Dionne Bennett is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles where she studied in the Psychocultural Studies and Medical Anthropology Program, and she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in Anthropology and Literature from Yale University. She was previously the Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Detroit Mercy and an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and a Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She has been a fellow of Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, the Ford Foundation, and the UCLA President’s Office. She has been an associate of the The Hiphop Archive at Harvard University since its founding in 2002 by Marcyliena Morgan, Ph.D. She is the author, with photographer Matthew Jordan Smith, of Sepia Dreams: A Celebration of Black Achievement through Words and Images, co-editor of Revolutions of the Mind: Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project 1996-2002 (CAAS Publications, University of California Los Angeles, 2003), and a contributor to Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (NYU Press, 2010).