MURAP 2014 Conference Booklet by Geeta

20th Annual Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program Academic Conference

“Structural Racism in the United States: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” Thursday July 24th & Friday July 25th, 2014 Hitchcock M ultipurpose Room 101 Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 150 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599

Table of Contents

MURAP Program History………………………………..………….3 MURAP Alumni Summary Statistics……………………………………………………...…………….4 Conference Schedule…………………………………………………..5 Conference Speakers’ Biographies……………………………….............................................9 Mentors’ Biographies………………............................................17 MURAP Staff Biographies………………………………………...24 MURAP Fellows’ Biographies & Abstracts…………………………………............................................30 Acknowledgements………………….............................................53

Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program History This year marks the 20th anniversary of the MURAP Academic Conference and the 25th anniversary of the MURAP program. The mission of The Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 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. Prof. 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 Andrew W. 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” in 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://www.murap.unc.edu.

MURAP Alumni Summary Statistics (as of June 2014)

Total number of MURAP Alumni (1989-‐2013) Alumni who enrolled in graduate and professional school Alumni holding positions in Academia Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the PhD • Alumni who have earned a doctorate • Doctorates in progress Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the Master’s Degree • Master’s degrees earned • Master’s degrees in progress

Number Percent of Total 426* 100% 247

59%

14%

143

34%

17%

71 104

17% 25%

94 10

22% 2%

*NOTE that although the total number of MURAP alumni is 426, the percentages that follow are based on the 419 who have received their bachelor’s degrees

Conference Schedule

Thursday July 24, 2014 8:00-‐9:00am: Breakfast 9:00-‐10:00am: Welcome: Carol Tresolini, Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives, UNC-‐Chapel Hill Opening Remarks: Prof. Rosa Perelmuter, Director, Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program Introduction of the MURAP 2014 cohort of students, mentors, and staff 10:00-‐11:00am Keynote Address: Prof. Cheryl Harris Rosalinde & Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law “De-‐racing Class/(E)racing Race: Colorblindness' New Clothes" 11:00-‐11:15am Break 11:15-‐1:00pm A Sampling of MURAP Students’ Research Moderator: Shelby Eden Dawkins-‐Law (MURAP 2010), UNC-‐Chapel Hill Samuel Alexander Mestizo, University of California, Santa Cruz “'Nos están asesinando’ (‘They are murdering us’): The Salvadoran Queer Community Since the 2009 Bloody June Murders” Ajene Robinson-‐Burris, UNC-‐Chapel Hill "Breaking Biocolonialism: The Importance of Informed Consent and Community Engagement with Indigenous Peoples in Genomic Research" Ashley Adams, North Carolina Central University “The Battle for a Fair Education in Durham, North Carolina: Blue v. Durham Public Schools, 1951” 1:00-‐2:00pm: Lunch

2:00pm-‐3:45pm

Scholar Panel I: Walking Into a Minefield: Uncovering Racist Policies and Moderator: Prof. Ariana Vigil, UNC-‐Chapel Hill

Prof. Karla Slocum, UNC-‐Chapel Hill "Prisons and the Promised Land: Race-‐based Policies, State Institutions and the Formation and Transformation of America’s Black Towns" Prof. Ashley Lucas, University of Michigan “Bridging the Divide: The Prison Creative Arts Project and Community Formation Amongst College Students and Prisoners” Prof. Laura López-‐Sanders, UNC-‐Chapel Hill "Inequalities in Unauthorized Latina/o Immigrant Health Care" Prof. Enrique Neblett, UNC-‐Chapel Hill "From Structural Racism to Health Inequity: Another Dream Deferred?" 4:45pm:

Concluding Remarks: Prof. Rosa Perelmuter

Friday July 25th, 2014 8:00-‐9:00am Breakfast 9:00-‐9:15am Welcome: James Dean, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UNC-‐Chapel Hill 9:15-‐10:15am Keynote II: Prof. Eduardo Bonilla-‐Silva Professor and Chair, Sociology Department, Duke University "'Now You See It, Now You Don't': Racism and Prejudice in Post-‐Racial America" 10:15-‐10:45am A Sampling of Duke University’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows’ Research Destiny Hemphill, Duke University "Investigating a Politics of Melancholia in Chicana Feminist Literature" 10:45-‐11:00am Break

11:00-‐12:00pm

12:00-‐1:00pm 1:00-‐3:45pm

Featured Presentation: Prof. Angel Harris, Duke University "Proportions, Distributions, and Probability: A Framework for Understanding Inequality" Lunch Scholar Panel II: Exposing the Status Quo: Racism in Media and Higher Education Moderator: Prof. Tim McMillan, UNC-‐Chapel Hill

Prof. Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University "Shifting the Frame: Race, Gender and the State of Independent Black Media" Prof. Philip Christman, University of Michigan "'It Strikes a Blank Wall': How to Suppress Black Experimental Writing" Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emory University "Higher Education Access and Stratification: For-‐ Profit Colleges, MOOCs, Academic Capitalism and Post-‐Racial Delusions" Prof. Dana Thompson Dorsey, UNC-‐Chapel Hill “Interest Convergence, Interest Divergence, and Imperialistic Reclamation (C-‐D-‐R): White Privilege and Power in Education” 3:45-‐4:00pm 4:00-‐5:30pm

5:30pm

Break MURAP Alumni Panel Moderator: Andrew Martínez (MURAP 2009) University of California, Los Angeles Folashade Alao (MURAP 2000), University of South Carolina Brandon Winford (MURAP 2004), University of Tennessee – Knoxville Tressie McMillan Cottom (MURAP 2009), Emory University Julian Rucker (MURAP 2012), Northwestern University Concluding Remarks, Dr. Perelmuter

Speakers’ Biographies Cheryl I. Harris is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law. A graduate of Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law, Professor Harris began her career with a leading criminal defense firm in Chicago and later served as a senior legal advisor in the City Attorney’s office during the reform administration of Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago. She teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory and Race Conscious Remedies. She has been recognized for her excellence in teaching in the area of civil rights education and was the recipient of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California's Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education.

Harris is one of the founding faculty members of the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA School of Law and is currently its faculty director. She is the author of groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Critical Race Theory, including the influential article, Whiteness as Property (Harvard Law Review). Her scholarship is concerned with the structural dimensions of race, examining how racial frames shape our understanding and interpretation of significant events like Hurricane Katrina—(Whitewashing Race, in California Law Review), admissions policies (with Carbado; The New Racial Preferences, in California Law Review), employment discrimination (with West-‐Faulcon; Reading Ricci: Whitening Discrimination, Race-‐ing Test Fairness, in UCLA Law Review), and immigration law and criminal procedure (with Carbado; Undocumented Criminal Procedure, in UCLA Law Review). With a strong interdisciplinary focus, Harris’ work contests the premises of colorblindness. She has lectured widely at universities and conferences in the US and in Europe, South Africa and Australia, and has been an influential voice on race, inequality and anti-‐discrimination law, publishing op-‐eds in leading outlets and providing commentary to a number of media outlets and public fora. She has also studied race and equality from a global perspective since her work in the 1990s as part of the leadership of the National Conference of Black Lawyers with South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution. Harris is a faculty affiliate and a member of the advisory board of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. This coming academic year she will be Interim Chair of the Department of African-‐American Studies at UCLA.

Eduardo Bonilla-‐Silva is Professor and Chair of the Sociology department at Duke University. He gained visibility in the social sciences with his 1997 American Sociological Review article, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” where he challenged social analysts to analyze racial matters from a structural perspective rather than from the sterile prejudice perspective. Bonilla-‐Silva's research has appeared in journals such as Sociological Inquiry, Racial and Ethnic Studies, Race and Society, Discourse and Society, American Sociological Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Contemporary Sociology, Critical Sociology, Research in Politics and Society, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Political Power and Social Theory among others. To date he has published five books, namely, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-‐Civil Rights Era (co-‐winner of the 2002 Oliver Cox Award given by the American Sociological Association); Racism Without Racists: Color-‐Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2004 Choice Award; this book appeared in 2006 in a second, expanded and revised edition and, again, in 2009 with a long chapter examining the Obama phenomenon); White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (with Ashley Doane); White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Social Science (with Tukufu Zuberi and also the co-‐winner of the 2009 Oliver Cox Award); and State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (with Moon Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas). Prof. Bonilla-‐Silva has received many awards; most notably, the 2007 Lewis Coser Award given by the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for Theoretical-‐Agenda Setting and, in 2011, the Cox-‐Johnson-‐Frazier Award given by the American Sociological Association “to an individual or individuals for their work in the intellectual traditions of the work of these three African American scholars.”

