AFAM Community

The Department of African American Studies Welcomes 

Kiamsha Bynes, Ph.D. 
Dr. Bynes is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at San José State University. Her research broadly examines the complex history of Black female athletes and sportswomen who helped shape Black women’s sporting culture across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moving beyond their athletic achievements alone, her work explores the social, economic, and political forces that shaped Black women’s experiences in sport and physical culture. As a former collegiate athlete and a high school basketball coach, her own experiences in athletics continue to inform and inspire her scholarship on race, gender, and sport. Beyond sports history, Dr. Bynes’s research interests engage broader themes in African American history, the history of Black education, Black cultural expression, urban life, and community memory. 

She is a member of numerous professional organizations such as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH). 

Dr. Bynes received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, where she also served as a postdoctoral associate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. A proud Jersey girl, she enjoys traveling and is a lover of all things hip-hop, R&B, and jazz.

Faith G. Williams, Ph.D.
Dr. Williams is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at San José State University. Her research examines how Black digital cultures navigate technological systems that often exploit and commodify cultural expression. Her working book project introduces the notion of “Black digital retreat,” which traces how Black creators engage digital media through aesthetic practices that render identity illegible to algorithmic recognition. Her article in Television & New Media titled “Circumventing Virality: The Illegible Sensibilities of Vernacular Black Digital Culture” demonstrates how Black cultural production thrives outside of attention economies and within marginal, non-viral digital spaces. Faith received her PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.