2015 MURAP Conference Booklet by Geeta

Table of Contents

History & Program Statistics

4-5

Schedule ………………………………………………………

6-9

Conference Panelist Biographies …………………

10-21

Keynote Speakers …………………………….. Featured Speakers ……………………………. Scholar Panelists ……………………………… Alumni Panelists ………………………………

10-11 12-13 14-18 20-21

MURAP Faculty Mentor Biographies ………….

22-27

MURAP Staff Biographies ……………………………

28-32

MURAP Cohort Biographies & Abstracts ……

34-54

Acknowledgements ……………………………………..

Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program History This year marks the 21st anniversary of the MURAP Academic Conference and the 26th anniversary of the MURAP program. The mission of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) is to contribute in a significant way to achieving diversity in academia by increasing the number of students in the US—both from underrepresented minority groups as well as others with a proven commitment to diversity—who pursue doctoral degrees in the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts. MURAP is named after our first doctoral recipient, Dr. Mignon Moore, now an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and past director of Columbia’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program. Professor Moore’s educational and professional pursuits are a model of the academic excellence and dedication to academic diversity that MURAP strives to uphold for all of its student fellows. In order to foster the entrance of talented students from diverse backgrounds into graduate school and faculty positions within our targeted areas, we provide a 10-week intensive residential summer program. The 20 students in each year’s class, all rising juniors or seniors in colleges and universities from across the nation, work one-on-one with UNC-Chapel Hill faculty mentors to design and execute high-caliber research projects of their own. In addition, they attend four workshops geared to preparing them for the challenges ahead (GRE Review, Communication Skills, Writing Techniques and Clinic, and Graduate Professional Development) and participate in social and educational activities organized by the program’s graduate assistants or chosen by the members of the cohort. With the generous continued support of the Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Office of the Graduate School, and the Institute of African American Research, MURAP aims to achieve its mission by identifying and training students of great promise and helping them to become scholars of the highest distinction. Please see our list of “Summary Statistics” on the following page to gauge our program’s results as of our last graduating class. For more information about MURAP please visit our webpage at http://murap.unc.edu/

MURAP Program Summary Statistics (as of June 2015)

Number Percent of Total

Total number of MURAP Alumni (1989-2014)

448*

100%

Alumni who enrolled in graduate and professional school

261

59%

Alumni holding positions in Academia

13%



Alumni with tenure

Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the PhD

155

35%



Alumni who have earned a doctorate

17%



Doctorates in progress

18%

109

25%

Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the Master’s



Master’s degrees earned

22%



Master’s degrees in progress

*NOTE that although the total number of MURAP alumni is 448, the percentages that follow are based on the 441 who have received their bachelor’s degrees

21st Annual MURAP Academic Conference “Colonialisms: A Global Perspective” Thursday July 23rd & Friday July 24th Hitchcock Multipurpose Room Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 150 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599

Day 1—Thursday, July 23, 2015 8:30am-9:00am

Breakfast

9:00am-9:30am

Welcome, Dr. Taffye Benson Clayton, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Diversity Officer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Opening Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter, Director, Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program

9:30am-10:00am

Introduction of the 2015 MURAP cohort of students, mentors, and staff

10:00am-11:00am

Keynote Address I: Prof. Carol Anderson Professor of African American Studies and History, Emory University “‘The Danger of the Single Story’: African Americans’ Anti-colonialism in the Early Cold War”

11:00am-11:15am

Break

11:15am-1:00pm

A Sampling of MURAP Students’ Research Liann Yamashita, Pacific University “Reap What You Sow: Evaluating HOPE VI’s Approaches to Urban Poverty” Katie Warczak, Ripon College “I can’t stand this bondage you got me in”: The Racial Protest of Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee” Bright Gyamfi, University of Notre Dame “Teaching African History through the Lion’s

Perspective: An Analysis of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Institute of African Studies” 1:oopm-2:00pm

Lunch

2:00pm-3:00pm

Featured Presentation I Introduction: Prof. Reginald Hildebrand, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Prof. William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr. Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, Duke University “The Colonial and the Subaltern: The Problem of the Middle Classes”

3:00pm-5:00pm

Scholar Panel I: Mapping the Spaces Between Slavery and Freedom Moderator: Prof. Donald Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Prof. Nancy Kang, University of Baltimore “When the American Dream was Canadian: Negotiating North American Slavery Beyond the US” Prof. Pat Northover, University of the West Indies, Mona “The Coloniality of Freedom: Why Sen’s paradigm of ‘Development as Freedom’ is not enough” Prof. Michaeline Crichlow, Duke University “Fleeing the Plantation or Coloniality Redux? Bare Life and Peripheral Migrants” Prof. Lindah Mhando, Duke University “Specters of Anthropocene: Youth, Diaspora and the art of listening”

5:00pm

Concluding Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter

Day 2—Friday, July 24, 2015 8:30am-9:00am

Breakfast

9:00am-9:15am

Welcome, Dr. Carol Tresolini, Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

9:15am-10:15am

Keynote Address II: Prof. Silvio TorresSaillant Professor of English, Syracuse University “How We Became Racial Beings: the Colonial Transaction and Social Relations Today”

10:15am-10:30am

Break

10:30am-12:30pm

Scholar Panel II— Negotiating Postcolonial Identities Moderator: Prof. Jennifer Ho, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Prof. Dawn Duke, University of Tennessee, Knoxville “From Fugitive to Affirmative Action: A Strategic Configuration of the Black Consciousness Movement in Brazil” Prof. Emilio del Valle Escalante, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Indigenous Responses to Colonialism” Prof. Monica Rector, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “The Postcolonial Condition in Lusophone Africa” Prof. Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “From the ‘Third World’ to the ‘Global South’: Undoing the Myth of ‘Under/development’”

12:30pm-2:00pm

Lunch

2:00pm-3:00pm

Featured Presentation II Introduction: Prof. James Coleman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Prof. Gyanendra Pandey Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Emory University “Unarchived Histories: The Colonized, the ‘Trifling’”

3:00pm-5:00pm

MURAP Alumni Panel Moderator & Panelist: Andrew Martinez (MURAP ’09), Doctoral Candidate, UCLA Prof. Krystal Frazier (MURAP ‘98), Assistant Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies, West Virginia University Prof. Lisa B. Y. Calvente (MURAP ‘98), Assistant Professor of Communications, DePaul University Prof. Charlene Chester (MURAP ‘02), Assistant Professor of Psychology, Morgan State University Ezelle Sanford III (MURAP ’11), Doctoral Candidate, Princeton University

5:00pm

Concluding Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter

Conference Speakers’ Biographies Keynote Speakers Carol Anderson is a newly minted Professor of African American Studies and history at Emory University. She is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge University Press), which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. Her latest book, also published by Cambridge, is Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960. Her research has garnered substantial fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She has also served on working groups dealing with race at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations. In addition, based on the strength and accessibility of her research, the leadership at Amnesty International, USA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, and others has used Eyes Off the Prize to frame and examine their human rights work in the United States. This has also led to sought after commentary in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and CNN.com that places in a historical perspective contemporary issues dealing with race, human rights, and politics. Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science, International Relations, and History. She earned her PhD in history from The Ohio State University.

Silvio Torres-Saillant is Professor of English at Syracuse University, where he has headed the Latino-Latin American Studies Program, held the William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, and directed the Humanities Council. His research centers on the racial regimes spawned by the colonial transaction, intellectual history, Latino discourse, ethnic American literatures, and comparative poetics. He has authored Caribbean Poetics (1997; 2nd ed. 2013), El tigueraje intelectual (2002; 2nd ed. 2011), Introduction to Dominican Blackness (1999; 2nd ed. 2010), An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006), Diasporic Disquisitions: Dominicanists, Transnationalism, and the Community (2000), and El retorno de las yolas: Ensayos sobre diaspora, democracia y dominicanidad (7999), in addition to co-authoring The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat (forthcoming) with literary scholar Nancy Kang and The Dominican-Americans (7998) with sociologist Ramona Hernandez. He has co-edited The Challenges of Higher Education in the Hispanic Caribbean (2004), Desde la orilla: Hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (8664), and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. IV (8668). He is currently completing “The Advent of Blackness,” a study that seeks to tell the story of how we became racial beings.

*Professor Torres-Saillant’s lecture is sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Featured Speakers William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Duke Consortium on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, NorthSouth theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment.

He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization's highest honor. He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association. He also has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College and Claremont-McKenna College. He has served as Editor in Chief of the latest edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (Macmillan Reference, 2008) and as an Associate Editor of the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (2013). His most recent books are Economics, Economists, and Expectations: Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004) (co-authored with Warren Young and Robert Leeson) and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpande titled Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003) both published by Routledge. He has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals.