Folashade Alao (MURAP 2000) is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, where she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th Century African American literature, 20th Century American Literature, Black women writers, and Black South Carolina writers. In her courses, she emphasizes themes including migration, memory, and place. She has recently been invited to be guest speaker for the NEH humanities grant-‐funded project “Out of the Rice Fields-‐-‐Vestiges of Gullah Culture in Modern Society” (grant submitted). In 2012, she was a panelist and workshop session leader for "Stories of the Great Migration," a two-‐week NEH-‐funded interdisciplinary workshop for K-‐12 teachers at the University of South Carolina. Prof. Alao also has been invited to speak on fiction and film, including her recent participation in The LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema travelling tour at Emory University and the 2013 South Carolina Academy of Authors Induction Ceremony Activities. In 2013-‐2014, she was awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship, was a Visiting Fellow at UNC's Institute for African American Research (IAAR), and is currently working on completing her book manuscript. Philip Christman teaches English at the University of Michigan. He holds an MA in English Literature from Marquette University and an MFA in fiction writing from University of South Carolina-‐Columbia. He is editor of the yearly Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. His own work has appeared in Paste, Annalemma, Books & Culture, Feminist Formations, and other places. He is MURAP's former Writing Coordinator. Angel L. Harris is Professor of African & African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University. He held previous appointments at Princeton University and the University of Texas. Harris received his PhD in Public Policy and Sociology at the University of Michigan, where he was awarded the Rackham Graduate School Distinguished Dissertation Award. His research interests include social inequality, policy and education, and the social psychological determinants of the racial achievement gap. Specifically, in his work he examines the factors that contribute to differences in academic investment among African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans, and Whites. Prof. Harris also studies the impact that adolescents' perceptions of opportunities for upward socio-‐economic mobility have for their academic investment, and the long-‐term effects of youths' occupational aspirations both within the United States and Europe.

He is the recipient of several important grants and research awards and, in addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, is the author of two recent books: Kids Don't Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-‐White Achievement Gap; and, with Keith Robinson, The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children's Education, both published by Harvard University Press. Laura López-‐Sanders is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. Prior to joining UNC, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Post-‐doctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley, where she researched access to and utilization of health services for unauthorized immigrant populations. Dr. López-‐Sanders holds an M.Ed. in International Education Policy from Harvard University, an MA in Social Sciences and Education from Stanford University and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford. Her primary research interests are in the fields of immigration, social inequality, and race and ethnic relations. Her research includes a study of immigrant integration in regions undergoing rapid demographic change, an analysis of the processes and mechanisms that influence the transition from a two-‐group (i.e., black and white) to a three group (i.e., black-‐white-‐Latino) racial system, and an investigation of racial competition before and after the Great Recession. Her research has received awards from the American Sociological Association and from the National Science Foundation, and has been published in the Latino Studies and the American Behavioral Scientist journals. She is currently working on a book that examines the influence of intermediaries on the integration of unauthorized Latina/o immigrants in new immigrant gateways. Dr. López-‐ Sanders currently serves as a mentor for member of the 2014 cohort. Ashley Lucas is Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama as well as Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan. She holds a BA in Theater Studies and English from Yale University and a joint PhD in Ethnic Studies and Theatre and Drama from UC San Diego. She is a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the UNC Faculty Engaged Scholars Program, and UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities. Her research and teaching interests include U.S. Latina/o theatre, prison-‐related theatre, theatre for social change, and related topics in acting, playwriting, and comparative ethnic studies. Prof. Lucas is also the author of an ethnographic play about the families of prisoners entitled Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass,

which she has performed as a one-‐woman show throughout the U.S. and in Ireland and Canada. Lucas is currently working on the book manuscript for the Methuen Critical Companion on Prison Theatre, which analyzes performances from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. Her scholarly publications include articles in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Latin American Theater Review, American Music, and Revista de Literatura Contemporánea de México. Together with sociologist Jodie Lawston, Lucas guest edited a special issue of the National Women’s Studies Association Journal on the topic of “Women and Criminal Justice: Policing, Prosecution, and Incarceration” (Summer 2008). Lucas and Lawston also collaborated on an edited volume entitled Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists (SUNY Press 2011) and write a blog by the same title: http://razorwirewomen.wordpress.com. Lucas also works with the University of Michigan’s Brazil Initiative—an exchange program with the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro—taking students to Rio each summer to do theatre work inside prisons, hospitals, and favelas. Andrew Martínez (MURAP 2009) is a doctoral candidate in the Culture and Performance program at the University of California, Los Angeles. 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 South Africa and Brazil with his MURAP mentor, Dr. Ashley Lucas, and will continue on to Cuba for fieldwork. Tressie McMillan Cottom (MURAP 2009) is a fourth year PhD Candidate in Sociology at Emory University. She studies inequality in rapidly changing social domains like education, new media, and technology. Her dissertation is a mixed methods study of race, class, gender and motherhood penalties for women enrolled in online, for-‐profit PhD programs. She has been published in Contexts, the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, has an article forthcoming in Qualitative Inquiry, and in textbooks from Oxford

University Press and Pearson. She is currently a PhD Fellow at Microsoft Research New England and visiting at the Berkman Institute for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her public scholarship has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Dissent, American Prospect, MSNBC, Dan Rather Reports and others. In 2013, The Nation named her a "Top Feminist Writer of the Year" and Huffington Post included her in their list of "Best Publications of the Year." Her book, “Lower Ed: The For-‐Profit College Fix,” is forthcoming from The New Press. Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-‐American Studies at Duke University and Founding Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship. A native of the Bronx, NY, Neal earned his doctorate in American Studies from the University of Buffalo. He has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, and the history of popular music. Prof. Neal is the author of five books, including the recent Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities; What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998); Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-‐ Soul Aesthetic (2002); Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003); and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). He is also the co-‐editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-‐Hop Studies Reader, now in its second edition. Neal hosts the weekly webcast, ‘Left of Black,’ in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University (http://leftofblack.tumblr.com/). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal contributes to several on-‐line media outlets and has appeared in several documentaries including Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-‐Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah’s Urban Soul (2004) and Jonathan Gayles, White Scripts and Black Supermen (2012). Neal is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan (in Exile) (http://newblackman.blogspot.com/). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan. Enrique W. Neblett, Jr. is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Lab Director of the African American Youth Wellness Laboratory at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He earned his BS degree from Brown University, his MS from The Pennsylvania State University, and his doctorate in psychology from the

University of Michigan. Dr. Neblett’s research examines the association between racism and health in racial and ethnic minority adolescents and young adults in the United States, with a focus on racial, ethnic, and biological factors that promote African American mental and physical health. He teaches courses on mental disorders of childhood and adolescence, African American psychology, and racism, racial identity, and African American mental health. In 2010, Dr. Neblett was a recipient of the Psychology Club Faculty Research Mentor Award, and in 2014, he received the Chapman Family Teaching Award, an honor among UNC’s highest campus-‐wide recognitions for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Neblett is a member of the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, and Race, the SRCD, and the Society for Research on Adolescence. He is also a four-‐time MURAP faculty mentor. Julian Rucker (MURAP 2012) is an incoming doctoral student in Social Psychology at Northwestern University. His primary research interests include understanding how different factors influence issues of social inequality. Specifically, together with his advisor Dr. Jennifer Richeson, Julian plans to examine how race and lay understandings of discrimination shape attitudes towards public policy designed to reduce racial disparities in the contexts of education, criminal justice and healthcare. Rucker graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with university and departmental honors in Psychology in 2013, and spent this last year serving as lab manager of the Mind and Identity in Context Lab at Indiana University-‐Bloomington (PI: Mary C. Murphy, PhD). He was recently awarded honorable mentions from both the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Ford Foundation Pre-‐ Doctoral Fellowship Program. Karla Slocum is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of African American Research at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. She is also past co-‐director of MURAP. Slocum specializes in studies of meanings of place, race, history, and globalization in the Caribbean and the U.S. For her major research projects she has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The author of several book chapters and articles as well as the book Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006),

Professor Slocum is currently completing a book manuscript on discourses of place, race, and history surrounding America’s “All Black Towns.” Dana Thompson Dorsey is an Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at UNC-‐Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on school law, policy, and race and culture. Dr. Thompson Dorsey received a JD and PhD in Education in the Administrative and Policy Studies program from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999 and 2007, respectively. During her doctoral studies and directly thereafter, Thompson Dorsey worked as a Senior Research Analyst for a research, evaluation and policy firm in the Washington, DC area. Prior to her faculty appointment at UNC, Prof. Thompson Dorsey held a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Springfield and had a post-‐doctoral research position at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on critically examining education laws, policies and practices, and their potential or actual influence on P-‐20 educational equity, access and/or opportunity for students of color and other marginalized groups. Currently, Dr. Thompson Dorsey’s research is concentrated on school segregation, affirmative action, and racial and rural identity issues of high school students in rural and racially segregated communities, as well as the legal, policy, and practical implications related to the aforementioned topics. Her research has been published in various scholarly journals, and she also has made numerous presentations at professional conferences. Brandon Winford (MURAP 2004) is an incoming Assistant Professor of African American and United States History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his BA and MA degrees from North Carolina Central University in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and his PhD in American History from UNC-‐Chapel Hill (2014). Winford’s dissertation, “‘The Battle for Freedom Begins Every Morning’: John Hervey Wheeler, Civil Rights, and New South Prosperity,” explores the link between racial equality and economic justice between the 1930s and 1960s. By exploring Wheeler’s unique sphere of black leadership, the study captures the larger relationship between black institutions, their connections to political and economic power, and the “brokering” of the civil rights movement. Brandon is now working on readying the manuscript for publication.

