Department of Africana Studies

Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is Assistant Professor of the Black Experience in the Americas in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She completed her Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University in May 2019. She earned an M.A. in Africana Studies at Brown University, an M.S. Ed. in Childhood Education from City University of New York-Hunter College, and a B.A. in Africana Studies and Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Alhassan specializes in Rastafari Studies, Black women’s intellectual history, Africana philosophy and religion, Black radical epistemologies and documentary film, with a current research focus on how Rastafari women use their livity to build Pan-African community and combat gendered anti-Black racism and religious discrimination in Jamaica, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Her dissertation, “Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World,” received the Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation in the area of feminist studies from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. She is a finalist for the 2019 National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois First Book Prize. Among her research awards are the African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellowship at Boston College (2018-2019), the Brown in the World/World at Brown Travel Grant from the Cogut Institute of the Humanities (2017), and the Global Mobility Grant from the Brown Graduate School (2016). She directed the documentary films, Awodie: Re-Membering the Womb (2009) and Balance: A Grounding With My Sisters (2019). Her written work appeared in Callaloo and the National Political Science Review.