Secretariat
Secretary of Rastafari Thought (2022-2027)
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California – Los Angeles. As a transdisciplinary Africana Studies scholar of religion, philosophy, and gender theory, Alhassan’s transnational ethnographic work focuses on Black women’s radical epistemologies in Africa and the Caribbean. She is interested in the healing communities Rastafari women form to combat anti-black gendered racism and religious discrimination. Her forthcoming book tentatively titled, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World is the winner of the National Women’s Association and University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is also the co-editor of the book, Black Women and Da Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care, published with the Feminist Wire Series Books at the University of Arizona Press in 2023.
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.
Secretary Liaison for Phenomenology Roundtable (2027-2030)
Gregory E. Doukas is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Babson College and a former research fellow at the Academy of Advanced African Studies at Universität Bayreuth in Germany. Doukas is also a research affiliate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut and serves as the CPA’s liaison for the Phenomenology Roundtable. Part of Doukas’ research explores questions of political responsibility in Black and Jewish existential thought and Marxist humanism. Another examines the question of decolonizing knowledge in Sufi Islamic philosophy in West Africa, particularly Senegal. Doukas has been a CPA member for his entire academic career and enjoys attending conferences and summer institutes annually because they always remind him of the broadest possible interpretation of Caribbean philosophy and how a set of small island nations and their inhabitants can tap into the global pulse of history and world events through its intellectual production.
Secretary of Graduate Outreach (2024-2027)
Alesandra (Ale) Gutiérrez is a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. 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 Liaison for Phenomenology Roundtable (2027-2030)
Stephen Nathan Haymes is a Professor of Educational Philosophy and Global South Theory in DePaul University’s College of Education and a Vincent de Paul Professor. His scholarship brings Afro-Catholic thought, decolonial political theologies, Africana phenomenology, and Global South thought into conversation with pedagogies of re-existence and resurgence. His current research examines the historical and epistemic relationship between Catholicism and Afro-Catholic communities. His ongoing project, Creolizing Illich, reinterprets Ivan Illich’s theological and philosophical anthropology through the lens of Global South epistemologies, placing his critique of modern institutions in conversation with intellectual traditions and thinkers from Africa, Latin America, and the wider Global South. His work also explores Afro-ecologies, decolonial spirituality, and the religious and ancestral traditions of Afro-diasporic communities in the Americas.
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 Digital Outreach and Chair of Architectonics (2020-2027)
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.