MURAP Mentors’ Biographies

GerShun Avilez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and also earned a Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies. Before coming to UNC, he taught at Yale University, where he won the university's Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. He previously held the Frederick Douglass Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American literature and visual culture. He is currently completing his book "The Art of Revolution," which investigates how Black nationalist rhetoric impacted African American artistic experimentation. His published work appears in the critical journals African American Review and Callaloo, the edited collection Representing Segregation, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Civil Rights Literature. Navin Bapat is an Associate Professor in the department of Political Science and the Curriculum of Peace, War, and Defense at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He received his BA from the University of Michigan and his MA and PhD from Rice University. Prof. Bapat’s research utilizes mathematical modeling to develop theoretical explanations of political conflicts, including issues related to terrorism, insurgency, and economic sanctions. He then tests explanations from these models by conducting statistical analyses of real world data. Currently, he is conducting research on American foreign policy and transnational terrorism, internal conflict and the rise of extremism within insurgencies, and the growth of insurgent movements from small cells to large-‐scale rebellions. Kia Lilly Caldwell is an Associate Professor in the department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. She completed her undergraduate degree in Latin American Literature at Princeton University and received an MA in Latin American studies and a PhD in social anthropology and from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Caldwell’s research interests include gender, race, citizenship, HIV/AIDS, and health policy in Brazil and the United States. She is the author of Negras in Brazil: Re-‐envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity and the co-‐editor of Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture. This last book resulted from a multi-‐year collaboration with the inter-‐university working group on Gender and Cultural Citizenship, which received grant support from the Rockefeller Foundation from 2002 to 2004. In recent years, Dr. Caldwell has been involved with two important HIV-‐prevention studies focusing on African Americans in North Carolina. She has served as a co-‐

investigator for LinCS to Durham, an HIV-‐prevention study funded by the National Institutes of Health. She is also the Principal Investigator for the Sister Circle Study, which focuses on HIV prevention for Black women of middle socioeconomic status in the Raleigh-‐Durham area. This study was funded by a Developmental Award from the Center for AIDS Research at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. Dr. Caldwell has received grants and fellowships from the UNC-‐Chapel Hill Office of the Provost, the American Psychological Association, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Library of Congress. She is currently completing a book titled, Gender, Race, and Health Equity in Brazil: Intersectional Perspectives on Policy and Practice. James W. Coleman is Professor of English at the UNC-‐Chapel Hill, where he has been teaching since 1990. He teaches American and African American literature, with a focus on African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. A primary emphasis in his published essays and books has been the fiction of John Edgar Wideman and other contemporary black male writers, but he has also written about prominent contemporary black women writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Prof. Coleman is currently completing the book "Understanding Edward P. Jones," which is under contract with the University of South Carolina Press for its Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series. His four previously published books are: 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 (2006); and Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman’s Art and Experimentation (2010). Reginald F. Hildebrand is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at the UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He received his BA and MA from Howard University and his PhD from Princeton University. He is author of The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 1995). His research focuses on the period of Emancipation and Reconstruction, although he is currently working on a collection of essays titled "Engaging Blackness: Body, Mind, and Spirit; the Perspectives of Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Howard Thurman." 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 co-‐chair of the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, a trustee of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and a member of the Board of the Paul Green Foundation. In addition, he serves as a member of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and of the Advisory Board for the North Carolina Historical Review.

Sherick Hughes is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He is the Graduate Program Coordinator/chair of Cultural Studies & Literacies; the Founder and Director of the Interpretive Research Suite and Bruce A. Carter Qualitative Thought Lab; the Founder and Co-‐ Director of the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Studies; and the Founder and Chair of BASE (Black Alumni of the School of Education). Dr. Hughes earned his BA at UNC-‐Wilmington, an MA at Wake Forest University, and an MPA and PhD at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He is a former public school Teaching Assistant, G-‐3 Teacher of urban youth in foster care, and a member of the NC-‐ERC, the former education research wing of Governor Jim Hunt’s Education Cabinet. During the past decade, Hughes’s research, teaching, and service efforts have focused upon: (1) Critical Race Studies & Black Education, (2) Social Context of Urban and Rural Schooling, (3) Interdisciplinary Foundations of Education, and (4) Qualitative/Mixed Research Methodology. These efforts have led to the acceptance of over 50 single-‐ and co-‐authored academic publications and reports, while also earning him leadership roles in the national Save Our Schools and United Opt Out movements and recognition from Phi Delta Kappa, Border Crossers-‐New York City and the Harvard Family Involvement Network of Educators. In addition to those honors, Dr. Hughes’ first book, Black Hands in the Biscuits Not in the Classrooms: Unveiling Hope in a Struggle for Brown’s Promise, earned the 2007 national Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association, and most recently, he received the 2013 national Early Career Award from Division G of the American Educational Research Association. Prior to returning home to Carolina, Dr. Hughes was a faculty member at the University of Toledo and the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Hughes lives in Carrboro, NC with his wife, Megan Hughes and daughter, Micah Victoriana Hughes. Miguel La Serna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He earned his MA and PhD from the University of California, San Diego. La Serna has received research and writing fellowships from the Ford, Fulbright, and Guggenheim foundations, and is the recipient of the 2012 J. Carlyle Sitterson Freshman Teaching Award. Prof. La Serna is interested in the relationship between culture, memory, and political violence in twentieth-‐century Latin America. His first book, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (UNC Press, 2012), examines indigenous peasants’ responses to the Shining Path guerrilla movement in 1980s Peru. He is currently working on a study that explores the ways in which MRTA guerrillas and the Peruvian state used historical memory and nationalist symbolism to promote, achieve, and thwart revolutionary change in late-‐twentieth-‐ century Peru.

Priscilla Layne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in African, African American and Diaspora Studies. She is a native of Chicago, received her BA from the University of Chicago, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Her fields of research and teaching interests are Twentieth-‐ and Twenty-‐First-‐Century Literature, Film, Music, (Post)Subculture Studies, Multiculturalism, African Diaspora Studies and Gender Studies. Prof. Layne has presented papers at the German Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Collegium for African American Research. She has also published essays on such topics as German hip-‐hop, film, Turkish-‐German literature and translation. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled “Black Masks, German Rebels: Music, Mimicry and Black Masculinity in Postwar German Culture.” Laura López-‐Sanders Please see Speakers' Biographies Kennetta Hammond Perry (MURAP 2000) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at East Carolina University, where she is responsible for teaching courses in Atlantic World History and African & African American Studies. Prof. Perry received a doctorate in Comparative Black History at Michigan State University in 2007. She completed a predoctoral research fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American Studies and held a postdoctoral research appointment in the Department of History at Duke University. For the 2012-‐2013 academic year she was in residence at UNC on a sabbatical research leave funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Dr. Perry’s research interests include transnational race politics, Black Europe, the global dimensions of African American history, Black women’s history, diaspora theory and the relationship between emancipation and citizenship. She has published in the Journal of African American History, Twentieth Century British History, the Journal of World History and the Journal of British Studies. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation research on Caribbean migration and transnational race politics in postwar Britain, tentatively titled "London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging." Mitchell J. Prinstein is the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the Director of Clinical Psychology at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Miami and completed his internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown University Clinical Psychology Training Consortium. Prinstein’s research examines interpersonal models of internalizing symptoms and health risk

behaviors among adolescents, with a specific focus on the unique role of peer relationships in the developmental psychopathology of depression and self-‐injury. He is the PI on several past and active grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child and Human Development, and several private foundations. He serves as the Editor for the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, and is an editorial board member for several developmental psychopathology journals. Prof. Prinstein is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association Divisions 53 and 12. He has received several national and university-‐based awards recognizing his contributions to research (American Psychological Association Society of Clinical Psychology Theodore Blau Early Career Award, Columbia University/Brickell Award for research on suicidality), teaching/mentoring (Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy Mentor Award, UNC-‐ Chapel Hill Tanner Award for Undergraduate Teaching), and professional development of graduate students (American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Raymond D. Fowler Award). Charlene Regester is an Associate Professor in the Department of African & African American and Diaspora Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Global Cinema Minor at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. She received her BA, MA, and PhD from UNC-‐Chapel Hill, where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Prof. Regester is the author of African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-‐1960 (Indiana University Press, 2010), and 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. Regester serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Film and Video and Choice Reviews for Academic Libraries, and is a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, University Film and Video Association, and Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association. She is a native of Chapel Hill. Debra Skinner is a Senior Scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UNC-‐Chapel Hill. Dr. Skinner received her MA and PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UNC-‐Chapel Hill. She received postdoctoral training and carried out research in Nepal and the US on interdisciplinary and cross-‐cultural approaches to the study of human development. Skinner has conducted numerous ethnographic and multi-‐ method longitudinal studies on families’ understandings of and responses to childhood disability and the broader cultural, economic, and political contexts of these beliefs and practices; has developed theoretical models

and methods to assess personal identity and parental beliefs; and has worked to integrate methods on large interdisciplinary and longitudinal projects around issues related to poverty, families, and disability. Her past research has included family and poverty studies in urban and rural contexts; inquiries into children's constructions of race/ethnic and other social identities in school; and cultural and familial interpretations of pediatric genetic disorders. Her current research includes family adaptations to and understandings of genetic disorder, specifically fragile X syndrome, and the social and ethical dimensions of expanded newborn screening and of the use of whole exome/genome sequencing in clinical medicine. Thanks to her efforts, UNC’s Center for Genomics and Society has funded the participation of a student in MURAP since 2011.

