Dr. S. Ama Wray
S. Ama Wray, PhD, was recognized by the Comparative & International Education Society, receiving their African Diaspora Emerging Scholars Award in 2018. An Associate Professor of Dance at UC Irvine, she gave the 2019 closing plenary for Dance/USA’s conference in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her PhD in dance studies at the University of Surrey, developing – Embodiology® her Africana-informed improvisation praxis. Embodiology® has been introduced at the following institutions: Temple University, Martha Graham School, UC Berkeley, Atlantic Center for the Arts, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Ghana, Legon, University of Texas, Austin, World Dance Alliance Conference, NDEO Conference, Dance Studies Association, Middlesex University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, Urban Movement Arts, Serendipity-UK, Jazz Antiqua, and the California Dance Educators Association. She is the custodian of Jane Dudley’s emblematic solo, Harmonica Breakdown (1938). Awarded a National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts Fellowship in the UK, she co-produced the award winning Texterritory, a cellphone-based interactive storytelling performance. As founder of JazzXchange her collaborators have included music: Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Gary Crosby, MBE, Zoe Rahman and Julian Joseph, OBE, Gary Crosby, MBE and Derek Bermel. Her work continues to be performed and commissioned on three continents.
Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Novelist and theorist of post-colonial 
literature, Ngũgĩ is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Leeds, Britain.
The Kenya of his birth and youth was a British settler colony (1895-1963). As an adolescent, he lived through the Mau Mau War of Independence (1952-1962), the central historical episode in the making of modern Kenya and a major theme in his early works.
Ngũgĩ burst onto the literary scene in East Africa with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, as part of the celebration of Uganda’s Independence. “Ngũgĩ Speaks for the Continent,” headlined The Makererian, the Student newspaper, in a review of the performance by Trevor Whittock, one of the professors. In a highly productive literary period, Ngũgĩ wrote additionally eight short stories, two one act plays, two novels, and a regular column for the Sunday Nation under the title, As I See It. One of the novels, Weep Not Child, was published to critical acclaim in 1964; followed by the second novel, The River Between (1965). His third, A Grain of Wheat (1967), was a turning point in the formal and ideological direction of his works. Multi-narrative lines and multi-viewpoints unfolding at different times and spaces replace the linear temporal unfolding of the plot from a single viewpoint. The collective replaces the individual as the center of history.
Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies, a Faculty affiliate of Gender, Sexual, and Queer Studies at the University of California, Irvine. During her time at UCI, she has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research through her
contribution in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and Division of Undergraduate Education. Willoughby-Herard works on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought, and African feminisms. Some of her research focus includes topics on South Africa, poor whites,race in foreign policy, diaspora, comparative racial politics, feminism, and community and civic engagement. In her recent book, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, she uses black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition, to explore the effect of politics of white poverty on black people’s life, work, and political resistance. In particular, this groundbreaking book examines the philanthropic institution of the Carnegie Foundation, contributed to the constitution of apartheid as a process of knowledge production in South Africa. Her manuscript examines U.S. complicity in constructing notions of whiteness, arguing that the Carnegie Commission Study of Poor Whites helped create knowledge production process central to apartheid, in particular scientific racialism. Some of her other works include Black Rainbows: Militant White Women Writers, Post-Racial Discourse, and the Stakes of Race, Class, and Gender in South Africa, Mammy No More/ Mammy Forever: The Stakes and Costs of Teaching Our Colleagues, and More expendable than slaves? Racial Justice and the After-Life of Slavery.