Gyanendra Pandey received his BA from the University of Delhi and his MA and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Director of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Workshop in the Department of History at Emory University. A founding member and leading theorist of the Subaltern Studies project, he has written extensively on marginality and citizenship, violence, and the history of history-writing. He has held teaching and visiting appointments at universities and research institutions in India, UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia and the USA. Before moving to Emory, he taught for many years at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; the University of Delhi; and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Among the best known of his single-authored books are Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (rev. ed. 2006); The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 (rev. ed. 2002); and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001). He has recently completed an ambitious history of the African American and Dalit struggles, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the USA (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013); and is currently working on a study of the autobiographical writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Viola Andrews. Three of his books were brought together in The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus, published in 2008; and one of them, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, has been reissued as an â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oxford India Perennialâ&#x20AC;? to mark the centenary of Oxford University Press in 2012.

Scholar Panelists Michaeline Crichlow is Professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University. She is the author (with Patricia Northover) of Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes of Fleeing the Plantation (2009); Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (2005). She has co-edited several volumes, including: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Cultural Politics of Affirmative Action; Human Trafficking: Past and Present; Race, Space and Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World, (November 2009); States of Freedom: Freedom of States; Informalization: Process and Structure (2000) edited, Carnival Crossfire: Art, Culture, Politics which was published as Carnival Arts, Politics and Culture: Performing Life by Routledge. She has published in articles on development and creolization in several journals. She teaches courses on Food politics; Citizenship and Postcoloniality; and Migration and Human Trafficking and is currently working on a manuscript on citizenship and development under globalization in Fiji, Hispaniola, and South Africa. Since 2012, she has been the editor of the Sage journal, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics and Power.

Emilio del Valle Escalante is a K’iche’ Maya scholar from Guatemala and Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Latin American literatures and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on Indigenous literatures and social movements, Central American literatures and cultures, and postcolonial and subaltern studies theory in the Latin American context. He is the author of Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala: Coloniality, Modernity and Identity Politics (SAR Press, 2009; Spanish edition by FLACSO, 2008). He is also editor of Teorizando las literaturas Indigenas (A contracorriente press, 2015), U’k’ux kaj, u’k’ux ulew: Antologia de poesia Maya guatemalteca contemporanea (IILI, 2010), and “Untying Tongues: Minority Literatures in Spain and Latin America” (with Alfredo Sosa Velasco, a special issue of Romance Notes, 2010). Dawn Duke is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portugues and Chair of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is also affiliated with the Latin American Studies and Cinema Studies Programs. Her graduate studies were completed at UNICAMP, the University of Guyana, and the University of Pittsburgh, completing the PhD at Pittsburgh in 2003. Her research focuses on Afro-Latin American Literature with a special interest in women's writings; however, she 14

continues to spend a lot of her research energies on Cuba and Brazil. Her first book, Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment (2008) is a record of that. She has expanded her research field to Santo Domingo and Panama. She is currently working on a second monograph that will include writers from Colombia and Nicaragua. Arturo Escobar is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Associate with the Culture, Memory, and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali. He has been visiting professor at universities in Ecuador, Argentina, Catalunya, Mali, Finland, the Netherlands, and England. His main interests are: political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. Over the past twenty years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements in the Colombian Pacific, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (7995,, 8nd Ed. 2011). His most recent books are Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (8668; 8676 for the Spanish edition), and Una minga para el postdesarrollo (8679). Some of his works can be downloaded from http://aescobar.web.unc.edu/ Nancy Kang is Assistant Professor of Multicultural and Diaspora literatures at the University of Baltimore. She is the co-editor of The Culture and Philosophy of Ridley Scott (8679) and co-author of the forthcoming The Once and Future Muse: Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat. Her other publications include articles in Canadian Literature, African American Review, and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Linda Mhando is a Research Associate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. As a feminist and migration specialist, Prof. Mhando has long been interested in the politics of youth identity, female subjectivity, sexuality, stratification, transnationalism and citizenship in immigrant-receiving contexts. She was a Future of Minority Studies/Mellon Fellow in the Summer Institute at Cornell and a Research Fellow in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. She has also held fellowships at the African Gender Institute, at the Nordic Africa Institute, and was the recipient of a UNDP award as an emerging African female Scholar.

Prior to coming to Duke University Dr. Mhando’s experience was in policy implementation as a practitioner, consultant and researcher in Sub -Saharan Africa, Latin America and India. Her past work focused on the redevelopment and the role of NGOs in producing new citizenship discourses in a fragmented political landscape. She studied GIS and was interested in applying a geo-spatial approach to analyze “Renee Island,” a remote Island along the Indian Ocean, as an area of the World that is biologically complex and poorly understood in particular relations with indigenous peoples. Her first book teased out questions on ethical codes and the meaning and moral implications of ‘cultural heritage’ and Nyerere’s intellectual History, using the Tanzania experience as a case. It won the New York African Studies Book Award. Weaving through her past work, her current research seeks to interrogate three related areas on bio-power. One, how young people’s experiences of being involved in youth organizations that work in participatory ways goes on to impact other spaces of their lives. In subsequent work, she has explored the intersections of youth subjectivity. Related to this work, Dr. Mhando has co-edited a collection of sociological and anthropological essays on Diaspora and Youth. Two, drawing on ethnographic and archival work, her book manuscript explores ways in which gender influences patterns of both state and household-making in Colonial Senegal. Three, Geographies of Health to understand the determinants of health inequalities. Alongside a team from the University of London, and using bioinformatics to study basic microbial communities, they are poised to examine how power relations between social groups, market forces and the environment changes ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing.’ Patricia Northover specializes in economic philosophy and critical development studies. She is a Senior Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona (SALISES, UWI). Prof. Northover received her doctorate in economics and philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She has been a Fellow of Girton College at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Mellon Professor at Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Northover’s current research interests are in racialized power and dispossession in the global political economy; globalization and climate change impacts on Caribbean development; racialized inequality, rurality and rural resilience and the politics of sugar and change. She is the chair of 16

the UWI research cluster, Sustainable Rural and Agricultural Development, (http://salises-srad.com), co-chair of the UWI interdisciplinary research group on Sustainable Investment, Environment and Development, InterSied, and co-coordinator of the Duke project, Race, Space, and Place: Making and Unmaking of Freedom in the Atlantic and Beyond (https://racespaceplace.wordpress.com/about/)

Prof. Northover is the author and co-author of several articles on the philosophy of economics, cultural dynamics, economic growth and Caribbean development, published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cultural Dynamics, Global South, Caribbean Dialogue, Small States Digest and Social and Economic Studies. She has published with Michaeline Crichlow, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (Duke University Pres, 2009). Her upcoming book is Growth Theory: Critical Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, Frontier series). Monica Rector is Professor of Portuguese at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and completed her graduate studies in Madrid, Spain, but defended her dissertation at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Neo-Latin Studies (Spanish as major), where she worked for a couple of years before moving to Rio de Janeiro. Rector received a second PhD in Linguistics at the Universidade Federal of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She has also taught at UFRJ, at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) before coming to the States in 1987. Her career and interests have always been in Humanities, and she has taught in a number of different areas: language and linguistics, literature and communication, and semiotics. At USP she taught Spanish language and Hispanic culture: at UFRJ and PUC her main field was Linguistics, with a specialization in Semantics and Dialectology; at UFF she taught Communication Theory with an emphasis on nonverbal communication and mass communication (the language of TV). Her theoretical approach to these fields is semiotics. She is currently working with Portuguese and Brazilian Literature and Culture with a focus on Portuguese Women writers.

Her publications include: De sagradas a profanas: a mulher portuguesa na Idade MĂŠdia e no Renascimento, Melhores contos de Ary Quintella, O fraco da baronesa by GuiomĂŁr Torresao. She has also co-edited several volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the latest dealing with African Lusophone writers, a volume of DeSignis (Buenos Aires), and Working Portuguese for Beginners.

