Sakina Hughes

Sakina Hughes

Sakina Hughes, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University. She specializes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries history, African American history, and Comparative African American and Native American histories. She completed her doctoral degree at Michigan State University in 2012 and was the Du Bois Mandela Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan in the Department of African American Studies. Hughes’ research considers mobility and racial uplift. She argues that circuses and other traveling performance venues in the post-bellum, pre-Harlem era enabled African and Native Americans to sustain robust communities and build national and international careers. These artists spread African American and Native American culture such as ragtime, blues, dance, art, and foodways. Hughes has written articles on topics such as African American missionaries, Black and Native American artists, conceptions of respectability among African American and Native American communities, and African American cookbooks and etiquette books. Her current book project, Under Other Tents: African Americans and Native Americans in the Golden Age of the Circus, will excavate for the first time the experiences that African Americans and Native Americans shared during the rise of American popular entertainment in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hughes’ research has been supported by a Newberry Library D’Arcy McNickle Center Fellowship and is featured in the PBS American Experience documentary, The Circus.