Election Committee

Donna Hope

Donna P. Hope, Chair

Donna P. Hope, PhD is tenured Professor of Culture, Gender and Society in the Institute of Caribbean Studies, and former Deputy Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. A specialist in the areas of popular culture, identity, masculinities, and media, Professor Hope’s work tackles Jamaican/Caribbean cultures of identity-making as they intersect with power domains.

She has made numerous presentations locally, regionally, and across the world, and published extensively in the areas of popular culture, gender, music, identity, and creative industries. Professor Hope believes in the importance of documenting culture and has published six academic books, one self-published motivational book, and many articles in journals and newspapers. Her most recent publication titled Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion/Subversion Erotica (edited with Carla Lamoyi) was published in August 2023. A bilingual work written simultaneously in English and Spanish, this book historicizes the Dancehall Queen phenomenon in its engagement with music, dance and fashion, and assesses the movement of this female-focussed cultural force outwards both regionally and globally.

Professor Hope is a former Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies, where she organized and chaired four International Reggae Conferences. A keen cultural activist with a deep interest in black, working class culture, and a researcher with a strong ethnographic focus,
Professor Hope is the founder of The Dancehall Archive and Research Initiative (www.dancehallarchive.org) which preserves, innovates and disseminates information about dancehall culture, while working with Dancehall actors and researchers locally, regionally and internationally. Dancehall Queen is the Dancehall Archive’s first book publication done jointly with FIEBRE Ediciones (Mexico).

A renowned keynote speaker, social commentator, former talk show host, and itinerant newspaper columnist, Professor Hope is finalizing her poetry monograph, These Thorns Have Roses, for publication. She is also completing the final draft her manuscript on the spread of
dancehall’s dance industry under the title Dancehall’s Scattered Children; as well as her work on the transitions in Afro-Caribbean gender structures tentatively titled Transitory Masculinities. Professor Hope holds a B.A. in Mass Communication *Hons), and Masters of Philosophy (Political Science) from the University of the West Indies, Mona; and, as a Fulbright scholar to the USA, she completed a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

E-mail: vice.president@caribbeanstudiesassociation.org

Godfrey St. Bernard

Dr. Godfrey St. Bernard is a Demographer and Applied Social Statistician with a reputation of excellence that has spanned almost 45 years of service, regionally in the Caribbean and internationally. He earned his PhD in Social Demography in 1993 from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in London, Ontario, Canada. 

Dr. St. Bernard’s legacy is evident in capacity-building and institutional strengthening, as well as his well-recognised lifelong contributions as a mentor, teacher, scholar, researcher, and international consultant. 

In 2012-2013, he was the President of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) and continues to serve the CSA sharing his experience with its membership. He is also a member of numerous other professional associations in disciplines such as Demography, Sociology, and Statistics. Since January 2020, Dr. St. Bernard has been the Editor-in Chief, Editorial Board of the Journal of the Caribbean Association of Professional Statisticians (JCAPS).

Rashana Lydner

Rashana Vikara Lydner, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Bridging the fields of Caribbean studies, French cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and Creolistics, her research focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black popular culture in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean at the intersections of language, identity, and power. Her published works include “Decolonizing Creolistics Through Popular Culture” in Decolonizing Linguistics (Oxford University Press), “S’habiller Sexy en Body String: The French Guianese bad gyal and the image of French Caribbean Women” in Small Axe: a Caribbean journal of criticism, and “‘Mwen Enmé’W’ [I Love You]: Black Queer Women’s Social Positioning in the French Caribbean” in Gender & Language. She is currently working on her first book manuscript titled Dancehall ka joué: Gender and Sexual Politics at Play in French Guiana. Dancehall ka joué asserts that dancehall artists in French Guiana employ subversive performances of their gender and sexual identities to contest French Caribbean societal norms. In addition, by identifying with a trans-Caribbean culture, they challenge notions of non-belonging and Frenchness as they carve out their own space in the French nation state.