Secretariat
Secretary of Rastafari Thought (2022-2027)
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies with a focus on the Black Experience in the Americas in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She completed her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University. Alhassan specializes in Rastafari Studies, Black radical thought, Africana gender theory and decolonial research methods. Her current work on Africana women's radical epistemologies focuses on the ways Rastafari women use their livity to build Pan-African communities and combat anti-black gendered racism, religious discrimination and racial capitalism in Ghana, Jamaica, and Ethiopia. Her forthcoming manuscript, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women's Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World is the winner of the 2019 National Women's Association and the University of Illinois Press First Book Prize.
Secretary for Black Feminism and Performance Art (2020-2027)
Lisa M. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where she also serves as the Associate Director for Graduate Studies for SST. She is a semiotician by training, whose interests include the political economy of black women in television production, afrofuturism, queer black women’s lived experience of disease, and black feminist thought more broadly. Her undergraduate degree was in political theory, and she received her PhD from University of Washington-Seattle in Drama. She has published on African American theatre, black women playwrights and filmmakers, and is currently completing a book on black women in television. She teaches courses on feminist theory, feminist phenomenologies, intersectionality, black feminist thought, and race gender and sexuality in science fiction.
Secretary of Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin American Outreach (2024-2027)
Damian Deamici is an assistant professor of Spanish at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He completed his undergraduate studies in modern literatures at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina, and received a Ph.D. in Hispanic American Literatures and Cultures from the University of Connecticut in 2024. His research focuses on contemporary literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America, transnational connections among literary avant-gardes, and independent publishing. He is currently working on two projects: one examining countercultural literary groups during the 1960s across the Spanish-speaking Americas, and another analyzing the role of independent literary publishing in the Hispanic Caribbean from the 1960s to the present.
Co-Secretary of LGBTQ+ Affairs (2023-2025)
Allyson Duarte is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient with interest and experience in Immigration Policy analysis, campaigning, and advocacy at the municipal, state, and national levels. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy focusing on the study of nation-states and their borders. Her philosophical work is primarily informed by Social and Political Philosophy, Latinx, Mexican, and Latin American Philosophies.
Secretary of Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean Culture (2018-2025)
Rosemere Ferreira da Silva is Associate Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia / UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. She is a specialist in Brazilian Literature, Afro-Braszilian Literature, Comparative Literature and Ethnic and African Studies. Her research focuses on Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean Literature. She is the coordinator of Literatura and Afrodescendência research group at UNEB. She is currently writing a book about black intellectuals. Dr. Da Silva is a Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs and part of the editorial team of Black Issues in Philosophy. Read more.
Secretary of Graduate Outreach (2024-2027)
Alesandra (Ale) Gutiérrez is a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy and History at the University of Texas at Austin. Specializing in Latin America and the Caribbean, Ale's areas of interest include philosophy of emotion, gender and queerness, bio/necropolitics, and race and colorism all through a decolonial/anti-colonial lens. Her upcoming thesis is an investigation of queer love and relationships when one is racialized under coloniality.
Secretary of Project Management for the Global South (2024-2027)
Marie-Pierre LeRoux is a dedicated researcher and professor at the Business School of the Université du Québec à Montréal where she teaches in graduate programs of project management. She holds a PhD in Industrial Relations from the University of Montreal. With a diverse academic background that includes studies in humanities, international studies, and Arabic, as well as a master’s degree in International Development Project Management, Marie-Pierre critically examines the perceived and experienced injustices faced by marginalized actors in international project teams. She has directed her research towards enhancing the realization of social benefits in projects funded by donors and implemented in the Global South. Currently, Marie-Pierre is working on a research program focused on responsible project management practices with the Global South. In addition to her teaching and research, she is an active member of key committees, including the Steering Committee of the Research Cluster on Mental Health, the Canadian Observatory on Crises and Humanitarian Action, the Project Management Chair. Her experience in various international consulting roles within international nongovernmental development organizations informs her commitment to improving social outcomes in those initiatives.
Secretary for Institutional Memory and Archiving (2020-2027)
Thomas Meagher is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He works in the areas of social and political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism, with particular interest in questions pertaining to race, gender, and coloniality and their capacity to shape and re-shape human values. He earned his doctorate at the University of Connecticut where he completed his dissertation, “Maturity in a Human World: A Philosophical Study.” He has also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, and as a Du Bois Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Secretary of Critical Theory and Social Thought in Latin America and the Caribbean (2023-2025)
Stephanie Mercado Irizarry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literature, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. She also holds an M.A. in Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies from said institution, and received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Her areas of interest include decolonial thought, Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Caribbean literature and social movements, and Latinx Studies. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary Puerto Rican literature as well as insular and diasporic muralism.
Secretary of Digital Outreach and Chair of Architectonics (2020-2025)
Dana Francisco Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a Research Associate for the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and psychosocial studies. His current book manuscript, “The Coloniality of Happiness,” investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression, and wellbeing for members of the African Diaspora. He also currently serves as a Faculty Research Fellow for the Applied Ethics Center (University of Massachusetts Boston). Read more.
Secretary of Poetry as Theory and Praxis (2024-2027)
Gwendalynn Roebke (they/them/theirs) is a fiercely interdisciplinary scholar in the Philosophy PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Their interests, in brief, are social psychology/affect, neuroscience, agency, identity formation (and its attempted inhibition), and coloniality; all with a healthy engagement in narrativity and poetics. In their nascent thesis project, Gwendalynn explores the centrality of coherence, as composed of mindedness, agency, identity, and narrativity, to the survival of colonial ruptures brought on by dispossession. Gwendalynn also writes and performs poetry, and has an indie chap book titled "A Bruxist Manifesto". They currently co-coordinate the Anti-Colonial Poetry and Philosophy Working/Reading Group at the University of Pennsylvania.
Secretary of Physics, Technology and Philosophy (2023-2025)
Jacob “Jake” Stanton is a recent graduate of Brown University where he earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematical Physics and Africana Studies. In Jake's undergraduate thesis, "Ọrúnmilà ní ó ò wàá bá ní", he looked to the traditional philosophy of the Yoruba people in order to suggest solutions to unanswered questions in Quantum Mechanics. Drawing from this experience, Jake is interested in bridging a connection between indigenous knowledge systems, science, and the natural environment.
Co-Secretary of LGBTQ+ Affairs (2023-2025)
Anwar Uhuru is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Their research interests include Black Existentialism, Africana Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black Intellectual Thought. They have publications in the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, The APA Newsletter: Philosophy and the Black Experience, and Radical Philosophy Review. Their forthcoming book, The Insurrectionist Case for Reparations: Race, Value and Ethics, will be published through SUNY Press.