MURAP Staff’s Biographies

Antonio De Jesús Alanís (MURAP 2012) will succeed Marissa Garcia as MURAP's Program Coordinator starting in 2014. He graduated from UNC, Chapel Hill in 2013 with BA in Romance Languages (Spanish) with an emphasis on Hispanic Literatures and Cultures. This fall Antonio will be applying to UNC's Masters of Arts in Teaching program through the School of Education. Jason Brouster (MURAP 2010) is a MURAP Resident Graduate Advisor. In 2011 he received his BA in Africana Studies from Wayne State University. He is currently completing his MA at the University of Kansas, majoring in African & African American Studies, with a thesis entitled “Radical Race Man: The Life and Times of Chester I. Lewis.” Jason’s research interests include the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, urban policy, criminology, and gender. He has presented his research (“Motor City Showdown: Police Brutality, Black Power, and the Carceral State in Detroit”) both at the Duke’s 2013 Graduate Student History Conference and at UNC-‐CH’s 2012 Triangle African American History Colloquium. Jason also wrote the selected bibliography for “The Legacy of Darwin T. Turner and the Struggle for African American Studies,” an essay written by Distinguished Professor and Africana Studies Chair Melba J. Boyd, which was published in the Winter 2012 issue of Black Scholar. William Cole is a Quantitative Assistant for MURAP’s GRE workshop. He received his BS from the University of Mississippi, majoring in Mathematics with a double minor in Art and African American Studies. During his tenure at the at the University of Mississippi, he was part of the Ole Miss Rebel Football team and participated in research summer programs. Will then received a MEd from Duke University and has been teaching high school mathematics at Northern High School in Durham since 2011. Kanisha Coleman (MURAP 2011) is MURAP’s Alumni Coordinator. She received her BA in Psychology from UNC-‐Chapel Hill in May 2012 and is entering her third year as a doctoral student at UNC’s School of Social Work. Her research focuses on the development of children who have suffered from various forms of maltreatment and the differential effects the child welfare system has on families from diverse backgrounds. During her first two years of graduate school, Kanisha interned and conducted research at a child abuse prevention agency and at Wake County Human Services in Raleigh, North Carolina. She also served as one of the chairs of the Black Student Caucus, a student organization within her academic department committed to improving diversity. The organization received the 2013 University Diversity Award for its significant contributions to the

enhancement of diversity on campus and in the community. She is a recipient of the Sam & Betsy Reeves Doctoral Fellowship. Shelby Eden Dawkins-‐Law (MURAP 2010) is MURAP’s Conference Coordinator, a position she has held for two years. She is a second-‐year doctoral student in the Policy, Leadership and School Improvement program in the UNC-‐Chapel Hill School of Education. She also received her BA in Psychology and MA in Education with a concentration in Culture, Curriculum and Change from UNC-‐Chapel Hill. As an undergraduate Shelby earned distinctions as a Carolina Research Scholar from UNC-‐Chapel Hill and a Millennium Scholar from the Society for Research in Child Development. She currently researches the evolving purpose of “public” education in the U.S., particularly as school choice policies usher in a new era of racial, economic, linguistic, and ability-‐based segregation. Her current research project, “Student Perspectives of Resegregation in North Carolina Public Schools,” is funded by the UNC-‐Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South. With this funding Shelby will administer surveys, focus groups, and interviews of graduates of Charlotte-‐Mecklenburg and Wake County Public Schools to ascertain why they believe their parents choose their schools, if they perceived their schools as segregated, and if their secondary school experiences impacted their own choices for college. This past spring Shelby’s article “Why America Needs a Counterstory to ‘Choice as the Last Civil Right’” was published in the Sanford Journal of Public Policy. This fall Shelby will be the inaugural Education Policy Fellow at the UNC General Administration Division of Institutional Research and Analysis. In addition to her studies, Shelby also serves as the UNC Graduate and Professional Student Federation President, representing all of UNC’s graduate and professional students as a speaking delegate to the Board of Trustees. Julie Fann is MURAP’s Writing Coordinator. She received her PhD in English at UNC-‐Chapel Hill in 2012 and held a postdoctoral fellowship there from 2012-‐2013. Her dissertation, Stories of God and Gall: Presbyterian Polemic during the Conformity Wars of Mid-‐Seventeenth-‐Century England and Scotland, was the first full study of the literary and cultural dimensions of Presbyterianism at a time when it suddenly came to occupy the highly fraught middle ground between state conformity and private conscience. Dr. Fann researches the historically dynamic cultural agents of the mid-‐ seventeenth-‐century civil war in Britain: the Presbyterians who sought to transform the ways in which people worshiped while also attempting to stabilize political, social, and ecclesiastical order. Although Julie Fann’s scholarship has merited the Howell-‐Voitle Dissertation Award as well as other honors and grants, she takes the greatest pride in receiving the Erika

Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching, an award that celebrated her innovative, engaged approaches to teaching writing and literature. Because equipping, inspiring, and supporting students is her greatest passion, Julie is honored to be working with MURAP’s students this year. Laurel Foote-‐Hudson is MURAP’s Assistant Writing Coordinator and GRE Verbal Assistant. She began her career as a graduate student in the PhD program in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-‐ Chapel Hill in the fall of 2009. Her current research and project interests have been influenced by her exposure to both Spanish and Japanese languages and literature as well as her interests in the tropes perpetuated by popular culture. She uses a comparative research approach to better reflect an ongoing interest in the genres of Golden Age Spanish and seventeenth-‐century Kabuki theater and travelogue; she believes that both media are captivating tools for exploring myriad tropes surrounding the performance of the self and foreign “other” in modern popular media. Framing both of these genres within their respective literary and cultural contexts is her growing interest in modern Adaptation Theory. She plans to rely on this emerging theoretical basis as a way to explore the multi-‐faceted production of “soft power” and the literary legacy of Japan (as the re-‐ branded “East”) and Spain (the former “West”) as she develops her prospectus for defense in the fall. Marissa Garcia is MURAP’s Program Coordinator, a position she has held for the past two years. She received her BA in Psychology and Spanish from UNC-‐Chapel Hill in 2012 and will begin graduate school this fall at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she will pursue a master’s degree in Healthcare Administration. Marissa has also served as a research assistant for the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. As a trainee in the University of Southern California’s Latino Mental Health Research Training Program in the summer of 2012, she worked at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she tested the reliability and validity of the Familism scale with a sample from Mexico City. Keith Gavigan is MURAP’s Communication Skills Workshop Coordinator, a position he has held for the past two years. He has an MFA in Theatre Performance from the College-‐Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. His commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, especially in the interplay of performance and environmental conservation, is evident in his diverse work. In addition to teaching presentation skills workshops in San Francisco and Cincinnati, he has contributed to the general science curriculum at North Carolina’s first bilingual elementary school and created an afterschool program called Creative Expressions.

Alejandra Márquez Guajardo is MURAP Director's Research Assistant. She is a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) at UNC-‐Chapel Hill, specializing in contemporary Mexican literature. A native of Mexico, Alejandra hopes to complete her PhD and join the ranks of academia in the US. 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. Shanna Jean-‐Baptiste (MURAP 2013) is a MURAP Resident Graduate Advisor and Office Assistant. She recently graduated from City College of New York, CUNY, where she majored in French Literature and minored in History, and is entering a doctoral program in French at Yale University this fall. As a former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she researched Francophone literature, post-‐colonialism, critical theory, and gender studies. As a MURAP student last year, Shanna worked under the direction of Dr. Priscilla Layne to consider the unprecedented portrayal of the Haitian upper-‐class, particularly upper-‐class Haitian women, in the 1907 novel Les Thazar by early twentieth-‐century realist novelist Fernand Hibbert (1873-‐ 1928). Fluent in English, French, and Kreyòl, Shanna plans to focus her graduate work on forgotten and understudied works from Haitian writers of the turn of the twentieth century. María J. Obando (MURAP 2008) is MURAP’s Senior Graduate Assistant, Professional Workshop Coordinator, and Writing Assistant. A current doctoral student in the department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-‐Chapel Hill, her research interests include twentieth-‐century contemporary Latina/o representations of identity and the production of dramatic texts by Latina/o playwrights who treat issues of social justice. Her focus on dramatic texts includes their historical, cultural, and literary contexts as well as their performative aspects.