Alumni Panelists Lisa B.Y. Calvente (MURAP 1998) is Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication in the College of Communication at DePaul University. Her primary areas of research are the Black Diaspora, Performance Studies and Cultural Studies. Her interests lie in the critical interrogation of anti-black and brown racism in the United States in order to generate possibilities of belonging and social justice. She has won a number of awards, including The African American Studies PostDoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University, The DePaul University ENGAGE Award for outstanding teaching and mentorship for social justice, and The Woodrow Wilson 601 5 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. She is currently working on her manuscript, Keep On Keepin’ On: Neoliberal Temporalities and the Black Diaspora as HomeSpace, and has also contributed to the anthology, Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz?, and the Journal of Cultural Studies. Her MURAP mentor was Prof. James Coleman. Charlene Chester (MURAP 2002) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Morgan State University, where she received her BS in Psychology. She earned her doctoral degree in Developmental Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to her appointment at Morgan State, Dr. Chester was a faculty member at Estrella Mountain Community College in Avondale, Arizona and in the Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University . Her research investigates the development of family processes and parent socialization practices during early developmental periods in an effort to understand the factors that affect child development. Dr. Chester uses adoption as a context in order to further understand the associations among family relationships and individual well-being. Her more recent work has investigated how disenfranchised youth access resources and the implications these processes have on development. Overall, Dr. Chester’s research contributes to a broader understanding of family development and an appreciation of how context can affect development. At MURAP, her mentor was Prof. Chenequa Walker-Barnes. Krystal Frazier (MURAP 1998) is an Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University. Her colleagues and friends well might describe her as an avid learner, a fashion arts enthusiast, and a natural wordsmith who enjoys people and loves surprises. Krystal’s academic career began in a Charlotte, North Carolina home, where her parents trained her and her two sisters to think deeply about and respect the world’s peoples, carefully analyze the intricacies of white supremacy, while celebrating 20

African American institutional strength, and to love the God of the Bible and the history it details. She graduated from West Charlotte Senior High, which was nationally recognized as “the place where integration has worked” and completed a bachelor’s degree in History Education at Florida A & M University. She earned her master’s degree in U.S. and African American History with a certification in oral history from American University and completed her doctoral studies in U.S. and African American History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Her book manuscript, on the ways in which historical declarative kin patterns have shaped economic strategies, political agendas and cultural identity among African Americans, is titled “We Are Family,” and she plans to publish it next year. Dr. Frazier has many wonderful mentors, and names Dr. Reginald Hildebrand, her MURAP preceptor, among her most consistent, encouraging and dear. Andrew Martínez (MURAP 2009) is a doctoral candidate in the Culture and Performance program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on ballet as nation building in the early years of the Cuban revolution. He seeks to convey the way choreographing of national identity is made material through the example of ballet, and how the trajectory of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba can be seen as a repository of the revolutionary conditions which will then serve as entrees into larger conversations about the ways in which artistic practice can uphold, critique, or reinscribe national ideologies. This summer he will be traveling to Brazil with his MURAP mentor, Dr. Ashley Lucas, and will continue on to Cuba for fieldwork. Ezelle Sanford III (MURAP 2011) is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. Working at the intersection of history, black studies, and anthropology, he studies race, medicine, and public health from the 19th century to the present. Specifically, his research interests trace the role of black medical professionals, the institution of the black hospital, contemporary health policy, and health activism. His dissertation project, “A Source of Pride, A Vision of Progress” proposes to uncover the complex inter- and intraracial social relationships within and surrounding the Homer G. Phillips hospital of St. Louis, MO, while providing new insights for writing institutional history. His MURAP mentor was Prof. Reginald Hildebrand.

MURAP Faculty Mentorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Biographies

Anna Agbe-Davies is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill and has appointments in the Curriculum in Archaeology and the Department of African and AfricanAmerican Diaspora Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania after completing a dissertation examining locally-made clay tobacco pipes from rural and urban sites in and around Jamestown, Virginia. She has also taught as an assistant professor in the anthropology department at DePaul University. Prior to that, she was a staff archaeologist for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department of Archaeological Research, and even earlier, an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. She is a historical archaeologist with research interests in the plantation societies of the colonial southeastern U.S. and Caribbean, as well as towns and cities of the 19th and 20th century Midwest, with a particular focus on the African diaspora. Her recent research projects include excavation and community collaboration at the sites of New Philadelphia, Illinois, and the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls on the south side of Chicago, and starting in 2014, she has initiated two new projects based in North Carolina.

James W. Coleman is Professor of English in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. He got his B.A from Virginia Union University and his MA and- PhD from the University of Chicago, and taught at Colorado College and San Diego State University before coming to UNC in 1990. Besides numerous published essays, he is the author of Blackness and Modernism: the Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman (1989), Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban (2001), Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction (8666), and Writing Blackness: John Edgar Widemanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art and Experimentation (8676). Also, his book entitled Understanding Edward P. Jones, a book in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series, is finished and in production; the University of South Carolina Press has scheduled its publication for July 15, 2016. Professor Coleman specializes in African American literature, and he also teaches twentieth century American literature. Reginald F. Hildebrand is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 7995).

His research focuses on the period of Emancipation and Reconstruction, although he is currently working on a collection of essays entitled "Engaging Blackness: Body, Mind, and Spirit; the Perspectives of Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Howard Thurman." In 2012 he was chosen to receive the Tanner Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He has served as interim director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History and also as interim director of the Institute of African American Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former cochair of the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, a former trustee of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and a member of the Board of the Paul Green Foundation. In addition, he has served as a member of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, book review editor for the A.M.E. Church Review, and is a member of the Advisory Board for the North Carolina Historical Review. Professor Hildebrand received his BA and MA from Howard University and his PhD from Princeton. Jennifer Ho is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill and also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the English PhD program. She teaches courses in Asian American literature, mulitethnic American literature, and Contemporary American literature, and her research interests are in critical race theory, anti-racism, and narratology. Her first book, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005) examines the intersection of coming-of-age, ethnic identity formation, and foodways in late 20th Century Asian American coming-of-age narratives and American popular culture. Her second book, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015) considers various forms of racially ambiguous subjects (such as transnational/transracial Asian adoptees, multiracial Asian American authors/texts, and Tiger Woods). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, among others, and her next academic project will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. Enrique Neblett is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his BS degree from Brown University, his MS degree from The Pennsylvania State University, and his doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Neblettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research examines the association between racism and health in 24

American adolescents and young adults, with a focus on racial identity, racial socialization, and Africentric worldview. He has published scholarly articles in outlets such as: Child Development, the Journal of Counseling Psychology, the Journal of Negro Education, and the Journal of Black Psychology and received several grants awarded by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Neblett teaches courses on childhood mental disorders, African American psychology, and racism, racial identity, and African American mental health. In 2014, he received the Chapman Family Teaching Award, an honor among UNCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s highest campus-wide recognitions for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Dr. Neblett serves on the Editorial Boards for Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, and the Journal of Black Psychology, and in 8679, he chaired the 59th Annual Black Graduate Conference in Psychology, a national conference that provides Black graduate students in psychology opportunities to present their research, gain professional development experiences, and network with faculty and other graduate students. Dr. Neblett is the incoming Co-Chair of the UNC Psychology Departmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Diversity Committee, as well as a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, and Race, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Society for Research on Adolescence. 2015 marks his fifth year as a MURAP faculty mentor. Mai Thi Nguyen is an Associate Professor in the City & Regional Planning Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her MA in Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University and her PhD in Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Nguyen employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to address problems related to social and spatial inequality, urban growth phenomena, the relationship between the built and social environments, and socially vulnerable populations. She is an expert in housing policy, community development, economic development, immigration, disasters, and urban growth phenomena. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles, edited books, and public policy reports. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She also teaches courses in the Housing and Community Development specialization with a focus on teaching about policies and practices that create transformative community change. 25

Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Assistant Professor of History at East Carolina University where she is responsible for teaching courses in Atlantic World History and African & African American Studies. She received undergraduate degrees in History and Political Science at North Carolina Central University and obtained her doctorate in Comparative Black History at Michigan State University. Dr. Perry’s research interests include transnational race politics, Black Europe, the global dimensions of African American history, diaspora theory and the relationship between emancipation and citizenship. She has published in the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of African American History, Twentieth Century British History and History Compass. Her first book, London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race is currently in production and will be published by Oxford University Press in November of 2015. Charlene Regester is an Associate Professor in the Department of African, African American, & Diaspora Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Global Cinema Studies Minor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 8676). The press nominated this book to the NAACP Image Awards. Regester serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Film and Video, Screening Noir, and Choice Reviews for Academic Libraries. Her articles have appeared in Film History, Film Literature Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Popular Culture Review, Popular Music and Society, Screening Noir, Studies in American Culture, and The Western Journal of Black Studies among others. She has served as a Faculty Mentor for the UNC-CH Minority Undergraduate Research Program (1996-2003, 2014-2015); Faculty Participant in Teaching with the Arts, Carolina Performing Arts, Institute for the Arts and Humanities (2014); Faculty Participant in the Interdisciplinary Seminar for Newly Tenured Associate Professors with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (2010); Faculty Mentor for the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program (2010); and Faculty Fellow with the Institute for Arts and Humanities (2005). Her work on early black cinema has been featured in productions or documentaries such as: PBS North Carolina Bookwatch with D. G. Martin (2011); Movies of Color: Black Southern Cinema (8668); American Movie Classic’s Hattie McDaniel Documentary (2000); and PBS I’ll Make Me a World: African American Artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1998).

