This session will focus on developing an understanding of Anti-Blackness and the many forms in which it can manifest.  It will also center on sharing strategies on how those seeking to serve as allies can actively help combat anti-blackness.

Moderator: Brianna Tate, Ph.D. Student, Animal Science, President of the Black Graduate & Professional Student Association

Discussant: Danielle Fuentes Morgan, ’16 Ph.D.; Cornell Bouchet Scholar, Assistant Professor of English, Santa Clara University

Discussant: Monet Roberts, ’17 M.S., ’19 Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering, Cornell Bouchet Scholar, Postdoctoral Associate, Virginia Tech University

About the Discussants

Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan, ’14 M.A., ’16 Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of English and specializes in African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is interested in the ways that literature, popular culture, and humor shape identity formation. In particular, her research and teaching reflect her interests in African American satire and comedy, literature and the arts as activism, and the continuing influence of history on contemporary articulations of Black selfhood. Her writing has been published on Racialicious and Al Jazeera, in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, Humanities, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, and Journal of Science Fiction. Her writing is forthcoming in College Literature. She has served as the Frank Sinatra Faculty Fellow for the Center for the Arts and Humanities working with W. Kamau Bell (2017-2018) and Taye Diggs (2018-2019). Her book, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming Fall 2020 with University of Illinois Press as a part of the New Black Studies Series. Dr. Morgan received an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Cornell University where was a Bouchet Scholar, an M.A.T. in secondary English education from Duke University, and a B.A. in English and African American Studies (minor) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Monét Roberts, ’17 M.S., ’19, Ph.D., is from Newnan, Georgia and received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014 where her interest in pursuing a Ph.D. stemmed from working as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Manu Platt’s lab studying HIV-mediated CVD. Monét received her Ph.D. from the Nancy E. & Peter C. Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University, with Dr. Matthew Paszek’s lab on the role of the cancer glycocalyx in microvesicle shedding in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. During her Ph.D., she was recognized as a Graduate School Dean’s Scholar, received the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, and was inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. As a postdoctoral research associate, she aims to understand and harness the tumor microenvironment to study and treat triple negative breast cancer and glioblastoma. Outside of lab, Monét enjoys cooking, video chatting with her younger sister (who is 16 years younger than her) to and help her with her homework, playing with her Yorkie, BJ, playing video games, hanging out with friends, and all things fashion and natural hair.