Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Mayowa Willoughby is a third-year Ph.D. student in Africana studies at Cornell University. In 2014, Willoughby received their B.A. in comparative literature from Dartmouth College where she completed a thesis titled "But the Color Stayed," an interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences of Turks of African descent in contemporary Turkey. Willoughby's current scholastic interests concern the ways the plant world has been used by people of African descent in the Mediterranean to intervene in physical, spiritual, and psychic traumas. Willoughby's research asks how plants in particular and (sub)terranean ecologies in general can be used to index histories of that which might be called "blackness" within the Turkish Republic.