Dr. Assata Zerai, Co-academic Director
Professor Assata Zerai currently holds positions as Director of the Center for African Studies, Associate Dean of the Graduate College and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).
Serving as faculty in Sociology at Illinois since 2002, Zerai’s research frameworks (theory and methodology) build from Black feminist thought, intersectionality, and African and Africana feminisms, and her interests have included maternal and child health, health activism, and safe water and sanitation in Africa and the African Diaspora, and in U.S. populations, as well as diversity and inclusiveness in U.S. Protestant congregations, and making the work of indigenous and marginalized scholars and activists more accessible. Dr. Zerai’s Hypermasculinity and State Violence in Zimbabwe: An Africana Feminist Analysis of Maternal and Child Health was published by Africa World Press (2014). She has just completed Intersectionality in Intentional Communities: The Struggle for Inclusivity in Multicultural U.S. Protestant Congregations (in press 2016, Lexington Books). She is author of Dehumanizing Discourse, Law and Policy in America: A Crack Mother’s Nightmare (Ashgate 2002) And her fourth book, Safe Water, Sanitation and Early Childhood Malnutrition in East Africa: An Africana Feminist Analysis of the lives of Women and Children in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, is currently under contract with Rowman and Littlefield.
Spring 2015, as Associate Dean in the Grad College, Zerai has worked with colleagues to establish an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation University Center of Exemplary Mentoring at the University of Illinois. They were awarded $1M to increase numbers of graduate students underrepresented in STEM.
Fall 2015, as Director of African Studies, Zerai has worked with core and affiliate faculty and staff integrate expertise from our internationally recognized programs in engineering, with social science methodologies and humanities country-specific skill sets, training in cultural competency, and social justice and to propose to host a Mandela Washington Fellowship Young African Leaders Institute in public management. Zerai is now co-PI on this grant, received from the U.S. Department of State. She is also PI on the Title VI National Resource Center grant to the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois.
Zerai has been selected for the Larine Y. Cowan “Make a Difference” Leadership in Diversity Award at the University of Illinois in November 2015. And Zerai has just received recognition from the U of I Women’s Resources Center and Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations for her work on behalf of women internationally during the March 2016 International Women’s Day Celebration.
Dr. Benito J. Mariñas, Co-academic Director
Mariñas joined the CEE faculty in 1995, having previously earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in sanitary and environmental engineering at University of California at Berkeley. At Illinois, Mariñas is the Ivan Racheff Professor of Environmental Engineering as well as Director of the Safe Global Water Institute. In this role, Mariñas has worked with various interdisciplinary teams to create sustainable solutions to sanitation and water purification issues in developing countries.
Dr. Maimouna Barro, Cultural Consultant
Dr. Maimouna Barro is Associate Director at the Center for African Studies, University of Illinois. Her research interests include women, education and development. She has authored a book and several articles. Dr. Barro received several awards including the prestigious University of University of Illinois Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE). She plays a leading role in the African Studies community, having served as Vice-Chair and Chair of the Association of African Studies Programs (AASP) from 2011 to 2013.
Brian Pianfetti, Administrative Director
Terri Gitler, Administrative Specialist
Terri Gitler received her MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked at the Center for African Studies since 2011. Earlier, she worked primarily in the publishing industry as a copy editor, project manager, and administrator.
Brenda N. Sanya, Program Associate
Brenda Nyandiko Sanya is a Ph.D. candidate and Cultures of Law in Global Contexts fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Broadly, her research explores educative practices and spaces where identities, rights, and documentation are contested, produced, and reproduced, and circulated in and through global landscapes. Sanya’s dissertation research is focused on the role of education in African immigration to the U.S. She uses theories from the fields of critical race, feminist, and queer studies to generate a conversation about racialization of immigrants and the social boundaries of immigration documentation and rights. She received her M.A. in Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College in Boston, where she researched constitutional rights of Kenyan women and civic engagement through emerging technologies. Sanya’s work on black diasporas, transnational feminism, and archiving African feminist histories has been published in Feminist Africa, Left History, Transnational Social Review, Policy Futures in Education, in Mobilized Identities: Mediated Subjectivities and Cultural Crisis in the Neoliberal Era, and most recently in Kenya after Fifty: Reconfiguring Education, Gender, and Policy.
Carlos Rubio, Program Associate
Carlos Rubio is a foreign-trained attorney from Bogota, Colombia, pursuing a doctorate degree at the College of Law. He arrived in Champaign-Urbana in 2009 to pursue a Master’s program and has been living here ever since. His dissertation investigates how the literature produced by scholars from law and other disciplines shapes our knowledge, views, and attitudes towards what we call intellectual property. His scholarly interests are broader than that, however, and extend to matters of knowledge production within higher education and the latter’s impact on society as a whole.
Soo-Yeon Yoon, Lab Instructor
Soo-Yeon Yoon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is originally from Seoul, South Korea. Her research spans the areas of fertility, family, and gender. In her dissertation, she examines one of the core topics in demography, the relationship between fertility attitudes and behavior, with particular attention to the role of gender equality.
