The Provostial Visiting Fellowship-in-Residence on Black Life and History is an initiative established by McGill's Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism. It welcomes to McGill a leading Black scholar whose research focuses on Black life and the Black experience, whether historically or in contemporary society. Fellows may be selected from any discipline and are welcomed into the faculty most closely related to their discipline for one or two academic terms. This year, McGill is proud to welcome two Visiting Fellows in Black Life and History in February and March. The Visiting Fellows are currently hosted by Prof. Nanre Nafziger (Faculty of Education) and Dr. Mabel Carabali (Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, & Occupational Health).
Dennis Pérez is a sociologist (Havana University, 1997); with postgraduate training on popular education, participatory action research, disease control (Master degree, ITM, 2004) and social development (Master degree, Havana University, 2007), among others. She holds a PhD in Sociology (Havana University, 2011) and in Health Sciences (Gent University, 2015). She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Public Health Research Institute of University of Montreal (2016-2019).
Since 1997, she has worked as a researcher at the Epidemiology Division of Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), Havana, Cuba. She has been working for nearly 10 years on building evidence on empowerment strategies for dengue prevention and control in the Cuban context. Her focus has been the dynamics of empowerment processes at small scale and the factors that could influence these processes when moving from micro to macro implementation. Based on her empirical, mainly qualitative, research and on her sociological background, and together with her colleagues, she has brought theoretical developments on the concept of participation and on some implementation issues.
Over the years, her research interest and efforts have shifted to better on how socio-political context and individual equity dimensions (e.g., health access, gender, race/ethnicity, and income) explain health gaps.
Key public engagements in this visit:
Keynote: Challenging health inequalities research from a “sociological imagination
Date: Thursday, March 14, 2024 Time: 13:30 to 14:30
Location: 2001 McGill College Avenue, 11th floor, room 1140, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G1, CA
Samaila Suleiman is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at Bayero University, Kano. He received his B.A. and M.A. History from Bayero University, Kano and graduated with a PhD in Historical Studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2015. His research interests lie at the intersection of historiography, identity, and the politics of knowledge production in Africa. Samaila has delivered guest lectures and papers at Cambridge, Oxford, Rutgers, Technical University of Berlin, Wilton Park, Sussex UK etc. He is a recipient of many fellowships and research grants including African Peace building Network (APN) of the SSRC, New York; Presidential Fellow of African Studies Association/American Council of Learned Societies 2018; Fellow Summer Program in Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Princeton, 2018/2019; Fellow Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI) Brown University USA 2014; and two time Fellow of the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa of the SSRC.
He was Deputy Director of Research and Documentation at Mambayya House, the Aminu Kano Center for Democratic Studies, and currently serves as the Regional Lead for West Africa, Association of Common Wealth Universities (ACU) Higher Education, and SDGs Network. Some of his recent publications include “Archives as Spaces of Power: The Social Life of the National Archives of Nigeria” Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, 2022, and Katsina in Transition: Exploring the History of Royalty, Culture, Trade, and Security published by the Department of History and Security Studies, UMYUK, Nigeria, 2024. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Contemporary African Studies, (JCAS) Rhodes University, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Key public engagements in this visit:
Workshop:
Research in archives in African contexts
Date: Monday, March 18, 2024, 5:00 to 6:30pm
Location: Bronfman Building, Room 423, 1001 Rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G5, CA
Keynote Lecture:
The Politics of Erasure: Dissident Narrative and the Battle for Historical Justice in Nigeria
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2024, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Location: Bronfman Building, Room 423, 1001 Rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G5, CA