Isaac Unah is Associate Professor of Political Science at UNCChapel Hill. He earned his BS in economics and management science from SUNY-Cortland (1989), and both his MA and PhD in political science from Stony Brook University in 1992 and 1995 respectively. His research and teaching interests focus on the behavior of judicial institutions and their collective influence on public policy. His research has been published in several political science, law, and interdisciplinary social science journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Law & Policy, Business and Politics, Journal of Law & Politics, and several major law reviews. His first book, The Courts of International Trade: Judicial Specialization, Expertise, and Bureaucratic Policy making (University of Michigan Press, 1998), examines the role of specialized courts in U.S. trade policy implementation. His second book, The Supreme Court in American Politics (PalgraveMacmillan, 2009) uses an evolutionary perspective to give readers a firm understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court. Among his ongoing projects, Unah is researching punishment politics, especially the extra-legal motivations underlying the use of capital punishment in the United States. His research served as the principal basis of the Racial Justice Act passed by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2009. From 2005â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2007, Unah served as program director for the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia and he is the incoming interim Director of the Institute for African American Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. Ariana E. Vigil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production (Rutgers University Press, 8674). She conducts teaching and research in contemporary Latina/o cultural production, focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, militarization, and transnationalism. Her work has appeared in meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Latino Studies, and Revista de Literatura Mexicana ContemporĂĄnea. She is currently working on a project that places Latina/o literature in conversation with media and communication studies.

MURAP Staff Biographies

Not pictured: Marissa Garcia, Emma Kioko, Jan Hendrickson-Smith, and Ben Wilson.

Jen Boehm is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at UNC. She has studied the social sciences at UNC for several years, earning a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and Linguistics in 2009 and a Master’s in Linguistics in 2011. Her main research interests are language documentation and preservation, dialect variation, and sociophonetics. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation research on the S’gaw Karen language, which is spoken by the Karen people from Burma. She works closely with members of the Karen refugee community here in Chapel Hill to record and document their language for further generations. Her research also seeks to analyze how the phonetic characteristics of S’gaw Karen are changing in the diaspora. She has given talks on S’gaw Karen at several conferences, such as the Southeastern Conference of Linguistics, and was awarded the Paul and Fran Hoch Summer Research Fellowship in 2014. As a graduate student instructor, Jen has taught courses in introductory linguistics and first-year composition. This summer, she is putting her experience in composition instruction and the social sciences to good use as the writing assistant for the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. After she earns her PhD, Jen hopes to continue to document and promote awareness of linguistic diversity in North Carolina. Yanexy Cardona is the Interim MURAP Program Coordinator and Office Assistant. She is currently a rising junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she majors in Global Studies and Spanish (Hispanic Literature and Culture). Her current academic interests are the medical humanities and how definitions of disease are shaped through cultural understandings. She plans on applying to be part of the MURAP 2016 Cohort and attend graduate school after graduating. Laurel Foote-Hudson is MURAP’S Writing Coordinator and assisted Jan Hendrickson-Smith in the GRE Workshop. Laurel received her BA in Spanish and Japanese Language and Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill with Honors and Distinction in 2007. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill whose research interests have been influenced by her exposure to Spanish and Japanese languages and literature, the interadaptations of various media, and Cyberculture. Within her popular and scholarly work, she utilizes a comparative approach to reflect an evolving exploration of Golden Age Spain and Edo Period Japan. These projects document the

shifts in the performance of the self and foreign “other” woven through contemporary popular media. Laurel’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Echoes of Honor”, employs a comparative approach toward the analysis of adaptations of honor in national plays from Spain and Japan. Marissa Garcia is MURAP’s Alumni Coordinator. She received her BA in Psychology and Spanish from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012. She is now pursuing her Master’s in Healthcare Administration at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and will graduate in May 2016. She has spent this summer interning with the Office of Rural Health and Community Care/North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services assisting with projects related to Small Rural Hospitals, Critical Access Hospitals and the N.C. Statewide Telepsychiatry Program (NC-STeP). Prior to graduate school she was the MURAP Program Coordinator and worked as a research assistant for the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. Carolyn Hardin is MURAP’s Communication Skills Workshop Coordinator. She is an instructor of Communication Studies and recent PhD at the UNC-Chapel Hill. Her teaching experience ranges from communication studies, to global studies to finance with a particular focus on reaching diverse student populations. Her research examines the intersections of culture, value, and finance. Her scholarly work has been published in the journals Cultural Studies, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism and Journal of Cultural Economy. She is currently working on a book project entitled Capturing Finance: Value, Context and Politics in Financialized Capitalism. Address: Department of Communication Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill. Kimberly Hardy (MURAP 2005) serves as MURAP’S Graduate Resident Assistant. She earned her BS in Communication Studies from Jackson State University in 2006, an MA in Education, Culture, Curriculum and Change from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009, and an MA in Higher Education Administration from Louisiana State University in 2012. She is currently a PhD student at Louisiana State University in Higher Education Administration. Her research centers on the spirituality of adolescents of color and education. Kimberly also serves as a high school educator with South Louisiana Corps of Teach for America.

Jan Hendrickson-Smith is the GRE Workshop Coordinator for both MURAP and the Carolina Population Center (CPC). She holds an MA in Economics from Pennsylvania State University where she served as the director of computing at the Population Research Institute and taught courses in statistical programming and introductory computing. As CPC Associate Director of Training Programs, she coordinates all administrative aspects of a population- and science-based interdisciplinary training program for undergraduate interns, predoctoral trainees, and postdoctoral scholars. Her current interests focus on the recruitment, retention, and mentoring of students and trainees from diverse populations, methods and models of interdisciplinary training, and instructional technology and design. Emma Kioko (MURAP 2014) is the MURAP Program Coordinator. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College cum laude where her thesis, "There is No God Like Ordinary People: The Case for Multiplicity in Bessie Head's Marui and A Question of Power," earned her honors and distinction in English. As a part of the 2014 MURAP cohort, she worked under the mentorship of Dr. James Coleman on her paper "A Haunting Present: The Ambiguity of Freedom in Toni Morrison's Beloved" which engaged with deconstruction and psychoanalysis to analyzed vexed notions of freedom for the African-American psyche. Her research interests include questions of temporalities and multiplicities in African and African-American literatures. She will begin applying to PhD programs in the fall. Rosa Perelmuter is Director of the MURAP program. She was born in Cuba, completed high school and college in Boston, and received her PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Michigan. As Professor of Spanish American Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, she writes and teaches about Colonial authors ranging from Columbus to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She is the author of two books on the latter, the acclaimed “Tenth Muse” of seventeenth-century Mexico: Noche intelectual: La oscuridad idiomática en el “Primero sueño” (7988) and Los límites de la femineidad en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Estrategias retóricas y recepción literaria (2004). Prof. Perelmuter’s many articles have appeared in national and international academic journals. After serving as a MURAP mentor for over a decade, she became its Interim Director in 2005, and has been Director of the program since September 2006. While she tries to keep up with her teaching, departmental and MURAP duties she is attempting to forge ahead with her research agenda, which includes a 31

book-length study of a celebrated sixteenth-century epic poem written in Chile, tentatively titled “The Rhetoric of Space in Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga’s La Araucana: Nature, Science and Ideology”; and a history-memoir of the Jewish Community of Cuba, "Jewish Cuba: Culture, Identity, and Community (1920-1960)." Samanthis Smalls (MURAP 2008) is MURAP’s Conference Coordinator. She completed her undergraduate degree in United States History at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. She will defend her dissertation, “Slaves, Jails, and the Question of Ownership” this Fall under the supervision of Prof. Laura Edwards in the department of history at Duke University. She has held fellowships through the Duke Graduate School, the Ford Foundation, the Bass Society, and the William Cromwell Foundation. Her research interests include the United States broadly with a focus on the late eighteenth-and nineteenth- century South and explores the intersections of government, power, and the discipline of black bodies with a particular focus on slavery, slave labor, and the law. Sam will begin a postdoc this fall at the University of ColoradoBoulder. Brionca Taylor (MURAP 2013) is MURAP's Graduate Assistant and Professional Development Workshop Coordinator. She earned her BA degrees in Sociology and African American Studies with a minor on Educational Studies from the University of Florida in 2014. She is currently a doctoral student in the department of Sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill where her research interests include the sociology of education, race and ethnicity, and gender studies. She was recently awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship to pursue her research project focusing on the experiences of African American adolescent girls in Advanced Placement classroom environments. Ben Wilson has been working with MURAP for fi ve summers preparing students for the Quantitative Reasoning section of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) for entrance into graduate school. Ben received his PhD in Mathematics from UNC this past May under the supervision of Dr. Karl Petersen. His research interests include ergodic theory and dynamical systems. In the fall, Ben will begin a position as math professor at Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland.