Rosa Perelmuter is the Director of MURAP. 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” (1982) 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 juggling her duties to students, her department, and MURAP, she is attempting to forge ahead with her research agenda, which includes both a 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). Ben Wilson is a Quantitative Assistant for MURAP’s GRE Workshop, a position he has held for four years. He earned a BS in Mathematics from Lehigh University in 2009. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Pure Mathematics at UNC-‐Chapel Hill and working with Dr. Karl Petersen in the field of Dynamical Systems. As a graduate student, he has taught undergraduate math courses, such as College Algebra, Mathematical Topics Courses, Calculus I, and Calculus II, for ten semesters. He has also tutored college and high school students in the Chapel Hill area in a wide variety of math courses.

MURAP Fellows’ Biographies & Abstracts

Miriam Abdullah Mentor: Prof. James Coleman

Miriam Abdullah is a rising senior majoring in English Literature and minoring in Arabic and History at the City College of New York (CUNY). Her identity as a first generation Palestinian American inspires her research in Arab and Arab-‐ American studies, Middle Eastern studies, feminist theory, and post-‐colonial theory. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF), she participated in the University of Chicago’s 2013 Summer Research Training Program (SRTP) where she focused on the identity formations of Arab American subjects in the Post-‐9/11 era as revealed in contemporary short stories and novels. As a member of the 2014 MURAP Cohort, Abdullah’s current research examines the identity formation of Algerian subjects in Memory in the Flesh by Ahlam Mosteghanemi, the first Algerian woman to publish a novel in Arabic. Abdullah plans to further her current research interests by pursuing a PhD in Near Eastern Studies. "Killing the Past with One Stroke of the Pen: Discussing the Significance of Writing Literature in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh" Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman to publish a novel in Arabic; in her award-‐winning novel, Memory in the Flesh (2000) Mosteghanemi explores themes of female voice and agency 25 years after the Algerian revolution (1954-‐1962). This paper examines the artistic expression described in Mosteghanemi’s work. The protagonists Khaled and Hayat use artistry such as writing and painting to deal with their silencing and objectification as Algerian subjects. Hayat writes about romantic love in her novels while Khaled, a war veteran, paints beautiful bridges in the city of Constantine. This paper argues that Mosteghanemi draws distinctions between these forms of art to show how Hayat’s novel on female agency and romantic love is more therapeutic than Khaled’s nostalgic paintings on Algerian culture. This difference is particularly due to the ways in which his paintings serve as a physical manifestation of his haunting past. While this novel is popular in the Arabic world, it has received little attention in the west.

Ashley Adams Mentor: Prof. Reginald Hildebrand Ashley Adams is a rising senior at North Carolina

Central University majoring in History with a concentration in African American and African Diaspora Studies. To enrich and conserve the history of Durham, North Carolina, Ashley has interned and volunteered with the Museum of Durham History. As a member of the Caulbert A. Jones History Society, which promotes social change and organizes Black History Month events, she has had the opportunity to attend and present at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in 2013 and will be in attendance in the fall of 2014. This summer, her research evaluates the struggle for a fair education amongst African Americans in Durham, North Carolina, from 1950-‐1970. She focuses her research on a local court case Blue v. Durham Public Schools (1951), a case that helped to shape future generations seeking an education during the Jim Crow Era. Ashley plans to continue her education and earn a doctoral degree in history. Through her volunteer experience she has developed a firm belief that being an advocate for minority education and the struggles with societal constraints that minorities face will benefit the education of future generations. "The Battle For a Fair Education in Durham, North Carolina: Blue vs. Durham Public Schools, 1951.” During the era of the Civil Rights Movement from the late 1940s to the 1970s, African American education was limited. Inadequate facilities, little to no funding from the state and county, and inadequate school materials were among the many obstacles that African Americans throughout the nation faced, especially in Southern cities like Durham, North Carolina. However, because the African American community in Durham was prosperous and educated, they mobilized. Members of the Durham Committee of Negro Affairs (DCNA)—assisted by two attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)— sued Durham Public Schools; although the case has received little attention, Blue et al. vs. Durham Public Schools set the precedent for the ground-‐ breaking case Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). By overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which had established racially segregated facilities as separate but equal, Blue vs. Durham enhanced the educational opportunities for African Americans not only in Durham but also nationwide.

Erica Broughton Mentor: Prof. Kia Caldwell

Erica Broughton is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in African, African American and Diaspora Studies and Public Policy with a concentration in Poverty and Social Justice. Her research interests include the racial dynamics and social movements affecting Afro-‐Brazilians, African Americans, and quilombo descendants. Erica Broughton has served as the Membership and Election’s Co-‐Chair of the Black Student Movement, where she worked to improve the unity among all the organization’s members and to voice the concerns and grievances of the university’s Black community (at UNC). In the past, Erica has volunteered for organizations such as Durham Urban Ministries and Habitat for Humanity that focus on providing aid to poverty stricken areas. In the future, she desires to do research in Brazil to gain experience working directly with quilombo communities to assist in efforts to mobilize against their marginalization. In Brazil, Broughton hopes to further investigate the role of Afro-‐Brazilian women and their involvement in the land titling process for quilombo remnants. She also plans to further her studies to obtain her doctoral degree in African diaspora studies. "Marginalization and Social Movements of Quilombos in Contemporary Brazil" Contemporary Brazilian quilombos were originally founded as fugitive slave communities. Due to hundreds of years of overwhelming destitution, violence, and cruel forms of social marginalization, quilombos have faced challenges in preserving their way of life and legitimating their claims to the lands they inhabit. However, despite the many obstacles that these communities have faced, they have been persistent in resisting their disenfranchisement. This paper analyzes the effect of racial dynamics on the experiences of quilombo inhabitants and the extent to which their property rights have been legitimized through land titling processes. Due to the surprisingly low number of property titles that have been awarded to quilombo communities, I argue that the Brazilian federal government has failed to acknowledge the rights granted to quilombos in the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. Based on these findings, I also argue that the marginalization of Afro-‐Brazilian quilombo communities has been shaped by the economic and political disparities these communities have faced, their struggle to gain property titles, and the lack of policies that adequately protect their rights.

Yun Cha Mentor: Prof. Laura López-‐Sanders Yun Cha is a rising senior studying Sociology at Vanderbilt University, where he is a College Scholar and a peer reviewer for the Vanderbilt University Research Journal. While Yun primarily researches social inequality and social mobility, his passion is higher education, and this passion drives many of his activities. As one of six Dean's Fellows at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, he presented his "Special Collections Topics in Wikipedia" project during the last Association of Research Libraries Fellows Institute. Yun's interest in education and social mobility first emerged while he attended boarding school in Korea and developed a mini-‐thesis on private boarding school and college admissions processes. Today, he helps prospective international students as he leads various student organizations that collaborate with Vanderbilt. In addition to his MURAP project, Yun has an Honors Thesis project on how socioeconomic status, institutional type, and financial aid influence students' likelihood of majoring in "lucrative" fields. In recognition of this ongoing project and his work in the Sociology Majors and Minors Association, Yun was awarded the Outstanding Sociology Undergraduate Student Award in 2014. To further his research, Yun plans to enter a doctoral program in Sociology.

"College Majors in Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Institutional Effects on Students' Major Choices" Recent studies have contested the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM, health, and other lucrative fields, which has implications for the continuing role of social policies designed to benefit minorities. In this study, I approach this issue from an institutional perspective with a laissez-‐ faire racism framework to determine whether structural influences, such as micro-‐level aggression, impact minority students' choice of major. Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, I compare African American students' choices in HBCUs and non-‐HBCUs. Contrary to what laissez-‐faire theory might suggest, African Americans at non-‐HBCUs are more likely to choose lucrative majors than their counterparts at HBCUs. African Americans at non-‐HBCUs are actually overrepresented in some lucrative fields compared to their white counterparts. In this sense, institutional effects such as micro-‐level aggressions do not seem to negatively influence the choice of lucrative majors for African Americans. Importantly, the results show that on average African American males select less lucrative majors than their white-‐male counterparts, thus resulting in a persistent earnings gap that merits further study.

