Magacaygu waa Suban Ahmed Mohamed Nur Bile Koshin Ali Faarah Ismaciil. But hey, you can call me Suban. I am an assistant professor of Black Feminisms, Genders, and Sexualities at Michigan State University’s department of African American and African Studies.

I am a researcher and teacher of all kinds of things pertaining to the cultural ➡ digital ➡ global ➡ local. That is to say, I’m really interested in how all these elements intersect to impact and inform us individually, and how we then interact as parts of larger communities within and across the world. I care about the micro and macro.

I am a proud Somali and Gen 1.5 Australian currently living in the U.S. where I am surrounded by my kind of people in Lansing, Michigan. I have a penchant for unabashedly laughing at my own terrible jokes, cannot help but singalong to songs I love (though I have NO business singing out loud), and I think goat cheese tastes like you licked an actual goat (fight me). Much of my work is driven by the rhetorics of identity and space, race, and cultural continuity in displaced communities, community engagement, transnationality and the digital. I want, more than anything, to understand what happens to Black cultures after displacement. Using my own community as a starting point, I research the impact of migration and displacement on the varied manifestations of cultural identity among Black African diasporic communities. In doing so, I am interested in understanding what happens to displaced communities and cultural memory over time and in different spaces across the globe

This is why I pursued a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. My dissertation research was a multi-location geographic comparative study which focused on elder women of the Somali diaspora and how migration and displacement can initiate a rhetorical inquiry of one’s culture and identity, manifesting in temporal and spatial constructions of a nation. I am honored to share that this passion project of mine was also selected as the 2021 CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award.

As a teacher, my methods center on inclusivity and fostering an interconnectedness with the varied knowledges my students bring with them into the classroom. I see teaching as community collaboration. My role as a teacher is to understand that we all have our part to play in the classroom space; principally to engage, connect, and learn something from one another.

Prior to academia, I worked for many years as a journalist and communications professional for organizations like the Refugee Development Center, Habitat for Humanity of Michigan, Dart Container, and the Michigan League for Public Policy, to name a few.

What else: I love to write, hike, am a wannabe spoken word performer, have a lot of passion for community engagement, all things hip hop/jazz/RnB/Afrobeats, all things Black, love me some travel and quixotic adventures. Have more questions? Feel free to contact me at subannurcooley@gmail.com.