2015 MURAP Cohort

Not pictured: Oni Crawford

Jacqueline Alvarez Faculty Mentor: Prof. Ariana Vigil Jacqueline Alvarez is a dual major in Philosophy and Women Studies at California State University of Fresno with a specialization in Social Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy, and Feminist Phenomenology. The preponderance of her work focuses on Race, Gender, LGBT+ populations, and sexual assault. She is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, and the College of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities Honors Societies. Jacki is a McNair Scholar and has received the Hubert Phillips and Craig Edward Gatson scholarships for exceptional academic merit and community social action. Through her feminist scholarship and activism she has established gender-neutral restrooms, and resources for pregnant and parenting students at Fresno State. Recently, she has presented her research at the National Queer Theory Conference at Asheville, the Central Valley Symposium, and The National Women Studies Association Conference.

“The Hermeneutical Lacunae of Chicana Lesbian Fiction” This project utilizes a philosophical approach to contemporary Chicana lesbian novels and argues that Terri de la Peña, Emma Pérez and Sheila Ortiz expose epistemic injustices that Chicana lesbians face in everyday life. It provides definitions and context for these hermeneutical and testimonial injustices, including a theoretical framework created by Miranda Fricker and expanded upon by José Medina. Within the study is an overview of Chicana/o literature and manner in which this literature is a form of resistance that highlights a move towards the production of “epistemic friction”. This project argues that this friction is required to negate the inability to share and receive knowledge and also explains how each novel highlights hermeneutical gaps that are revealed when Chicanas talk about la familia, lesbian sex, desire, or body. This gap prevents Chicana lesbian voices from being clearly heard, but by applying a philosophical approach to this literature, these novels can function as calls to action and expose the oppression faced by Chicanas.

Janelle Billingsley Faculty Mentor: Prof. Enrique Neblett Janelle Torri Billingsley is a rising senior majoring in Psychology at North Carolina Central University. Utilizing a strength-based approach, she is interested in studying the development of student motivation, self-efficacy, and identity in relation to the academic achievement of African American youth. This past summer, Janelle participated in the Charlotte Research Scholars Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as an undergraduate research assistant in the Community Psychology lab under the direction of Drs. James Cook and Ryan Kilmer. Currently, she is a research fellow for the Center for Translational Health Equality Research (CTHER) at North Carolina Central University, where she is exploring issues that impact health disparities. Following graduation, Janelle plans to pursue a doctoral degree in educational psychology in order to continue to expand upon the research links she has identified between racial discrimination and educational outcomes.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Racial Discrimination and Academic Outcomes: Analyzing the Role of Social Support on the Adjustment of African Americans at Predominantly White Universitiesâ&#x20AC;? Prior research suggests a relationship between racial discrimination and poorer educational outcomes such as academic performance and engagement. This study uses three waves of data to examine the role social support may play in the relationship between racial discrimination and academic outcomes. Within this study, one-hundred and thirty African American students attending a predominantly White university completed self-report measures of racial discrimination frequency and bother, perceptions of social support, grade point average, participation in academic and extracurricular activities, and overall and academic engagement. Ultimately, this study notes that social support moderated, or influenced, the association between racial discrimination and academic outcomes, such that for individuals with low social support, racial discrimination was associated with increased participation in academic activities. Social support did not mediate, or explain, the association between racial discrimination and academic outcomes. These results suggest that African American studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; levels of social support are important to consider in understanding the impact of racial discrimination on their academic well-being. 36

Keevin Brown Faculty Mentor: Prof. Charlene Regester Keevin Brown is a City College of New York senior majoring in Black Studies. He is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow as well as a Chi Alpha Epsilon National Honor Society member. Keevin's research interests include myriad topics such as Black Masculinity, Hip Hop culture, socio-economic mobility, and Black Nationalism. He hopes that his research this summer, which critiques how socio-economic stratification and transcendence is impacted by ideals such as the American Dream, will show the effect of hip hop lyrics on Black and Latino males from the inner city.

“‘I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven’: How Kanye West Conceptualizes Mobility Through His Lyrics” This study investigates the meaning of “getting ahead” in Kanye West’s albums. Given his middle-class background and his positionality as a Black man who grew up in inner-city Chicago, his crafting of lyrics around socioeconomic stratification may speak to broader issues centered on race, class, education, and consumerism among the urban Black male’s pursuit of the American Dream. This study centers on lyrics from Kanye's first three albums: College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation in order to determine how his conceptions of mobility shift over time. The albums in particular most prominently espouse and confront the tropes of socioeconomic mobility. Thematically they constitute a trilogy that uses the concept of school as a metaphor for socioeconomic mobility, while collectively they reflect the internalization of six themes: Introspection, Racism, Socioeconomic Mobility, Spatial/ geographical Mobility, Consumerism and Agency. In addition, they link economic stratification to political and ideological factors that have an impact on what urban Black males think is “achievable.”

Akiera Charles Faculty Mentor: Prof. Kennetta Perry Akiera Xavina Charles is a rising junior concentrating in Black Feminist Thought and Queer Theories at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies. A selfdescribed nouveau Eco-womanist, Akiera imagines the great horizons academia has in store for her as she figures out ways to merge her interest of Black Queer theory with aspects of Black Studies and Black Liberation Politics and Feminist Critique. Her research plan, developed while taking a feminist theory course at Spelman last spring, is to de contextualize how White heteropatriarchy upholds systems of agency in erasing, commodifying and appropriating identities within Black liberation discourse. In this way, she hopes to shed light on the various biases found within academia’s and pop culture’s discourse around Black Studies and Black liberation movements. After MURAP, because social activism is an important part of her life, Akiera intends to continue her involvement with NYU’s LGBTQ center, the Audre Lorde Project and the Black Women Blue Print organization. “'Theft' is the Name: The Re-appropriation of the #BlackLivesMatter at Colleges/Universities” This project brings attention to the re-appropriation of the Black Lives Matter label on public event flyers at various colleges and universities across the nation by reading the advertisement of these events through Garza’s framework of “inclusivity.” In this context, inclusivity refers to the framework which calls attention to the need “to connect struggles across race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality and disability.” Following this method, the project categorizes multiple flyers into three groups: male-centered “intra-racial” flyers, male-centered “inter-ethnic” flyers and “inclusive” flyers. After performing a visual and linguistic analysis, the paper argues for a need to reevaluate the hetero-patriarchal narratives often lauded in the flyers. The advertisements often hyper-visualize Black male victims while simultaneously making invisible the death of Black Trans women. This research demonstrates that more elite fouryear institutions such as New York University follow the Black Lives Matter framework of “inclusivity,” while smaller colleges such as LaGuardia Community College often reproduce male-centered flyers. Studies such as this demonstrate the importance of re-examining hetero-patriarchy in the academy. 38

Oni Crawford Faculty Mentor: Prof. James Coleman Oni Crawford is a rising senior majoring in English at North Carolina A&T State University. Though her major’s concentration is Professional English, her passion lies in Black Feminist Critical Theory and Literature. At the 2015 UNC System Summit--Innovation and Change: Thriving in the 21st Century, she presented her research which centered on the use of Black Feminist and Critical Race Theory in Transformative Undergraduate Research Mentorship. Oni’s current research focuses on the ethnography of Black motherhood, self-literacy, and generational identity politics. Dedicated to the narratives of Black women in and out of academic spaces, Oni serves as the President of 100 Collegiate Women of NC A&T as well as the Vice-President of the Theta Xi Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society. Upon graduation, Oni will pursue her interests in doctoral programs focusing on African – American or Women’s and Gender Studies.

“Shattering Space and Era: Transcendence and Literary Activism in Toni Morrison” This study argues that the literature of Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and God Help the Child, merges authorship and black feminist activism. This project argues that Morrison exposes the sexual exploitation and manipulation of Black women’s identities by primarily engaging with what she called Literary Archaeology. In this process, Morrison first references her imagination before highlighting the transformation of historical discourse. Here, the personal yet again becomes political, and her work solidifies how Black women’s identity formation exemplifies nuance and fluidity. Included in the analysis of the text is an extensive consideration of Moya Bailey’s “misogynoir” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality in a “post-black feminist” era. As Morrison’s authorship rewrites and validates black women’s narratives, this research highlights the ways in which her novels are continually in conversation with young black feminist scholars and ideologies.

