
Seminar Exchange Fellows 2022
Stellenbosch University Fellows

Priscalia Khoza
Dr Priscalia Khosa is a lecturer in the Department of Social Work at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She published widely on her fields of research interests, which include social work supervision, social work education, substance abuse and gender dynamics. She supervises masters’ students research on gender-based violence, school social work and medical social work, among others. In 2019, she was awarded a Social Work Emerging Educator of the Year Award by the Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI). She also received an Emerging Scholar Award for the Sixteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (ISS) in 2021. For more on her research, click http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7453-4417

Precious Simba
Dr Precious Simba is a lecturer in the department of education policy studies at Stellenbosch University. Her background is in after-school programmes, having founded a girls’ education initiative in Bulawayo in 2011. Her doctoral research was a feminist critique of Ubuntu as a philosophy of education centred on education policy in Zimbabwe. Her research interests are ubuntu as a philosophy of education, education policy, feminist theory, intersectionality, and democratic citizenship education. She has an MA from University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies (IDS) where her studies focused on gender and development with a special interest in education. Dr Simba is a Mandela scholar (2013/14), a Sol Plaatjie scholar (2018/2020) and an Ubuntu Dialogues Student Graduate Fellow (2020). ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0626-3704
Michigan State University Fellows

Marcella McCoy-Deh
Dr Marcella McCoy-Deh, is an associate professor of American Studies in Jefferson’s College of Humanities and Science. She dedicates her research to building concrete steps to decolonize African scholarship. Currently, she is exploring how to ensure that students of African Studies learn about the African experience with materials from African scholars, as opposed to curricula that are dominated by European and/or colonial perspectives.

Lekpoh Dwanyen
Dr Lekpoh (Lekie) Dwanyen grew up in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and eventually Minneapolis, MN. She is currently a Dean’s Research Associate in the College of Social Science and Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University. Her research interests include the study of war exposure and trauma, family and community resilience, and culturally and contextually grounded interventions. She currently engages with communities in Uganda.

Mosi Adesina Ifatunji
Dr Ifatunji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he also holds affiliations at the Center for Demography and Ecology and at the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Program for Research on Black Americans, which is located in the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Jasper St. Bernard
Jasper St. Bernard is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at the University of Memphis. His work focuses on African American philosophy, particularly that of the late 19th to early 20th century. He is currently working on a dissertation that is attempting to center the social/political thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. He is specifically looking at her early anti-lynching work (1892-1905). He is examining how she understood lynching at the intersection of race, gender, and law/government. One of the goals is to work through how Wells-Barnett’s work speaks to current issues, like police brutality, and mass incarceration.