South African Theatre won the 2017 National Women's Studies Association/University of Illinois Press (UIP) First Book Prize and is under contract with UIP. It is based on her dissertation, “Africana Women’s Theatre as Activism: A Study of Sistren Theatre Collective, Jamaica and The Mothertongue Project, South Africa” which received the Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award and Marie J. Langlois Prize for an Outstanding Dissertation in the area of Feminist Studies from the Pembroke Center at Brown in 2017. Among her research grants and fellowships are, the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) Grassroots Development Dissertation Research Fellowship (2014-2015), the Brown in the World/World at Brown Grant from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities (2015) and the Steinhaus/Zisson Research Grant (2015) from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her essays have been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The C.L.R. James Journal, Jamaica Journal  and The Black Scholar blog. She has also published several book chapters, including two in the Caribbean Reasonings series. Her list of theatre works includes her play, Afiba and Her Daughters which premiered at Rites and Reason Theatre in 2016, in addition to numerous other performances.