Ashley Crooks-Allen Faculty Mentor: Prof. Jennifer Ho Ashley Crooks-Allen is a senior at Emory University majoring in English and Creative Writing and minoring in Sociology. Ashley is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. They use memoir and autobiography in order to examine the effects of the "racial ascription process" on AfroCaribbean immigrants who have arrived in the United States since 1965. Building upon this research interest is Ashley's current project which utilizes Caribbean literature to explore pre-immigration ideas of race; specifically, Ashley examines the effects of colorism among women in Jamaica within Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s True History of Paradise. Upon graduating in December 2015, Ashley intends to continue their research in Caribbean Studies while applying to PhD programs in the fall of 2015.

“‘Too Much History’: Jamaica’s Inhabitation of Jean in The True History of Paradise” In The True History of Paradise, Margaret Cezair-Thompson has crafted a novel that is as much about Jamaica as it is about Jean, the assumed protagonist. This project argues that Jean personifies Jamaica and provides a new perspective on Cezair-Thompson’s often overlooked first novel. Jean’s state of stagnation throughout the novel raises questions about her narratological function and readers may wonder why Jean remains passive throughout the novel despite the narrator focusing on her. She is a vessel for the narratives of her ancestors and this project argues that she contains voices that span the entirety of Jamaica’s history. Yet, she does not seem to have room to express many of her own decisions. Jamaica likewise remains in a constant state of internal turmoil throughout the novel. The motto of independent Jamaica is “out of many, one people,” and Jean is the embodiment of this motto. She makes it possible for the narratives of those who have come before her to be preserved and her escape from Jamaica is not only an act of self-preservation but the preservation of Jamaica that politicians and “gunmen” are destroying. Jean has the true history of paradise inside of her.

Delonte Egwuatu Faculty Mentor: Prof. Anna Agbe-Davies Delonte Egwuatu is a native of Washington, D.C. and a rising senior at Morehouse College where he majors in Sociology. His research interests examine how African Americans acquire social and cultural capital through study abroad programs and how this experience translates into greater economic capital in their professional careers. For the past two years, Delonte has served as the Vice President of the Morehouse Student Educators Club. He has recently presented several papers based on his research interest in study abroad programs. The first titled “Reality, Identity, and the Dream of Argentina: The Presence of Neo-realism in Cama Adentro” was presented at the XV Congreso International de Literatura Hispánica in Antigua, Guatemala. The second, “Being Black Beyond Borders: Two Distinct Experiences in the Same Host City”, was presented at the Creating Connections Conference at Georgia State University. He continues to assist with the processing of travel visas and web/content design for the University Consortium for Liberia at the Consulate General of the Republic of Liberia. “Moving from Study Abroad to Education Abroad: African American Undergraduate Students Responses to Study Abroad” Study abroad programs offered by many institutions of higher education serve as tools to further the goals of education in a non-traditional setting. As the world becomes increasingly connected, colleges and universities also see study abroad as a means to ready students for the global workforce. This paper explores how African American participants of study abroad programs gain new symbols or abilities that have profound effects on their expression of their racial identities. This project considers how African Americans navigate foreign spaces using Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of cultural capital, Dr. Prudence L. Carter’s notion of dominant and non-dominant culture, and Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis in order to contextualize the unique challenges facing these students in an era of racial turmoil.

Bright Gyamfi Faculty Mentor: Prof. Kennetta Perry Bright Gyamfi is a rising senior majoring in History and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Bright’s research at his home institution, under the guidance of Prof. Paul Ocobock, explores the development of the Ghanaian history curriculum. He has conducted archival research in both Ghana and England, and his project has received funding from a number of on-campus grants, including Experiencing the World Research grant, UROP Comprehensive Summer Grant, Balfour Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and the Nanovic Institute Fellowship. As a Gilman Scholar, Bright has also received research funds from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In early 2015, he presented at Notre Dame’s Undergraduate History Research Conference and was honored with the Kellogg/Kroc Research Grant to continue his research in Trinidad and Tobago to study the works of George Padmore. Upon graduation, Bright hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in African History.

“Teaching African History through the Lion’s Perspective: An Analysis of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Institute of African Studies” This project examines the significant roles educational institutions such as the Institute of African Studies have played in our understanding of decolonization, African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and post-colonial nation building. It posits that the liberation of Ghana in 1957 enabled Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, to advance his agenda for Pan-Africanism and African nationalism through higher education, thus allowing Africans to write their own history. This claim rests, first, on an analysis of Nkrumah’s political and educational experiences abroad between 1935 and 1947, and second, on an evaluation of his establishment in 1961 of the Institute of African Studies, a semiautonomous Institute within the University of Ghana. The study highlights how the history curriculum has had an impact on Ghanaian citizens’ understanding of their nation, citizenship, cultural norms, and political rights, and aims to contribute to the literature on higher education, Ghanaian nationalism, and Pan-Africanism. Overall, this research project approaches the development of higher education through new and unexplored avenues and adds to literature on the histories of education and national development in Ghana and the ways in which these influence Ghanaians’ impressions of their own history. 42

Javan Linney Faculty Mentor: Prof. Enrique Neblett Javan Michael Linney is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke majoring in Psychology and planning on entering the field of clinical psychology. His research interests center on the psychological effects of racial socialization on African Americans. Javan has served as a research assistant for the business, psychology, and sociology departments at UNCP . He has presented his findings at events such as Pembroke’s Undergraduate Research and Creativity (PURC) and A&T’s entrepreneurship summit. He has served as an academic mentor, orientation leader, Auburn University’s Diversity Campus Experience program (DiCE), and the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at his school. Upon graduation, he hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in clinical psychology.

“Racial Discrimination and Paranoid Ideation: The Role of Skin Tone and Identity” This study uses three waves of data to examine the influence of patterns of racial identity and skin tone on the association between racial discrimination and paranoia. One hundred and twenty one African American college students attending a predominantly white institution in the southeastern United States completed measures on racial discrimination, skin tone, racial identity, and paranoia. Using latent profile analysis, this study identified two patterns of racial identity and skin tone. The first pattern was categorized by medium skin tone, high private regard, low public regard, and high centrality. The second pattern was categorized by medium skin tone, low private regard, moderate public regard, and moderate centrality. These patterns did not influence the association between racial discrimination and paranoia. However, for individuals with high racial centrality racial discrimination was associated with increases in paranoia. Together, these findings suggest that racial identity is an important factor in the association between racial discrimination and paranoia.

Vicenta Lopez-Mateo Faculty Mentor: Prof. Ariana Vigil Vicenta Lopez Mateo is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in Sociology and Hispanic Literature and Culture. Her experience growing up in Morganton, North Carolina as a Maya woman from Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango, Guatemala has inspired her dedication to work within Hispanic and Mayan communities. Actively involved with community engagement through internships at the Samaritan Clinic in Morganton, and interpreting for Q’anjob’al and Spanish speakers, she finds time to write for Mezcla, a student organization at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her current research documents the long-term impact of the Case Farm Incident which occurred in Morganton in the 1990s and examines the consequences of this protest which spurred a human rights movement. Ultimately, she hopes her research will foster a better understanding of the Maya community and initiate a dialogue about the cultural and political importance of this community to North Carolina.

“Mayan Workers Across International Borders: Community and Family as a Defense Against Employer Exploitation” This study examines the impact of the Case Farm incident that occurred in Morganton, NC in the 1990s. This incident was the result of unjust work situations—the lack of bathroom breaks, poor working conditions, unpaid hours, and inadequate pay led to uneasiness which culminated in a protest by Maya workers in May of 1993 at Case Farms. This project utilizes Leon Fink’s qualitative research recorded in his book The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (8669). While his text addresses the dynamics of the Case Farm incident, this study explores the contemporary Maya perception of the incident through interviews conducted with current and former workers. This project provides current insight into the Mayan perception of the incident and initiates a dialogue about the cultural and social importance of the Mayas within North Carolina society.

Laurel Meyer Faculty Mentor: Prof. Mai Thi Nguygen Laurel Meyer is a rising senior at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She is a developmental and personality psychology major with concentrations in English and queer studies. Since her sophomore year, Laurel has worked as a tutor in her library’s Peer Writing Center, where she meets individually with students to guide them in the development of their writing and speaking skills. In the greater Lewiston community, Laurel volunteers for the Boys’ Aspirations Program, a workshop in which elementary and middle school students consider the importance of education and social justice to their lives. While Laurel finds working with younger students greatly rewarding, her current research interests focus on gerontology, and in particular how social environments impact successful aging. In a comparative case study of cohousing communities in Denmark, where this model originated, and the U.S., Laurel hopes to explore ways to increase the racial, ethnic, economic, and age-based diversity of domestic cohousing communities. She is looking forward to continuing a similar line of research for her honor’s psychology thesis in the fall.

