Celina de Sá earns PhD with distinction.

Celina de Sá, Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies and Lecturer earned her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania, this past summer. Her ongoing research focuses on the legacies of racial formation, colonialism and the slave trade, in urban francophone West Africa and beyond. De Sá explores the ways in which contemporary African contexts and agents recast, critique, and engage with the black Atlantic. She is currently working on her first book project, Becoming Diasporically African: The Cultural Politics of West African Capoeira, examining a network of martial arts groups in Senegal, the Gambia, Togo, Benin and the Ivory Coast.