Advisory Team

Natsu Taylor Saito, Regents’ Professor Emerita, College of Law

Natsu Taylor Saito is a Regents’ Professor Emerita. She taught in the College of Law from 1994 to 2022 and was an affiliated faculty member of the Africana Studies Department. A graduate of Yale Law School, she practiced law with several large firms in Atlanta before joining the faculty at Georgia State University’s College of Law in 1994. Since then, she has taught race, ethnicity and the law, federal Indian law, immigration law, international law, international human rights seminars, and professional responsibility. Professor Saito has published more than thirty law review articles as well as three books, most recently Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists (NYU Press, 2020). Professor Saito was the founding president of the Georgia Chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) and is a recipient of NAPABA’s Trailblazer Award, the Critical Race Studies in Education Association’s Derrick Bell Legacy Award, and Georgia State University’s inaugural Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Award. A former community organizer and teacher, she continues to advocate for racial justice, Indigenous self-determination, and the rights of incarcerated persons. https://law.gsu.edu/profile/natsu-taylor-saito/; https://nyupress.org/9780814723944/settler-colonialism-race-and-the-law/

Dr. Lia T. Bascomb, Associate Professor

Lia T. Bascomb is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and is affiliated with the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at Georgia State University. She is trained as an interdisciplinary Black studies scholar with emphases in diaspora theory, cultural theory, visual culture, performance studies, gender and sexuality, and literature.

Her scholarly interests focus on representations and performances of nation, gender, and sexuality across the African diaspora with an emphasis on the Anglophone Caribbean. She has published in journals such as Meridians, Souls, Palimpsest, Anthurium, Antipode, and the Black Scholar, and her book, In Plenty and In Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity, is part of the Critical Caribbean Studies Series at Rutgers University Press. 

Dr. Monique Moultrie,  Associate Professor  

Dr. Moultrie’s scholarly pursuits include projects in sexual ethics, African American religions, and gender and sexuality studies. Her research has been supported by a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning Grant, a Georgia State University Dean’s Early Career Award, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Jack Shand Research grant, and an American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant. She is co-principal investigator on a Henry Luce Foundation Advancing Public Knowledge on Race, Justice, and Religion in America grant which will fund “The Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism.” Her book Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality was published by Duke University Press and was the 2018 Book of the Year for the Religious Communication Association. Her second manuscript Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership is under contract with Duke University Press. Her recent publications include a co-edited volume A Guide for Women in Religion: Making Your Way from A to Z, 2nd edition (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); an article, “Making Myself: An Exploratory Study of Black Christian Childfree Women’s Concepts of Family;” in the Journal of Religious Ethics (2021); “Putting a Ring on It: Black Women, Black Churches and Coerced Monogamy” in the Black Theology (2018)journal; a book chapter “Black Female Sexual Agency and Racialized Holy Sex in Black Christian Reality TV Shows” edited by Mara Einstein, Katherine Madden, and Diane Winston (Routledge 2018); an article “#BlackBabiesMatter: Analyzing Black Religious Media in Conservative and Progressive Evangelical Communities” in the Religions (2017)journal; a book chapter “Critical Race Theory,” in Religion: Embodied Religion edited by Kent Brintnall (Palgrave Macmillan 2016): 341-358; and an article “After the Thrill is Gone: Married to the Holy Spirit but Still Sleeping Alone,” in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 33 (2011): 237-253. Additionally, she is a book Series Editor for T&T Clark Enquiries in Embodiment, Sexuality, and Social Ethics and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Black Women and Religious Cultures and the Bloomsbury Series in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Outside of the university, Dr. Moultrie was a consultant for the National Institutes of Health and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual. Transgender Queer -Religious Archives Network. She was a Content Development working group member for the Columbia University’s Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice’s Scholars Group, a group of religious scholars collaborating at the intersection of religion and reproductive justice. Within the larger American Academy of Religion guild, Dr. Moultrie is the former Status of Women in the Profession Chair and a former co-chair of the Religion and Sexuality unit.

Dr. Ras Michael Brown, Assistant Professor, History

Ras Michael Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgia State University. 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 Kongo/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 essays titled “Gullah and Ebo: Reconsidering Early Lowcountry African American Communities,” “The Immersion of Catholic Christianity in Kalunga,” and “Mother Nganga: Women Experts in the Bantu-Atlantic Spiritual Cultures of the Iberian Atlantic World.” Additionally, essays on Black hunters in early South Carolina, African religions in early North America, and indigenous identities in Africana religions are in various stages of revision and production now.   Dr. Tiffany Player, Assistant Professor, History   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.

Dr. Tiffany Player, Assistant Professor, History

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.

Dr.  Jay Rajiva, Associate Professor of Global Anglophone Literature

Jay Rajiva is Associate Professor of Global Anglophone Literature and Director of Literary Studies at Georgia State University. His second book, Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature (Routledge 2020), uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman maKer, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India. He is also the author of Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (Bloomsbury 2017), which analyzes literature of partition and civil war on the Indian subcontinent alongside apartheid and post-apartheid South African fiction. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Twentieth-Century Literature, ARIEL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. He was the recipient of the Dean’s Early Career Award in 2019.