“Cohousing as a Model for Affordable Housing: People Versus Place in Community Connection” The term Cohousing describes an intentional community designed to create a collaborative lifestyle and foster a strong sense of community. Past research indicates that these communities provide strong social support for single-mothers, the elderly, and lead to enhanced pro-social behavior and well-being. The main criticism of cohousing, however, is a lack of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity. While there is a growing body of literature on “diversifying” such communities, this study seeks to examine the experiences of the non-dominant populations already living in cohousing. Do residents from diverse backgrounds experience the positive associations linked with cohousing that have been reported among the largely white, upper-middle class, and highly educated majority? These benefits include connection to community (people and place), participation in cohousing activities, political engagement, mental and physical health, and life satisfaction. This study compares these experiences across several dimensions of diversity, including age, race, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, gender, sexual orientation, partnership status, and religion. It hypothesizes that dominant and minority groups experience similar benefits from living in Cohousing. 45

James Mite Faculty Mentor: Prof. Charlene Regester James Mite is a rising senior at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He is majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and has pursued writing in various fields, including poetry, fiction, and screenwriting. Last summer, he was awarded a grant to conduct an independent study as a member of the University of St. Thomas Excel! Research Scholars Program, a former McNair Scholars Program. The project focused on filmmaker Tyler Perry’s representation of black masculinity in the film Madea’s Family Reunion (6446). James presented his research at the 6nd Annual Excel! Research Scholars Symposium and the 67rd Annual Ronald E. McNair Research Conference and Graduate Fair in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to his work with masculinity, James’ research interests include African American history, popular culture, and literature. After graduation, James plans to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English or African American Studies.

“Kendrick Lamar: The New Gold Standard for Hip-Hop?” Scholars argued that the gangster, thug, and pimp tropes have dominated mainstream hip-hop music since the early 1990’s and the overuse of these identities in rap is problematic because it distorts public perceptions of urban Black and Latino youth. Award winning rap artist Kendrick Lamar denounces these negative representations and subsequently symbolizes the new gold standard of authenticity in hip -hop. Mainstream media outlets have attempted to analyze and decode Lamar’s latest album To Pimp A Butterfly (2015), however, currently there is a lack of substantial scholarly research investigating the artist’s most recent album. This study integrates hip-hop journalism and scholarship to expand the discussion of Lamar’s music, synthesizing style, and character. It argues that Kendrick Lamar’s commercial success is a result of an authentic representation of self, honest storytelling, and multifaceted autobiographical narrations. Moreover, through the lens of Kendrick Lamar, this study juxtaposes “realness” to “trueness,” a reconstructed definition of authenticity in rap music.

Samuel Ortiz Faculty Mentor: Prof. Anna Agbe-Davies Samuel Ortiz is pursuing a BA in History with a minor in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Florida. He is a McNair Scholar with an interest in comparative history. His research contextualizes and analyzes various historical sources in order to develop alternative narratives about the engendered survival of Native American/Indian women. His previous work has argued that while Pocahontas, Sacajawea, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, and Doña Antonia were either expected or forced to marry male colonizers, they managed to refuse domination by these men and maintain their autonomy by preserving their own cultural identities. This summer, Samuel will utilize this comparative approach in order to explore Floridian slave owner Zephaniah Kingsley’s pro-slavery ideology. Upon graduation, Samuel aspires to be a historian and a digital archivist who will advocate for the digital preservation of historical documents.

“The Inconvenience of the Institution of Slavery: Comparative History of Zephaniah Kingsley and Thomas Jefferson's Philosophy on the Morality of Slavery” The foundation of this project rests on the analysis of the philosophical writings of two plantation owners, Zephaniah Kingsley and Thomas Jefferson, during the antebellum period. Zephaniah Kingsley was a proslavery advocate who married an enslaved woman, legally recognized their children and emancipated his family during his lifetime. This project examines the way the respective social environments of these plantation owners influenced their justification for the enslavement of black people and the institution of slavery. This study utilizes Racial Formation theories developed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in order to explore this comparison between slave owners, and offer a nuanced view of co-existing slavery institutions in the South.

Jessica Rodriguez Faculty Mentor: Prof. William Darity Jessica Rodriguez is an English major at CUNY Queens College. She is an alumna of the CUNY Pipeline Research Fellowship. She presented her research, entitled “The Rhetoric of Resistance: Identity as Liberation,” at the Annual Pipeline Conference in New York. This work utilized Gandhi’s Non-Violent Resistance literature to determine the role of identity in solidarity by tracing the origins and effects of collective cohesion in the triumphs of mass social movement. Her current research centers on the concept of identity as a product of conflict. She is invested in exploring the intersections of collectivity, culture and language as manifested in literature.

“Searching for the Sun: An Afrofuturist Reading of Paul Beatty's Slumberland” Exhibiting intensely post-modern characteristics and a deep entrenchment in the audiophile, DJ subcultures of the later twentieth century, Paul Beatty's Slumberland has a depth and complexity that has not been considered satisfactorily in the existing literary criticism on the novel. The greatest consideration has been devoted to discussions of the AfroGerman subject and the allegorical qualities that provide limited understanding of the text’s treatment of blackness as both a limiting and limitless quality. This project seeks to identify the literary patterns consistent with Afrofuturist themes that make Slumberland an honorary science fiction novel. By reformulating our understanding of Slumberland as a realization of Afrofuturist ideals, culture can be perceived not only as a marker of racial identity but as a supplement for collective and intraracial prosperity, ultimately expanding the reach and application of Afrofuturism beyond traditional, science fiction tropes.

Myles Santifer Faculty Mentor: Prof. Reginald Hildebrand Myles Santifer is a rising senior majoring in African American Studies at UC Berkeley and hails from Inglewood, CA. As a scholar in the Clark Institute for Engaged scholars and the Chair for the Black Student Union, he seeks to shape a campus environment that nurtures black identity and self-determination. Myles has presented at the National Council of Black Studies and the St. Clair Drake Symposium on the manner in which black cultural life offers hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forms of resistance in American society. With the latest release of a musical project entitled “Black Power and Flowers” Myles, as a hip-hop artist, uses this art form to further explore constructions of black divinity and self-conceptualization.

“Constructing the Beautiful Negro in the Soul-world” Saidiya Hartman, in her work ‘Lose Your Mother (2008), challenges romantic conceptualizations of Africa as a distant home for Black people. By addressing the African public ceremonies that targeted American Blacks, Hartman exposes this nonsensical longing for home. This study explores how these people define home, during a period in which Black people still operate as the marginal “other” within the landscape of African identities. This project argues that Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement produced art predicated on championing racial pride and allegiance in order to overtly speak out against white society. However, this project notes that the continued relevance of this approach is called into question by contemporary Black visual artists like Paul Anthony Smith, Jacolby Satterwhite, Glenn Ligon, and Xaviera Simmons who, in utilizing post-black approaches to art, decenter racial conversations by highlighting and deconstructing them through their art. Therefore, by examining the multi/interdisciplinary forms of aesthetics employed by these artists, this study uncovers how post-black sensibility operates within the contemporary movement. More importantly, this project seeks to understand how conceptions of “home” are constructed for each artists’ cultural and self-identity via their visual artistic practice. 49

Christiana Taylor Faculty Mentor: Prof. Isaac Unah Christiana R. Taylor is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in Political Science and Sociology. Previously, she has conducted research on race and federal death row populations by utilizing Dr. Isaac Unah’s process theory of capital punishment. To inform her research interests, Christiana has volunteered with organizations such as the Community Math Academy and the Tarheel Outreach Program. She is currently a Technology Without Borders mentor and a Program Assistant for The Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling. She is also a member of Alpha Kappa Delta, the international sociology honor society, and has received the Hayden B. Renwick Award for Academic Excellence every semester she has attended UNC. Upon completion of her undergraduate studies, Christiana hopes to obtain her doctorate in Sociology in order to disseminate knowledge for underserved populations. “Mens Rea: An Analysis of Motive and the Likelihood of the Death Penalty” Four elements must be present in order for an action to be considered a crime. One of these elements, mens rea, is the essential mental condition of the defendant at the time of the crime. In particular, it speaks to the defendant’s motive for committing a crime. Motive is one of the many factors that contribute to juror’s decision making in the sentencing phase of criminal trials. This project seeks to understand the role of defendants’ motives in the sentencing phase of death penalty cases. In addition, it examines the way that race and motives interact to inform the sentencing behavior of capital juries in North Carolina. Relying on data from the North Carolina Death Penalty Project assembled by Professors Isaac Unah and Jack Boger, this study estimated and tracked several logistic regression models where the dependent variable is the jury’s sentencing decision. This project finds that defendants who kill based on financial motive or rage are most likely to receive the death penalty. Adding race into this context, the analysis then shows that when black defendants murder white victims, several more motives including prior felony conviction and body mistreatment become statistically significant in explaining death-sentencing decisions compared to when a white defendant kills a white victim. 50

