CHCI 2025 New Advisory Board Members

The CHCI Nominations Committee welcomes four new board members to CHCI: Grace Diabah, Amy Elias, Christina Garsten, and Maurits van Bever Donker.

We also warmly welcome the following board members for their second term: Prathama Banerjee and Rosinka Chaudhuri.

The Nominations Committee for the 2024-25 nominations cycle included board members Rosinka Chaudhuri, Patricia Parker, and Peter Simatei.

The committee welcomed nominations from the entire membership from the 2024 Annual Meeting to November 2024. The board approved a slate of candidates, and this slate was presented to the membership for a vote in January 2025 and was approved. We expect that the committee will again begin accepting nominations after our next Annual Meeting in June 2025.

Image credit for Christina Garsten: Steven Quigley

Grace Diabah is Associate Professor of Language and Gender at the Department of Linguistics (University of Ghana) and the Director (Ghana) of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA). She previously served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ghana. Grace is a member of the Steering Committee of the University-Based Institutes for Advanced Studies (UBIAS); a Postdoctoral Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies-African Humanities Program (ACLS-AHP); a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Building A New Generation of Academics in Africa (BANGA-Africa) project; and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of South Florida (Tampa, USA).

Grace obtained her PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University (UK). Her teaching and research focus on language and gender, and language use in specific domains such as politics, media, education, and business. Her scholarly works cover language and gender issues in African contexts and humour studies. She has recently started researching on interconnections between language, identity and decolonization, an interest that is linked to MIASA's focus on knowledge production and decolonization.

Amy J. Elias is UT Chancellor’s Professor, Distinguished Professor of English, and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts. She earned tenure at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before coming to UTK in 2002. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and the PI on two NEH grants since 2018, Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001), winner of the Perkins Book Prize from ISSN, and more than 40 articles and book chapters. She is also editor or co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015), Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU, 2016), and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke, 2025). She was principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal (JHUP), which won three national publishing awards. Since starting as director, she has brought more than $4 million into the Centers endowment, has engineered major funding MOUs with university administrative units, and has expanded programming regionally and nationally. She is working on a book about speculative forms of environmental dialogue.

Christina Garsten became Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University in 2008. She served as Chair of the Department of Social Anthropology between 2002 and 2011. She is now Professor of Social Anthropology at Uppsala University, and, since 2018, Principal of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Professor of Social Anthropology at Uppsala University. Since 2022 she is also President of the European network of institutes for advanced study, NetIAS.

Christina Garsten’s research interests lie in organizational anthropology, with a special focus on globalization processes, sociocultural dynamics and forms of governance. Her current research focuses on the role of think tanks and policy professionals in the production and diffusion of knowledge and ideology, in influencing political decision-making processes and in shaping global governance. Particular attention is placed on the creation and use of future foresight activities and scenario creation as part of knowledge creation. A related project is focused on the role of think tanks and corporate-based organizations and their involvement in climate change governance.

Some of her book publications reflecting these research interests are Discreet Power: How the World Economic Forum Shapes Global Markets (with Adrienne Sörbom; Stanford University Press, 2018); Power, Policy and Profit: Corporate Engagement in Politics and Governance (ed. with Adrienne Sörbom; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017); Makt utan mandat (with Bo Rothstein and Stefan Svallfors; Dialogos Förlag, 2015); Makeshift Work in a Changing Labour Market: The Swedish Model in the Post–Financial Crisis Era (ed. with Jessica Lindvert and Renita Thedvall; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015); Anthropology Now and Next: Diversity, Connections, Confrontations, Reflexivity (ed. with Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Shalini Randeria; Berghahn, 2014).

Christina Garsten serves on academic boards and committees. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala, a member of the International Advisory Board of the College of Fellows at the University of Tübingen, and a member of the Swedish Society for International Affairs.

Maurits van Bever Donker’s research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world. Of particular interest is how the philosophy of Black Consciousness constitutes a notion of the subject through the aesthetic, what we might call a retraining of the senses. He also researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. His monograph, Texturing Difference (2024), is available through Polity Press in the series Critical South with a Preface by Yala Kisukidi, and is located at the intersection of postcolonial and critical theory, literature and philosophy. In it, he situates the nuanced intervention of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa within the international conjuncture of anti-colonial thought and decolonisation. He makes the argument that the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its urgent political focus, should also be read as a philosophical intervention on the problem of Man that haunts the idea of race.

He convenes a research platform in the CHR on New Ecologies of the Subject, and is the Principal Investigator for an NIHSS Postdoctoral Project titled “A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom”. This project seeks to promote new research in the areas of “aesthetic education and democratic futures”, “aesthetics and humanism”, and “a new synthesis between the human and technology”. He is also a lead researcher on “Communicating the Humanities” together with Prof Premesh Lalu, and convenes the lecture and discussion series “Humanities in Session”. Maurits had lead editorial responsibility for an influential edited collection, Remains of the Social, and has edited several journal special issues on “The mind of apartheid”, “Transformative Constitutionalism and the Human”, and the “Idea of the University in Africa”. He is an editor in chief for the international peer-reviewed African studies journal, Afrika Focus, and was recently appointed as co-Chair of the Critical Humanities Spaces Network of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) together with Katharine Wallerstein, which aims to provide a platform for critical reflection on the work of institutes and centres and the unique roles they play, and have the potential to play, both within and outside the academy.