Adela L. Contreras Mentor: Prof. Miguel LaSerna

Adela L. Contreras received an Associate's Degree with distinction from Pasadena City College in 2013 and is currently pursuing a BA in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a member of the Sigma Alpha Lambda honors society. She has received numerous scholarly distinctions, including the President’s Latino Advisory Committee Scholarship, the Pasadena City College Retirees Association Scholarship, the Dr. Robert D. Haugh Scholarship, and the William and Lillie Goldmann History Scholarship. A mother and a transfer student, Contreras is committed to helping other non-traditional students carve out pathways to educational success. In addition to volunteering regularly at her daughter’s school and coaching her youth soccer team, Contreras is currently working with the Dean of Women, Gender, and Sexual Equity at UCSB to improve the experience of transfer students from non-traditional paths. Contreras’ personal history has also informed her scholarship. The daughter of entrepreneurial Central American migrants, she is interested in studying the intricacies of transnational migration, gender, and labor in the Americas. She is currently working on a project that examines the role of the guerrilla radio station, Radio Venceremos, in the FMLN insurgency in 1980s El Salvador. Ms. Contreras looks forward to matriculating in a PhD program, earning her doctorate, and becoming a professor of history. "Ellos…están con la humanidad entera': The El Mozote Massacre and El Salvador’s Radio Venceremos January 1-‐December 31, 1981" Two weeks before Christmas 1981, while in pursuit of the mobile guerrilla radio station Radio Venceremos ('We Will Win'), the elite Atlacatl battalion attacked the small hamlet of El Mozote in Morazán, El Salvador, ending in one of the most deadly massacres in modern Latin American history. Radio Venceremos had become a primary target of the military expeditions of the American-‐influenced Salvadoran army since the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) initiated its first final offensive in January of 1981. Drawing on guerrilla memoirs, US media coverage, and audio archives of Radio Venceremos broadcasts, this study analyzes the first year of Radio Venceremos in order to discern what it was about the guerrilla radio station that the United States and Salvadoran governments found so threatening. In doing so, it will reflect on the intersection of the media, the public, and collective remembrance as it contributes to the shaping of a public narrative.

Tegan George Mentor: Prof Navin Bapat

Tegan George is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Peace, War, and Defense and Global Studies. Her academic interests include the evolution of the military in tactical, strategic, and covert operations; drones and the strategic targeting of civilian noncombatants; and the integration and expansion of terrorism into urban life. Tegan has received the Joseph A. Beirne Scholarship and is a Wickersham Scholar with the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS). In the past, she has interned with RTI International in Research Triangle Park, the Italian Academy Foundation in Rome, and Urban Ministries of Wake County in Raleigh, participating in a variety of international development and global governance projects. After completing her bachelor’s degree, Tegan plans to pursue a graduate degree in international security, peace studies, or conflict resolution.

“Understanding Terrorist Alliances” Intuitively, rebel groups should ally to maximize their ability to maximize their power relative to their target governments and minimize their vulnerability to repression. Yet, groups do not always form alliances, and instead sometimes engage in inter-‐factional conflict. This raises a question that researchers have tried to address: when and why does cooperation fail to materialize between rebel groups? Using micro-‐level studies of terrorism, I argue that the strength of groups is typically a function of resources or commodities (such as oil, minerals, or diamonds), their relationships with the local populations, and their ability to attract state sponsorship. I demonstrate that the access rebel groups have to these three factors—state sponsorship, access to natural resources, and popular support—ultimately determines the success or failure of rebel alliances. Finally, I hypothesize that while groups with extensive support from their populations are able to cooperate without external enforcement, groups that are resource-‐dependent are typically less prone to cooperation and more likely to engage in intra-‐factional fighting. I test these hypotheses using a set of Middle Eastern conflicts as case studies, along with a preliminary quantitative analysis.

V. Emma Kioko Mentor: Prof. James Coleman

V. Emma Kioko is a rising senior at Bryn Mawr College where she majors in English and minors in History and Africana studies. Her research spans African and African-‐American literatures— including works by Bessie Head, Zoe Wicomb, and Toni Morrison—and is complemented by her study of Swahili. During the 2013-‐2014 academic year, Emma used a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship awarded by the University of Pennsylvania to develop her passion for interdisciplinary approaches to Africana studies further. Having expanded her knowledge of literary theory as well, Emma was invited to present the following papers at recent conferences: “A Mercedes and a Penis: Lacan’s Repetition Automatism in Patricia Duncker’s Betrayal and Ian McEwan’s Pornography” and “All Eyes on Belinda: Foucault’s Panopticon in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.” Committed to civil rights as well as research, she helped to found and lead Bryn Mawr’s chapter of the NAACP. Emma hopes to continue her study of literature and theory as she pursues a PhD in English. "A Haunting Present: The Ambiguity of Freedom in Toni Morrison’s Beloved" Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved explores slavery and the complex perspective of the enslaved before and after emancipation. The novel engages with multiple characters’ notions of belonging and identity as they address the haunting presence of a past that refuses to vacate the present. The characters of Beloved struggle to define their freedom. The traumas of slavery haunt their daily lives, complicating the concept of freedom within the novel and echoing the larger cultural context of slavery. Due to its largely ambiguous definition, freedom emerges as a complex signifier within the novel. This essay uses post-‐structuralist theory to argue that the ambiguity of freedom within the novel asserts the unresolved nature of freedom in contemporary America. In Morrison’s hands, the unresolved specter of slavery has incredibly relevant and contemporary implications which affect the ways in which we engage with slavery’s ambiguous legacy today. In order to understand the contemporary legacy of slavery, this essay scrutinizes the complex social and cultural discourses and norms that continue to circumscribe true American freedom.

Ashley Lee Mentor: Kennetta Hammond Perry Ashley Lee is a rising junior majoring in English at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include twentieth-‐century African American literature, representations of race in literature, and the Black Diaspora. Intrigued by the construct of race as well as the power and prestige whiteness exerts in American life, Ashley has explored these topics as an opinion columnist for Iowa City’s independent newspaper, The Daily Iowan, and as Secretary of Iowa’s chapter of the NAACP. Because she is committed to expository writing and to fostering a culture of diversity in the Department of English, Ashley has been awarded the Scott A. Anderson Memorial scholarship and the Darwin T. Turner award. Ashley plans to graduate with honors and looks forward to pursuing a doctoral degree in African American literature after graduation.

"Not So Tragic: The Passing Mulatto Figure in The Autobiography of an Ex-‐Colored Man"

This paper seeks to explore the history of passing narratives and texts that feature the tragic mulatto character in American fiction by close examining James Weldon Johnson’s biracial narrator in the 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-‐Colored Man. Whereas the tragic mulatto is typically a character that is doomed to his or her unhappiness, despair, and demise because of an impossible dream of being white, this study demonstrates how Johnson’s protagonist is not an example of the tragic mulatto character traditionally known in African American literature. The “ex-‐colored man” defies the trope of the tragic mulatto character by choosing to pass permanently as a white man. This project explores how the significance of white manhood, economic privilege, and the quest for full-‐citizenship contributes to the narrator’s motivation to eventually disclaim his black heritage and pass for white. Incorporating Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this paper also considers biracial identities and the ways in which racial identities are both imposed and internalized, in order to understand the narrator’s racial performance of whiteness and his fluid movement between the black/white binary of the early twentieth century. The theme of passing allows us to consider how the historic realities and questions surrounding the performance of race in Johnson’s time are still in effect today. Passing allows us to think about the construct and performance of whiteness and blackness in American society. Johnson’s novel refuses to view mixed-‐race characters through a narrow lens, and more broadly, this project is meant to show how anti-‐blackness and white superiority coexist.

Kimiko Nicole LeNeave Mentor: Prof. Miguel La Serna Kimiko Nicole LeNeave will graduate in 2015 from

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in History and Latin American Studies and a minor in Music. Her research considers sociopolitical movements in Latin America, relations between the United States and Latin America, migration and migrant identities, and cultural history. As a member of the UNC Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society, LeNeave serves as a mentor for the Carolina Latina/o Collaborative (CLC) Latino Peer Mentoring Program (LPMP), a volunteer English tutor for Enrich ESL, and an intern for the Latino Migration Project’s New Roots Latin Oral Histories. LeNeave hopes to enter a Latin American History graduate program and become a university professor. "Song as Weapon Music’s Impact on The Shining Path: Culture-‐Clash in Ayacucho" The 1980s proved to be a chaotic period in Peruvian history, as Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) swept through the Peruvian countryside in a vehement quest for Socialist-‐Communist revolution. In Ayacucho, the wellspring of the insurgency, the culture clash between Shining Path and indigenous peasantry was fierce, and soon cultural expression became both a weapon and shield during the conflicts. Music played a distinct role on various fronts by symbolically embodying central themes of the struggle between Senderista militants and Quechua-‐speaking highlanders. This paper examines the competing ways in which Sendero Luminoso and Andean peasants utilized music to foster their political convictions during the insurrectionary period. While other scholars have examined Andean Peasants’ fight to keep their culture intact during the Shining Path insurgency, less is understood about how Andean communities turned to one of the most powerful forms of cultural expression, music, to take a stand against Sendero’s attempt to destroy tradition and establish the Party as the new cultural standard. Thus, this new approach analyzes the ways culture was used throughout the Sendero Luminoso revolution and how it became a mechanism of confrontation and defense.