Christopher Viera Faculty Mentor: Prof. Prof. Isaac Unah Christopher Viera is a rising senior at St. Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s University where he is majoring in sociology. His research interests include race, ethnicity, and incarceration. Christopher is also a member of the National Honor Society of Leadership. To further pursue his interests in the relationships between race and mass incarceration, Christopher will be applying to doctoral programs in sociology later this year. In the future, he plans to become a professor and assist students of color in hopes of eventually eliminating the racial disparity that continues to exist within academia.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Beyond Scared Straight: Explaining the Sources of Prison Violence in the USâ&#x20AC;? Incarcerated populations are isolated from the rest of society and their safety and wellbeing is often overlooked and forgotten. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that lead to prevalence of prison violence in the U.S. What are the nature and sources of prison violence in the United States? What is the distribution of violent incidents between private and public prisons? Examining sources of prison violence is important because the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and these incidents of violence speaks to issues of safety and wellbeing of prisoners and guards. This study uses institutional capacity for control as a theoretical framework to understand how the size and composition of inmate population, prison security level, and prison environment function as sources of prison violence. Using data from the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities (ICPSR # 24642), this project conducts a regression analysis in order to examine the relationship between sources of prison violence and inmate misconduct. Results show that administrative segregation, the presence of female security staff, and the number of black prisoners are all factors that lead to prison violence. Prison overcrowding and single-sex prisons reduce prison violence. The results also show that private prisons have fewer incidents of violence than public prisons. 51

Katie Warczak Faculty Mentor: Prof. James Coleman Katie Warczak is a rising senior majoring in English and History at Ripon College. Her research interests revolve around early-twentieth century modernist, First World War, and black literature and she uses various critical lenses, including feminism, postcolonial and race studies, and new historicism to explore this literature. Her recent research has focused specifically on the revision of modernist texts such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” (1926) and how post-publication changes have altered scholarly and popular understandings of these revised works. This research took place independently at Ripon College during the spring of 2014 as well as during her time as a junior research fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago in late 2014. She has presented this work in several professional venues, including a Newberry Library Colloquium and the Sigma Tau Delta 2015 International Convention. “‘I can’t stand this bondage you got me in’: The Racial Protest of Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee” Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), is a text scholars have devoted minimal attention to since Hurston’s recovery in the 1970s. This dearth of attention is largely due to the fact that the novel tells the story of a white woman, Arvay Henson’s, rise to the middle class through marriage and contains none of Hurston’s traditional black heroes. In spite of Arvay’s overt whiteness though, she has symbolic ties to blackness, making her an allegory for black suffering and Seraph a racial protest novel. Arvay’s symbolic blackness reveals itself through her figurative slave status and the fear-driven psyche she shares with Bigger Thomas, the black protagonist of one of America’s most famous protest novels, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Arvay’s symbolic blackness is important because this trait makes her, and her suffering, relatable to Hurston’s primarily white audience. Unfortunately, Seraph’s protest and Arvay’s symbolic blackness have been understudied because of traditional black feminist assumptions about the novel’s absolute whiteness and Hurston’s inability to be put in conversation with Wright. As a result, this paper not only re-evaluates Seraph within a racial protest paradigm, but calls for a larger re-examination of Hurston as well as the white-life genre to break down the traditional barriers hindering alternative interpretations of Hurston’s work as well as that of other white-life authors. 52

Jasmine White Faculty Mentor: Reginald Hildebrand Jasmine White is a senior majoring in History at Tennessee State University. Her research interest is centered on antebellum period enslaved women. As a Research Assistant with The Massey Chair of Excellence, Jasmine expanded her research by examining the history of Frierson Chapel, an African-American church founded in 1865. She also presented her research in a paper titled “Slave Patrols and their Influence on Racial Profiling and Police Brutality” at the 2015 African Conference and won best student paper. She has held an appointment as a Public History Intern at the Tennessee State Library and Archives where she completed an inventory of the collection of a post-emancipation plantation family. Jasmine was recently inducted into the History Honors Fraternity Phi Alpha Theta and is a member of the Southern Historical Association.

“The Enslaved Mother: Examining Marriage and Motherhood among Enslaved Women in Georgia” Enslaved mothers in the antebellum were denied the right to choose when, how, and with whom, conception occurred. These women were viewed as breeders and suppliers for more enslaved bodies on the plantation, with no consideration given to their role as a mother and wife, despite the manner in which these roles were important to the women as individuals. Slavery, as an establishment, reduced motherhood to the physical act of creating a human being and negated the complex relationship that the experience of motherhood brings. This paper seeks to understand how the role of motherhood and womanhood was lived and understood by enslaved women on the many Georgia plantations in the southern portion of the United States during the antebellum period. The foundation of this research on womanhood and motherhood among enslaved women relies heavily on the investigation of WPA Slave Narratives from the state of Georgia. This research seeks to determine the common themes of motherhood as evidenced in the Georgia WPA Slave Narratives, with the intention of investigating this topic as a way to provide a study that conceptualizes the lives of enslaved women as mothers. The goal of this project is to develop an understanding of what motherhood would have been like for a woman who did not have ownership of her body, her spouse (or the right to choose one), and her children. 53

Liann Yamashita Faculty Mentor: Prof. Mai Thi Nguygen Liann Yamashita is a senior Sociology major at Pacific University. She is passionate about understanding the ways in which people form and negotiate their identities—a topic inspired by her own familial history. The American-born daughter to a South Korean immigrant mother, Liann looks forward to connecting with groups of marginalized and contradictory origins (i.e. 1.5 generation citizens). In doing so she hopes to foster and investigate narratives that acknowledge this population’s highly nuanced experiences. Alongside one of her Pacific University professors, Liann conducted research on men’s formation of their gender identities. She explored the performance of masculinity via the “Bro Code,” and presented these findings at the 2015 Pacific Sociological Association Conference. She is now shifting her attention towards identity development in racial and ethnic minorities.

“Reap What You Sow: Evaluating HOPE VI's Approaches to Urban Poverty” HOPE VI, a federal housing revitalization project, focuses on remedying the issue of urban poverty by utilizing a two-pronged approach: 1) reconstruct dilapidated urban ghettos to improve working class families’ living conditions and 2) equip communities with the (educational, career) skills to achieve upward mobility. Despite the dual nature of HOPE VI’s goals, a one-sided redevelopment has occurred. While the architectural changes in the community have gone to plan, its socioeconomic progression has fallen short of expectations. Using the case of Boulevard Homes as a lens of examination, this project thus attempts to address barriers to prosperity unrealized by HOPE VI. Findings derived from analyses of interviews conducted with Boulevard Homes case managers, suggest that HOPE VI’s cultural foundations prompt impractical and unsympathetic demands upon the populations it serves. The program impresses white, capitalist middle-class ideas of ideologies upon primarily black families who have long suffered the tolls of intergenerational poverty. The discrepancies between these groups’ conceptualizations of “success” leave a void to be filled: a gap between changes HOPE VI wants to sow and the improvements that community members need to reap. 54

Acknowledgements MURAP expresses its gratitude to the following staff members and individuals for their assistance with the 2015 Conference and for their continued support of the program (in alphabetical order): Jen Boehm, Assistant Writing Coordinator Yanexy Cardona, Interim Program Coordinator and Office Assistant Prof. William "Sandy" Darity Provost James W. Dean, Jr. Mireille Djenno, Librarian, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Laurel Foote-Hudson, Writing Coordinator and GRE Verbal Assistant Carolyn Hardin, Communication Skills Workshop Instructor Kimberly Hardy, Resident Graduate Assistant Jan Hendrickson-Smith, GRE Workshop Director Javier Jaimes-Ayala, Facilities Manager, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Dr. Joseph Jordan, Director, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Emma Kioko, Program Coordinator Amy King, Business Liaison Prof. Federico Luisetti, Chair, Romance Studies Department Geeta Menon, Communications Manager Gregg Moore, Librarian, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Prof. Rosa Perelmuter, Director, MURAP Dr. Karla Slocum, Director, Institute of African American Research Samanthis Smalls, Conference Coordinator Brionca Taylor, Graduate Assistant Barbara Williams, Administrative Manager, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Videography by Peter Goswick Catering by The Root Cellar, Sweet Janeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bakery, Mediterranean Deli, and Mama Dipâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Travel Arrangements by Mayra Wagner, Maupin Travel Contact Information: MURAP c/o IAAR UNC-Chapel Hill, Sonja Haynes Stone Center #305. CB #3393 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3393 (919)962-6811; fax: (919)843-9407 Website: http://murap.unc.edu/