Email
tmasiki@wpi.edu
Office
Salisbury Labs 310-D
Phone
+1 (508) 8316385
Education
PhD Afro-American Studies, UMass-Amherst, 2017
Cert. African Diaspora Studies, UMass-Amherst, 2017
Cert. Latin American, Caribbean, & Latino Studies, UMass-Amherst, 2017
MA Afro-American Studies, UMass-Amherst, 2014
MFA Creative Writing (Prose), Emerson College-Boston, 2001
MA English, Texas A&M University-College Station, 1996
BS Computer Science, Southern University-Baton Rouge, 1992

Trent Masiki is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the social, historical, and intercultural ties that bind African Americans to other communities of African descent in the US, Africa, and the African diaspora.  Masiki’s scholarly articles appear in the journals Latino Studies, MELUS, African American Review, and College Language Association, among others. He was a co-guest editor of “Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades,” a special issue of The Black Scholar 52.1. The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism (UNC Press 2023), Masiki’s first book, examines African American cultural, political, and literary influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts Movement.

 

Scholarly Work

New Books Network Podcast | Dr. Reighan Gillam interviews Trent Masiki about his first book The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism (UNC Press 2023) | Dec. 20, 2023. https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-afro-latino-memoir

“'Any place is better than here': Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell." College Language Association Journal 63.1 2020

“Ambiguous Seductions: Doppelgangers, Suciogenesis, and the Mask of Tíguerismo in Junot Díaz’s ‘Drown’ and ‘Miss Lora.’” MELUS 43.4 2018

Professional Highlights & Honors
NEH Summer Stipend Grant, 2021
National Endowment for the Humanities
Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow, 2021 - 2022
Amherst College
Interdisciplinary Arts Programming Grant, 2020
Boston University Arts Initiative | Office of the Provost
Postdoctoral Scholar , 2018 - 2021
Kilachand Honors College | Boston University
Five College Graduate Student Du Bois Fellowship, 2017
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Fulbright U.S. Scholar, 2014 - 2015
Department of English | Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí in Panama