Tamra Lepro Mentor: Prof. Priscilla Layne Tamra Lepro is an English honors student at The City College of New York-‐CUNY. As a City College Fellow and Kaye Scholar, she is pursuing her interests in eighteenth-‐century literature. Her research considers the intersections of national identity and gender, centralized around England's pre-‐colonial annexation of Scotland and how this change affected ideas of masculinity. Last summer Tamra participated in the first Stanford-‐CCNY Humanities program, geared towards students who are interested in pursuing higher education, where she worked on understanding the differences in eighteenth-‐century perceptions of Scottish, English, and British national identity. This year Tamra expanded her project while conducting funded archival research at Yale's Sterling library. Analyzing the memoirs and private letters of James Boswell, an eighteenth-‐century Scottish laird has helped her to understand some of the conversations surrounding national identity and perceptions of manliness. Tamra will be applying to doctoral programs in English for the fall of 2015. "To be as manly as I possibly could": James Boswell, the Soldier, and Myths of Power and Prestige " This paper explores the intersections of class, national identity, and masculinity in the eighteenth century using the works of Scottish biographer James Boswell as a cultural lens. Based in part on Benedict Anderson's argument about national identities and R.W. Connell's notion of hegemonic masculinity, I will examine Boswell's London Journal 1762-‐1763 and personal writings to explore his desire to join the English army. Boswell's personal writings stand out as a unique piece of eighteenth century writing because of his tendency to shift between different identities and to consciously adopt certain roles. As a Scot in eighteenth-‐century London, Boswell was treated as a minority and second-‐class citizen. I argue that his interest in joining the army was motivated by his insecure masculinity and his antiquated ideas of military life which stemmed from representations of the soldier he encountered in the theater. This paper contributes to discussions in masculinity studies, English literature, and Scottish studies, as it shows how literature can be used with an historical lens to explore the cultural realm of identity in the eighteenth century. This topic is particularly timely as notions of Scottish identity against English internal colonialism are still being discussed in Scotland with the pending vote for Scottish independence from Great Britain.

Ijeoma Madubata Mentor: Prof. Mitchell Prinstein Ijeoma Madubata is a rising senior pursuing a B.A.

in psychology at Princeton University. Her academic interests include both clinical psychology and social psychology, and she plans to integrate the two subfields in her work. In the past, Ijeoma has researched intragroup and intergroup interactions—focusing on the topic of racial prejudice—in the Shelton Laboratory at Princeton University. That experience inspired her to further research the relationship between disclosures of subtle or overt prejudice and feelings of social support; she plans to expand upon this project during her senior year. Ijeoma plans to attend graduate school for a PhD in clinical psychology. “Longitudinal Associations Among Subtle and Blatant Discrimination, Ethnicity, and Suicide Ideation Among Ethnic Minority Adolescents” Past research has defined ethnic discrimination as a stressor and potential risk factor for suicidal behavior in ethnic minority adolescents. However, few studies have researched the potential variables that could influence the magnitude of the relationship between discrimination and suicidal behavior. This study examined ethnicity (African-‐American, Latino American) as a moderator of the longitudinal association of two forms of perceived ethnic discrimination (subtle and blatant) and suicide ideation. A total of 140 9th Grade students (54% African American) completed questionnaires reporting their experiences with discrimination and suicide ideation at baseline and one year later. The results indicated that higher levels of subtle, but not blatant, discrimination were associated longitudinally with higher levels of suicide ideation among adolescents. A non-‐significant trend suggested stronger associations among African American adolescents. Results suggest significant distress may develop from subtle discrimination experiences for adolescents, despite the perception of it being a milder form of discrimination.

Samuel Alexander Mestizo Mentor: Prof. Kia Caldwell

Samuel Alexander Mestizo is a rising senior double-‐majoring in Anthropology and Latin American & Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Inspired by his tumultuous experience coming-‐out to a traditional Salvadoran family, Mestizo’s research interests include queer theory, queer identity, queer ethnographies, and queer rights in relation to the Salvadoran LGBTI community. Last year, he was awarded the Joel Frankel Scholarship, the Ryan Heumann Anthropology Undergraduate Scholarship, and the Nancy Pascal Field Study Scholarship to pursue foundational research in the San Salvador area. His current research analyzes how the conditions of the Salvadoran queer community has changed since the 2009 Bloody June murders. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Mestizo plans to pursue a PhD in Anthropology and conduct research that will promote social equality for queer individuals of color. “’Nos están asesinando’ (‘They are murdering us’): The Salvadoran Queer Community Since the 2009 Bloody June Murders” This paper considers how the conditions of the Salvadoran queer community have changed from the 2009 Bloody June murders until the present day. Although violence has affected all Salvadoran citizens during the last twenty years, Salvadoran gangs targeted la diversidad sexual (the LGBTI community) for lethal hate crimes in June 2009. At work and in healthcare settings, La diversidad sexual has also suffered discrimination. Much like the physical hate crimes they experience, the cultural and institutional discrimination towards Salvadoran queer individuals often result in impunity. In this paper, I will attempt to answer why such vehemence against la diversidad sexual exists. Because queer theorists continue to debate the value of cultural studies, this paper first summarizes the disparate approaches anthropologists, feminists and queer theorists employ to study the subaltern. It then analyzes the Presidential Decree 56 and other government initiatives, considering what they suggest about the Salvadoran state’s attention to queer related human rights issues. The intention of this paper is not to judge Salvadoran culture or the government’s efforts to address the needs of la diversidad sexual but rather to contextualize the conditions in which the Salvadoran queer community negotiates everyday life.

Kalimah Mustafa Mentor: Prof. GerShun Avilez

Kalimah Mustafa is a senior English Major at the University of Massachusetts, Boston who is interested in Black literature and American poetry. She is the winner of the Academy of American Poets Award for her poem “slipping” and earned English Honors for her senior thesis on sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Kalimah is the Outreach Coordinator for Groundwork Somerville and has worked and volunteered for several other nonprofits that focus on food justice, ESOL classes, and youth job creation in low-‐ income communities and communities of color. After completing her undergraduate degree, Kalimah plans to pursue a PhD in African American literature and to continue her work with nonprofits in communities of color. “Isolating the Sensory Experience: Resistance in the Poetry of Norman Pritchard” In this paper, I examine how Norman Pritchard used experimental poetry to resist the racialized confines of canonical American literature. After discussing how W.E.B. DuBois, Stephen Henderson, Larry Neal, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston contributed to a standardized definition of African American literature, I argue that his poetry mixes mixing mediums in order to spotlight the visual or aural experience. Pritchard's experimental form enables him to adroitly navigate the standards of the African American canon. DuBois’ “The Criteria of Negro Art” sets the stage for the other critics to support and amend. I corroborate the similarities between “The Black Arts Movement” by Larry Neal, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” and Stephen Henderson’s “The Forms of Things Unknown.” I then dissect evasive similarities between the critical works. After these analyses, the paper details the ways in which Norman Pritchard engages the ideas presented in these essays. Pritchard’s pervasive absence in contemporary critical discussions has led to a hole in the discourse on the following matters: the white presence in canonized Black expression, Black aesthetics, and politics in African American literature. In its entirety, this paper illuminates the important contributions Pritchard’s poetry offers the discourse and how his poetry takes a model approach toward the standardized definition of African American poetry enacted by these iconic critics.

Merrick Osborne Mentor: Prof. Mitchell Prinstein Merrick Osborne is a rising junior and McNair Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A business and psychology double major, Merrick is fascinated by how organizational structure influences success in the workplace and beyond. In Dr. Enrique Neblett’s African-‐American psychology lab, he investigated the factors that can influence African-‐American wellness, and this research fostered his desire to identify interventions that will enhance minority success in the workplace. His interest in the workplace environment emerged during his research assistantship at the Kenan-‐Flagler Behavior (OB) Lab, where he has noted a void in the OB literature on whether minority-‐driven interventions enhance workplace performance. His experiences in the community, through his involvement in the Buckley Public Service Scholars program and as Vice-‐President of the Mu Zeta Chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, have inspired Merrick to pursue a doctoral education in organizational behavior psychology so he can find innovative ways to enhance minorities’ organizational environment. "A Longitudinal Analysis of how Absence Potentially Mediates the relationship among Likeability and Academic success” Objective: This study examines social factors that may predict adolescents’ academic achievement. It hypothesized both that peer likability and academic achievement would be longitudinally associated and that this association would be mediated by school absences. Methods: A total of 900 7th and 8th grade students (50% female, 51% non-‐White) from a low socioeconomic community in the southeastern US participated. Data was recorded twice: at a baseline time point and then one year later. To measure peer likeability for each adolescent, the study prompted students to gauge how much they liked each of their peers. Results: High levels of Time 1 likeability were longitudinally associated with higher Time 2 school grades while controlling for Time 1 grades. School absences during year 2 also predicted changes in grades between Times 1 and 2. However, likability was not longitudinally associated with absences. Thus, mediation could not be tested. Conclusions: Peer likeability and school absences independently predict adolescents’ school grades. Social factors should be considered in fostering adolescents’ academic achievement.

