Professor Maylei Blackwell is an Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Along with being an integrative scholar-activist who researches the intersection of women’s and indigenous rights, specifically in the United States and Mexico, she is also the author of many books. Professor Blackwell is of both Thai and Cherokee descent.

Professor Blackwell earned her bachelor’s degree as a double major at the California State University, Long Beach, in 1993. She went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz in Women’s Studies in 1996 and 2000 respectively. Moreover, she was an Anne Ray Resident Scholar between 2015 to 2016 at the School for Advanced Research.

For a large part of her adult life, Professor Blackwell was an activist for many indigenous social movements, which provided opportunities to research such movements firsthand. Some recent hands-on research included working on transnationalism through the experience of women and indigenous migrants in Mexico. She has also been a part of several sexual rights movements throughout Latin America in the past few years.

Blackwell's 2011 book ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement draws on the oral accounts she retrieved as a part of the Chicana activist movements as well as the print culture that details the formation of Chicana feminism community. The book is one of the first to present a full history of this movement. Professor Blackwell also wrote Zones of Autonomy: Gendered Cultural Citizenship and Indigenous Women’s Organizing in Mexico which details the vital role that indigenous women played in a national indigenous movement in the 1990s.

More recently, Professor Blackwell won the Chancellor’s Award of Community-Based Research, which gave her a grant for developing new research courses at UCLA. She has decided to map the indigenous American diaspora in Los Angeles and to aid indigenous people in recording their history in a manner that they see fit.

Written by Tuhin Ghosh, Class of 2022

Imani Perry is the Hughes Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, but she describes herself in her Twitter bio as a “mother, writer, intellectual, [and] freedom dreamer.”

Perry received her Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies and Literature from Yale University, after which she earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. She currently teaches a variety of courses centered around African American Studies and is a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jazz Studies at Princeton.

Perry’s most recently published work — she is the author of six books, in total — was published in 2019. Described by Booklist as a mother’s “striking and generous admonition to thrive even in the face of white mendacity” and a “meditation on parenting,” the autobiographical book is titled Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. The work was a 2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist and a 2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee in Outstanding Literary Work. It is her first creative work— Perry has in the past published two works of music criticism, two historical analyses, and and a biography of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle.

Perry’s book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, published in 2018, is a history of the Black National Anthem. It was a winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction.

Perry is currently working on a narrative that takes readers through the American South, and she has plans for an investigation of African American theories of law and justice, as well as a reflection on the color blue within the Black experience.

Written by Liliana Greyf, Class of 2022