African and African American Studies

Dr. Bria Harper

Assistant Professor of English

B.A. and M.A., University of Alabama
Ph.D., Michigan State University

Dr. Bria Harper’s research interests include African American literature, Black feminist thought, Black girlhood studies, popular culture and memory studies.

Dr. Jim Neighbors

Professor of English

Dr. Jim Neighbors’ teaching interests include Black literature and culture in the United States, the history of Black activism in the United States, the history of white supremacy and anti-Black racism in the United States, and the practice and theory of antiracism in the United States. He is currently leading the Back of the College Project, a community partnership to tell the history of the rise and decline of a prominent Black Spartanburg neighborhood. His research also focuses on the history of Black resistance to white supremacy and anti-Black racism in the United States, the history of Black women’s literary, cultural and activist traditions in the United States, and Black film history in the United States. He earned his B.A. from the University of Washington, and his M.A. degree and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He enjoys working with Wofford students, whom he often finds to be hard-working, insightful, sincere, curious, compassionate and, at times, inspiring. Away from Wofford, he enjoys long-distance running, making bread, playing with dogs, road trips and enjoying time with family and friends.

Jessica Scott-Felder

Assistant Professor of Studio Art

B.A., Spelman College
M.F.A., Georgia State University

Jessica Scott-Felder is a visual and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an assistant professor and studio coordinator of studio art and teaches drawing, design, figure drawing, painting and printmaking in the Department of Art and Art History at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate studies in Studio Art from Spelman College, an MFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from Georgia State University and studied experimental printmaking at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy.

Jessica’s latest performance art piece, Adornment was featured in the group exhibition "Africa Forecast," at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta and also featured in the 2017 edition of the Emergency Index, a nationally distributed performance art catalog. She was the 2017 featured visiting artist at Ithaca College in New York where she presented her artistic research on “Black Matter”, an installation based on Black Hole physics, American folklore, Afrofuturism and imagination. Her drawings have been featured in nationally and internationally recognized spaces such as the A.I.R Gallery in New York and the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Ga. Her work is featured in private and corporate collections in Spartanburg, Cambridge, New York, New Jersey and the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta.