Alumni Spotlight: John Mundell
Source: https://africam.berkeley.edu/news/alumni-spotlight-john-mundell Parent: https://africam.berkeley.edu/
Ph.D. program alumn John Mundell.
March 3, 2026
In our Alumni Spotlight series, AAS Project Manager Barbara Montano interviews recent Ph.D. program alumni about where their Ph.D. has taken them. Our March spotlight focuses on John Mundell, now a visiting assistant professor in African and African American Studies at Washington University, St. Louis.
Where are you now and what are you up to? Tell us about your current role.
I am currently a visiting assistant professor in African and African American Studies (AFAS) at Washington University in St. Louis where I also completed my postdoctoral fellowship (2022-2025). While at WashU, I have been building out my research in Black queer and feminist studies and Afro-Latin American studies by writing a book proposal and two additional chapters to transform my dissertation into a monograph, titled Longing for a Racial Democracy: Interracial Intimacies and Popular Culture in Brazil. With the support of my colleagues in AFAS at WashU and the Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean working group that fellow alum Nicole Ramsey and I started back in 2017, I’ve also been able to workshop some articles that have been published or are forthcoming. Two of these were co-written—such a wonderful learning and loving experience we rarely get in the humanities!—one, with my colleague, Cassie Osei (History, Bucknell University), and another with a former mentee at WashU, Alejandro Ramirez, who recently began their Ph.D. in Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Part of my postdoc and current role at WashU has also been to develop undergraduate and graduate courses with a particular focus on Black popular culture, literature, media, and intellectual thought in Latin America that effectively broaden the scope of offerings for WashU students. In our department, I also helped lead the proposal and developed the curriculum for our Graduate Certificate in Global Black Studies. After two years of back-and-forth with Administration, the certificate program was launched this past fall: a critical step toward what we hope may become a Black Studies Ph.D. program. Finally, another exciting part of my work has been the translation into English of literary and scholarly works by Black writers in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa. My translation of Fe en disfraz, a novel by Afro-Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres, will be published this May as Faith in Disguise in the Global Black Writers in Translation series out of Vanderbilt University Press. I have two other book-length translations in process, one from Colombia and another from Angola, that I hope, like Faith in Disguise, might get assigned in Black studies courses.
What in your time in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley best prepared you for your postdoc or other position?
There is so much I could mention, but two things immediately come to mind. After I returned from field work in Brazil, I had the chance to design and teach my own seminar within the College Writing Program at UC Berkeley. This was pivotal to, first, being able to talk about and teach some of my research, while also widening the breadth of material I could cover with students. The two courses I developed in that program became the foundation of two courses that I have continued at WashU, “Afro-Latin America on Camera” and “Blackness in Brazil.” The second aspect that the Ph.D. program instilled in me was service as a critical pillar of Black Studies: the mentorship of students, organizing programming that integrated local and global Black communities, the importance of collective action and care in defense of our rights as laborers and our sense of belonging, and a broader accountability to the field of Black Studies as storytellers and arbiters between powerful institutions (i.e., the academy) and Black communities in the past, present, and future. While the Ph.D., indeed, prepared me incredibly well to conduct effective interdisciplinary research, I have found over my four years out of the program that the emphasis on our responsibility to students, the community, and each other has been invaluable, especially now as ethnic studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies are under a barrage of attacks of such an unprecedented magnitude.
What courses or seminars shaped the way you now teach or frame your research?
This question is a tricky one because I gained equally as much knowledge from our seminars as I did from the courses where I served as a GSI, both in content and pedagogy. The fall of my second year is most memorable: I took “Race and Politics in Comparative Perspective” with Tianna Paschel, “Black + Queer” co-taught by Darieck Scott and Nadia Ellis, and “Race, Gender, and National Bodies” in Gender and Women’s Studies with Juana María Rodríguez. Not only did these faculty all become mentors and/or serve on my exam and dissertation committees, but it was the first time in the Ph.D. that I felt like the work I wanted to do was possible. I began making deep connections on blackness and queerness as methods of inquiry, not simply identities—and ones that were often fluid and contested across space and time. In the courses I took outside the Department, race was so often simply an additive quality to research. In these courses, and all the courses I took in the Department, race was, instead, the analytic, where the theory, cultural objects, and practice all interconnected with one another. It was the semester where everything fell into place and planted the seed that would eventually change my whole research project into what it became. These courses, along with the courses I GSI'ed with Ula Taylor, Michael Cohen, Brandi Catanese, and Darieck Scott, shaped the interdisciplinarity of my research while they also showed me that knowledge production could be playful and still rigorous.
What faculty wisdom or mentorship do you still carry with you? How has your work evolved since starting the postdoc?
Laugh. This was wisdom imparted on me not in words. I am, shall we say, recognizable for my laugh—but so are many of the faculty on the sixth floor, as were my fellow graduate students during my time. You must have joy; the minute joy walks out the door, so should you. This is not an aphorism on being happy all the time as much as it is an ethos. Ula Taylor, Tianna Paschel, Juana María Rodríguez, and other faculty have all shown me what it means to love in this profession, that it can be challenging, especially in these past few years. But standing on the imperative of joy, of laughter, as they have done is a life lesson I carry with me, especially in my own struggles in academia. This has deeply affected how I approach writing, teaching, and mentorship: there now must be a concrete, material end goal centered on the improvement of somebody’s life and opportunities afforded to them. Before, I had these in mind, but I also admittedly pursued lines on a CV to get a good job, to show well-roundedness. The job market, though stubborn as it is, has shown me that even productivity and breadth will not always get your foot in the door. So, in the past couple of years, I have begun focusing more on what brings me joy in my work, the types of pieces I want to write and translate, what I want to teach, and to whom I can be of service. For example, last summer, I served as the academic coordinator for our department’s Black Studies Summer Institute for St. Louis secondary educators teaching AP African American Studies and, this past fall, I helped organize the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora conference in St. Louis. This took some time away from my research writing. However, to be able to bring people together, share my work, and guide us toward a common goal in supporting Black Studies scholarship and Black educators and students gave me joy. I felt that my impact was greater in those moments than it ever had been before.
What are your future dreams and aspirations? Where do you hope your postdoc takes you?
I am hopeful, while I am also realistic. The academic job market is increasingly troublesome and cruel these days, to say the least. I would love to continue in academia because I love my students and my work. But this may be my last year formally affiliated with an institution due to the realities of this market, at least for now. If it comes to that, the work can always continue independently. I plan to continue translating and writing, no matter what industry I go into. I regularly remind myself that so much critical Black Studies scholarship that we cite today comes from thinkers at the margins of the academy, unaffiliated by choice or involuntarily. On that note, for the past year and a half, I have taught culinary classes at a cooking studio here in St. Louis, focusing mostly on Latin American cuisine. Through that affiliation, I have been able to build relationships with the local food scene, and one of my dreams has been to eventually institutionalize a hands-on African diaspora foodways cooking course featuring local Black St. Louisan and immigrant chefs at WashU (to be determined!). If food is my next venture, the Ph.D. will still serve me deeply, particularly in how my work on Black popular culture, gender, and sexuality in Latin America will continue on through research, teaching, and building local and global community.