Layla Brown-Vincent, Graduate Certificate 2016

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Visiting Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study

Professor Brown-Vincent teaches courses on Blackness in Latin America, Black/Africana Feminisms, Global Left Social Movements, and the African Diaspora. She is an interdisciplinary Pan-African Feminist scholar/activist trained as a Cultural Anthropologist. She is committed to producing scholarship that fosters liberation and dignity for all peoples, particularly peoples of African descent. Layla Brown-Vincent is currently finishing her first book manuscript "Return to the Source: The Dialectics of 21st Century Pan-African Liberation".


How has being a Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (formerly Women's Studies) graduate from Duke University helped shape your professional success?

"My training in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies along with my studies of the African Diaspora are the foundation of my intellectual, moral and ethical agenda as a teacher, scholar and activist. The critical interventions made by Black women in the field of women’s and gender studies which call attention to the multiple, overlapping and intersecting forms of oppression and discrimination experienced as a result of race, class, gender, ability etc. are, as bell hooks would say, 'for everybody.'"

Layla Brown-Vincent