Dissertation Scholars

Morgan DaCosta is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil research draws on archival resources to produce a genealogy of policing from the end of British slavery in 1838 until the early 21st century in Jamaica and Trinidad. She conceptualises police power as a form of reiterative violence used to reproduce slavery-era and colonial social order in postcolonial former slave societies. Previously, she worked for Human Rights Watch researching abuses by security forces and human trafficking in the Sahel, and was a Fulbright scholar in Senegal examining urban women’s political activism. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kevin Morris is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he focuses on twentieth-century Black literature and questions around carcerality, antiblackness, and the limitations of liberal humanism. Kevin’s dissertation is titled “All Black Literature Is Carceral Literature: Chronotopes of Carcerality and the Black Novel,” which attends to the way Black authors comment on and represent carceral time-spaces within the novel to disrupt narratives of progress that obfuscate the relational dynamics of slavery and its carceral afterlives. He holds a BA in Philosophy and African & African American Studies from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and an MA in Pan-African Studies from Syracuse University. Kevin is a native of South Central Los Angeles (not “South LA”) but has called Harlem home for nearly a decade. He spends most of his time hanging with his dogs, Bronny and Bosch, watching sports, sneaker shopping, wandering around museums, and being an “old head” hip-hop nerd.

Mark Lockwood is a resource mobilizer, community researcher, and harm reductionist who values the health, freedom, and equity of all racial and gender minorities. Both his professional and professional experience lie at the intersections of sex work, harm reduction, racial equity, and HIV/AIDS. He received a B.A in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University - New Brunswick and a M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Currently, Mark is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His dissertation, "Black Inches: Masculinity, Visuality, and Performance in Thug Porn," explores the history, visual, and sexual representations of Black men in gay pornography's "thug porn" (also known as "Blatino porn") genre. In his research, he looks specifically at the figure of the "homo-thug", and how this archetype gets constructed within the pornographic realm. Using archival material and close readings of vintage gay porn film, erotic novels, porn magazines, hip-hop music, and play scripts, his dissertation explores how Black porn actors retool the homo-thug as a way of challenging, and sometimes subverting, their racialized stereotypes produced within this niche market.  Outside of academia, Mark enjoys bottomless brunch; hip-hop step classes; traveling; solo movie dates; and quality time with friends, his partner (Jared), and imaginary dog (Remi).

Brittany L. Marshall is a PhD candidate in mathematics education at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include the effects of Western imperialism and antiblackness in mathematics classrooms, K-12 mathematics teaching and learning, and math identity development, particularly among Black girls. She is also an outside graduate researcher at the PRISM Lab at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Before Rutgers, Brittany taught middle and high school mathematics in Chicago for almost a decade. Prior to education, she practiced architecture in both Chicago and DC. Brittany holds a Master of Architecture degree from North Carolina State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brittany is a Chicago native and loves to debate the best city skylines and pizza. She is also a world traveler and unwinds by watching Chopped on the Food Network. She is thrilled to be spending a year learning from amazing scholars in UCSB's Black Studies Department