Trinity faculty member Naima Khahaifa has been selected as one of 62 scholars — selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process — to receive a fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
As the program’s longest running program, the ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In 2025, the program will award more than $3.5 million in support of outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
Khahaifa joined Duke in 2024 as an assistant professor of African & African American Studies She teaches two courses offered for the first time at Duke: Carceral Geographies, which explains mass incarceration in the United States, and Black Geographies, which explores borders, boundaries and Blackness in the U.S.. The development of this groundbreaking undergraduate coursework is based on Khahaifa’s expertise in the carceral state and on her highly-specialized research exploring the understudied perspectives of the Black correctional workforce.and on her highly-specialized research exploring the understudied perspectives of the Black correctional workforce.
Through her project, “Making Prisons Work: Black Correctional Officers and Carceral Geographies of Western New York,” Khahaima aims at unveiling the hidden story of Black Correctional Officers or COs, whose overlooked labor influenced prison reproduction in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, a key site of the prisoners’ rights movement.
