Faculty Opportunities

The Center for African & African American Studies offers funding and recognition opportunities for faculty working in African studies, African American studies, and/or African diaspora studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

CAAAS Faculty Awards

  The CAAAS Faculty Awards

The purpose of the CAAAS Faculty Teaching, Research & Creative Work Awards (aka “CAAAS Faculty Awards”) are to assist University of Colorado Boulder faculty with their teaching, research, and creative work in African studies, African American studies, and African diaspora studies. CAAAS Faculty Awards provide modest funding for a variety of projects. For example, CAAAS Faculty Awards can be used for conference presentations, on-campus conferences, research assistance, travel for research purposes, materials and equipment for increasing teaching efficiency, etc. Partial funding is possible, and most awards are between $3,500 and $5,000. The CAAAS will consider funding up to $7,500 for international travel based on airfare and lodging costs. There may also be instances when domestic research travel requiring a longer stay than a traditional conference may also be funded for a higher amount (but no greater than $6,000). All CU Boulder tenured and tenure-track faculty and full-time instructors with demonstrable teaching, research, and creative work in African studies, African American studies, and/or African diaspora studies are eligible to apply. 

CAAAS Faculty Awards open September 1st and close May 1st annually. 

CAAAS Faculty Fellowships

  The CAAAS Faculty Fellowship provides a two-course teaching reduction (taken in a single semester) for faculty teaching a 2/2 load; faculty teaching a 2/1 load will receive a single course reduction and be expected to take the fellowship in the semester they are scheduled to teach their single course. 

  Meet The CAAAS Faculty Fellows 

Deadlines Academic Year 2023-2024

  FALL 2023

Faculty Fellowship: December 1

2024 - 2025 CAAAS Faculty Award Winners

Henry Lovejoy

Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
hlovejoy@colorado.edu

Professor Lovejoy received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book, Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, is a biography of an enslaved African at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería. It won the Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano best book prize for Yoruba Studies. He is co-editor of the volume Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (2020) and Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives...

2023 - 2024 CAAAS Faculty Award Winners

Danielle Hodge

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, College of Media, Communication and Information (CMCI)
CAAAS Faculty AffiliatesCAAAS Executive Committee MembersCAAAS Faculty Fellows
danielle.hodge@colorado.edu

Danielle Hodge, PhD, employs a critical race theoretical approach to identity, culture, and language. In particular, she is concerned with how systems of oppression and marginalization inform the identities, discursive practices, and experiences of African Americans. To advance theoretically robust and culturally grounded knowledge about African American life and language worlds, her research agenda is guided by the following questions: How can communication concepts and theories (i.e., discourse analysis) ...

Henry Lovejoy

Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
hlovejoy@colorado.edu

Professor Lovejoy received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book, Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, is a biography of an enslaved African at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería. It won the Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano best book prize for Yoruba Studies. He is co-editor of the volume Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (2020) and Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives...

Maputo Mensah

Teaching Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Dance • Director of West African Highlife Ensemble, College of Music • Director of Logoligi African Dance Ensemble group, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
maputo.mensah@Colorado.edu

Maputo Mensah was born and raised in Accra, Ghana, in a family of professional musicians and dancers. While still a small child, he was dancing and drumming with his family, and before he reached his teens, he was teaching and performing these traditional Ghanaian arts professionally. Later, he was honored to study for many years with Mustapha Tettey Addy, one of Ghana’s premiere artists in traditional music and dance, at the Academy of African Music and Arts. Over the years he has performed and taught with...

crystal am nelson

Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
crystal.nelson@colorado.edu

crystal am nelson is an assistant professor of art history whose research and teaching focus on Black art and Black visual culture(s) as articulated through painting, photography, film/video, and performance. Her other interests include identity and representation, critical pleasure studies, and contemporary Black life. Her current project examines the visual culture of Black pleasure and the aesthetics of Black joy and safe space in the visual representations of quotidian Blackness as depicted by the paint...

S.N Nyeck

Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty AffiliatesCAAAS Executive Committee Members
sn.nyeck@colorado.edu

Dr. Nyeck is a multidisciplinary Associate Professor in Africana/Gender Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Trained in political economy of development at the University of California Los Angeles with specialization in International Relations and Comparative Politics, Dr. Nyeck has pursued two research streams to date. The first stream is centered on the political economy of development, governance, and global public procurement reform with an interest in social justice, race and gender-responsive ...

Omedi Ochieng

Associate Professor, Department of Communication, College of Media, Communication and Information (CMCI)
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
Omedi.Ochieng@colorado.edu

Omedi Ochieng specializes in Africana philosophy & rhetoric, rhetorical theory & criticism, and comparative intellectual history. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Routledge: 2017) and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press: 2018). His most recent thinking, research, and teaching limns the...

Shawn O'Neal

Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
CAAAS Faculty AffiliatesCAAAS Executive Committee Members
shawn.oneal@colorado.edu

Dr. Shawn Trenell O’Neal earned the distinction of being awarded the first dissertation completion fellowship from the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) at CU Boulder (2022-2023). He is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, in addition to being a renowned DJ and audio producer. Dr. O'Neal is also a founding member and faculty fellow in Lyripeutics Storytelling: Remixing Our Reality Through Hip Hop Education with the Renée Crown Wellness Institute. His res...

Michele D. Simpson

Associate Teaching Professor, Philosophy, Arts & Culture Residential Academic Program (RAP), College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Affiliate & Research Associate, Renée Crown Wellness Institute
CAAAS Faculty Affiliates
michele.simpson@colorado.edu

Michele D. Simpson is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Philosophy, Arts & Culture Residential Academic Program.  She is also a faculty member of the Student Academic Success Center, the Honors Residential Academic Program, and the Program for Excellence in Academics and Community. Her courses reflect her passion and commitment to topics including anti-racism, anti-Blackness, social justice, and the exploration of the intersections that inform myriad lived experiences. Michele’s course offerings ha...