Intersectionality in the American South

Tanya Washington Hicks is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. She earned her J.D. from The University of Maryland School of Law and then clerked for Associate Judge Robert M. Bell on the Maryland Court of Appeals. After practicing as a toxic tort defense litigator in the Baltimore office of Piper & Marbury, she completed two fellowships and earned her LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

Professor Washington Hicks has taught Civil Procedure I and II, Family Law, Education Law and Race and Law at Georgia State for the past 18 years. Her research and scholarship focus on issues related to educational equity, domestic violence, racial justice, inclusion and diversity, marriage equality, and children’s constitutional rights. Her articles and op-eds have been published in law journals and periodicals across the nation and Professor Washington Hicks has co-authored five (5) amicus briefs filed in U.S. Supreme Court cases, including in the Court’s marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Her brief was cited by Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion of that landmark ruling.

Professor Washington Hicks believes the true value of the law lies in its capacity to improve the human condition and this creed animates her work. She served for three years on the Atlanta Human Relations Commission, volunteered with various organizations that provide support to Atlanta’s unsheltered population, cooked and served food at area soup kitchens, filed several amicus briefs in Georgia appellate cases and in federal circuit and U.S. Supreme Court cases, and provided countless hours of pro-bono work. Her work as an educator activist also includes serving for 2 years as Director of the John Lewis Fellowship Program, a Humanity in Action program funded by a grant to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights from the Mellon Foundation. Professor Washington’s work as a public intellectual has been recognized and celebrated by the Gate City Bar, with the President’s Award for Excellence, and by Georgia State University, with the Alumni Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching and Scholarship. Professor Washington currently serves as President of the Faculty of the African Diaspora Association (FADA) for Georgia State University, and she frequently conducts team building and diversity training and workshops for organizations, law firms and university departments.

Katie L. Acosta is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. She is the author of two books: Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family and most recently Queer Stepfamilies: The Path to Social and Legal Recognition. Queer Stepfamilies highlights the complex dynamics that influence lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender parented families’ strength and resilience. In addition, her work appears in the Journal of Family Theory & Review, Family Relations, Sexualities, Journal of Homosexuality, Sexualities Research and Social Policy, and Gender & Society.

Tiffany A. Player is a historian of identity formation and the attendant political and social transformations of communities within the African diaspora during slavery and after emancipation. She completed her Ph.D. in History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. Her book project, “‘What Are We Going to Do For Ourselves?:” African American Women and the Politics of Slavery from the Antebellum Era to the Great Depression,” analyzes Black women’s efforts to force a public reckoning with the material and cultural legacies of slavery in the United States as an essential component of their political power across multiple generations.

Ras Michael Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. His research and teaching interests engage the long historical development of religions and cultures in the African Diaspora with special emphasis on the dispersal of Bantu people and cultures throughout the Atlantic World. Early African/American communities and their spiritual cultures figure prominently within this larger scope, especially those in South Carolina and Georgia that were ancestral to more recent Gullah-Geechee communities. Dr. Brown’s book African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was honored by the Journal of Africana Religions as the inaugural recipient of the “Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions” in 2013. Other publications representative of the reach of his work include “Gullah and Ebo: Reconsidering Early Lowcountry African American Communities” in Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the Nineteenth-Century American South (edited by Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart, University of Georgia Press, 2019); “The Immersion of Catholic Christianity in Kalunga,” Journal of Africana Religions, 2, 2: 246-255 (2014); “Original Claims and Haunted Forests: American Indians, African Americans, and Southern Spiritual Landscapes in the Writings of William Gilmore Simms,” The Simms Review 20, 1-2: 29-49 (2013); and “Mother Nganga: Women Experts in the Bantu-Atlantic Spiritual Cultures of the Iberian Atlantic World” in Women of the Iberian Atlantic (edited by Sarah E. Owens and Jane E. Mangan, Louisiana State University Press, 2012). Since 2016, Dr. Brown has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Africana Religions.

As an educator, Professor Brown has taught dozens of World History classes, as well as many instances of “The Atlantic World,” “African-Atlantic Spirituality,” “Bantu Diasporas,” “America’s Religious Diversity,” “Slavery and the Old South,” “American Environmental History,” “Black American History to 1865,” “History of Africa,” and “African World Studies” with undergraduate students. His training of graduate students has included “Practicum in Teaching College-level History” and “Recent Historiography” courses along with numerous hours of individualized instruction. Further, Professor Brown has served as director, chair, examiner, or reader on over 50 dissertation, thesis, and exams committees for master’s and doctoral students in History, Religion, and Psychology programs at Southern Illinois University and other prestigious institutions.

In addition to academic endeavors, Brown enjoys deep immersion in the cultures of music composition, performance, and production. He welcomes collaborations in both the academic study and lived experience of Africana religions, musics, and cultures.