The final seminar in the series includes Merwomanist scholar Dr. Jalondra Davis and Butler faculty member and historian Dr. Charlene Fletcher (History/Anthropology/Classics) discussing more traditional and alternative African religious expressions that are situated in the lives and experience of Black woman in the African Diaspora.
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Dr. Jalondra A. Davis is a Black feminist artist intellectual, warrior mama, and merwomanist Melusine currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. She has published theory and criticism of Black speculative fiction and culture in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Shima Journal, the Museum of Science Fiction Journal of Science Fiction, and forthcoming in the Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms. Her monograph in progress, Merfolk and Black Being analyzes the many appearances of mermaids, water spirits, and other aquatic beings in African diasporic literature, art, and popular culture, with a focus on narratives that engage the transatlantic slave trade, Western modernity, and the Anthropocene. Mermaids center in her current scholarship, fiction writing, recreational practices as an amateur mermaid, and content creation for the Merwomanist Podcast as a site of both interrogating history through fantasy and as Black whimsy, pleasure, and play.

Charlene Fletcher is a historian, educator, and writer. With a PhD in History from Indiana University specializing in 19th century United States and African American history and gender studies, Fletcher joined Butler University’s faculty in fall 2023. Her forthcoming book explores the experiences of confined African American women in Kentucky from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era. Fletcher has been affiliate faculty at the Center for Africana Studies at IUPUI and Curatorial Director at Conner Prairie Museum as well. Among her many accolades, Fletcher served as the ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.