Miguel Penabella Mentor: Prof. Charlene Regester

Miguel Penabella is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in Comparative Literature and Communication Studies with research interests in the intersection of global cinema and race representation as well as topics in surrealism, horror, and new wave cinemas. He also enjoys studying popular culture and videogames, having been published in game studies periodicals First Person Scholar and Medium Difficulty, the latter of which was cited in an MIT thesis on gaming criticism. In addition to achieving Dean’s List status as of last spring, Miguel has also gained experience peer tutoring at The Learning Center at UNC’s Dey Hall, skills that he hopes will benefit him when he becomes a graduate student and subsequent professor in comparative literature. He currently has two research projects in progress: 1) his MURAP project on the portrayal of historically misrepresented and marginalized ethnic groups and the selective construction of racial identity by media outlets and 2) his honors thesis on film studies for presentation in the spring of 2015, is titled “A Pause for Reflection: The Suspended Memories of Oshima, Alea, & Kiarostami.” "Memories of (Mis)representation: Hegemonic Racial Narratives & The Uncanny Trauma of Images in Bamboozled and City of God" This project uses psychoanalysis and critical race theory to closely examine Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled in conjunction with Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 film City of God. More specifically, this essay engages Sigmund Freud’s writings on the uncanny and trauma theory with W.E.B. Dubois’ idea of double consciousness in relation to these two films. Bamboozled and City of God suggest that media companies that are unwilling to address racial issues contribute to the systematic repression of historically misrepresented or marginalized ethnic groups. Because both films center on characters working in media production, these works underscore the difficulty and psychological toll in dealing with the trauma of harmful imagery. These ideas are dissected in scene-‐specific analyses that weave together the aforesaid theories within the parameters of Bamboozled and City of God, arguing that these films evoke a long and traumatic history of image making.

Cassandra Perez Mentor: Kennetta Hammond Perry

Cassandra Perez is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley researching the intersection of federal recognition and environmental issues with indigenous communities. Her community involvement as a youth activist through the non-‐profit Communities for a Better Environment inspired her to double major in ethnic studies as well as society and environment. As a current Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she plans to study environmental activism in a larger independent research project. Cassandra aspires to pursue a PhD in An American Studies program and to continue connecting her scholarly work with her passion for social and environmental justice. "The Long Made Efforts for Self-‐ Determination: An examination of Federal Recognition and Environmental Justice Work Within the Lumbee Community" This research paper focuses on the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina and the intersecting discourses of federal recognition and environmental justice activism in the late 20th century. In the 1980s the Lumbee community came together to fight a proposed hazardous-‐waste facility in Robeson County, North Carolina. Using newspaper clippings, articles, and videos, this paper examines how the Lumbee have coordinated with organizations and community members to exercise self-‐determination in environmental justice arenas. It finds that through their environmental justice work, the Lumbee have claimed political power and asserted their right to make decisions that directly affect their community, economy, and livelihood. This essay situates Lumbee environmental justice activism in the 1980s within the larger history of federal recognition and argues that each must be understood in relation to the other. The Lumbee pursuit of environmental justice is tied to their larger effort to obtain federal recognition and finally become a fully self-‐autonomous community.

Ajene Robinson-‐Burris Mentor: Prof. Debra Skinner

Ajene Robinson-‐Burris is a rising junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in Global Studies and Philosophy and minoring in Classical Humanities. Always eager to understand other people and cultures, she has recently served as a Cultural Competency Leadership Institute Scholar and Multicultural Advisor. She has helped people in workplaces and residential communities to value diversity and communicate respectfully. Her passion for multicultural sensitivity also drives her research into how stakeholders, including people from diverse backgrounds, can collaborate in shaping just international policies. An aspiring professor of public policy, cultural competency, and global communities, Ajene looks forward to shaping culturally competent students. "Breaking Biocolonialism: The Importance of Informed Consent and Community Engagement with Indigenous Peoples in Genomic Research" Indigenous peoples have been the targets of biocolonialism. Biocolonialism refers to researchers from more technologically advanced countries extracting knowledge or biological samples from indigenous cultures for commercial development with the hopes of making a significant profit. In these efforts, little or nothing is given back to the people from whom the information came. As a result, indigenous peoples have often formed strong negative responses to genetic research, rejected scientists conducting research, and attacked studies they felt posed a threat to their communities. While it is true that indigenous peoples may benefit from genetic research, it is also the case that these endeavors may be harmful to them. This paper explores ways to conduct ethically-‐ and culturally-‐respectable research with indigenous populations. It does so by comparing genetic research studies conducted with the Havasupai tribe and the H3Africa study of schizophrenia among the Xhosa, looking at the ways the research studies were presented, how they engaged the community, whether they were transparent in their aims, and reviewing the returned results. I conclude that research with indigenous people can provide important benefits for them, but if researchers want to battle the stigma of biocolonialism, they must approach indigenous peoples with respect for their cultural values and be transparent in their research aims.

Rosalie Rubio Mentor: Prof. Navin Bapat

Rosalie Rubio is a native of Texas, a rising senior, and Carolina Covenant Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Within her broad studies of international security and politics, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, she explores feminist perspectives of political resistance, violence, and terrorism which have been traditionally marked as male-‐dominated subjects. She remains actively engaged in the Carolina community through her work in the Office of University Development and as a leader of multiple organizations focused on educating and empowering minority students and women. Upon graduating, she plans to pursue a career in the intelligence community before ultimately earning a PhD in international relations. “Understanding Female Terrorism: A Quantitative Study on Female Participation in Terrorist Activity” Theoretically speaking, terrorist groups that have been exposed to the same stimuli and have access to the same populations should utilize similar recruiting methods. However, some organizations choose to recruit women, whereas others do not. This study explores the puzzle of why some terrorist groups recruit females into their organizations while others tend to exclude them. I examine the motivations for more inclusive versus exclusive recruitment strategies in terrorist organizations by utilizing original data on the use of females in terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent from 2000-‐2006. I argue that the following kinds of terrorist groups are more likely to encourage active female participation: those operating in states where the government is stable, those who do not identify as religious, and those in a society with a propensity for gender disparities. The results indicate that nationalist organizations tend to engage women at significantly higher rates.

Karina Silva Mentor: Prof. Laura López-‐Sanders

Karina Silva is a senior at Washington State University studying human development, Spanish, family studies, and global leadership. As an intern with Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) in North Carolina, Karina has promoted health awareness, education, and services to Latino families. Her interest in human behavior and vulnerable populations’ access to health care has led her to study childhood obesity, health education programs, disease prevention, cultural factors that influence health status, and parent-‐child relationships. As a Ronald E. McNair Post-‐baccalaureate Achievement Program Scholar, she has researched the influence of parent-‐ mediated autonomy on how low-‐income Latino children self-‐regulate their calorie intake. She has presented her findings at various conferences, such as the 2014 meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (ISBNPA). Her outstanding work has also earned her a position in the Human Development department and membership in the Kappa Omicron Nu honor society. Her career goals are to earn a PhD, become a public health professor, and study both health behavior and health promotion.

"Childhood Obesity: Influence of Parental Behaviors Across Ethno-‐racial Groups" Although childhood obesity in America affects minorities the most, previous research on parenting has only compared one or two ethno-‐racial groups and has not effectively addressed parenting in households with obese people. This study examines the relationship between parenting in various ethno-‐racial groups and children’s body mass index as well as eating behaviors. To understand differences across various ethno-‐racial groups (Mexican, Other-‐Hispanic, White and African American), I used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to examine parental behaviors in households with obese children (BMI above the 95th percentile) who are 4-‐11 years old. The results showed statistically significant differences across ethno-‐racial groups in older children (4-‐11 years old). For example, children in both White and African American households consume more fast food than their Mexican counterparts; however, Mexican households report higher levels of sedentary times in children than do their White and African American counterparts. This study also found that differences between ethno-‐racial groups are more salient when socioeconomic status is lower. Of the six parental behaviors associated with obesity that I examined, five showed statistically significant differences between ethno-‐racial groups in poorer households (earning less than two times the federal poverty level), while only two of the obesity-‐related behaviors differed significantly in slightly wealthier households (earning between two and five times the federal poverty level). These results emphasize the importance of socioeconomic status and cultural sensitivity when designing health policy interventions pertaining to vulnerable populations.

Alecia Smith Mentor: Prof. Sherrick Hughes Alecia Smith is a rising senior at the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Political Science, Spanish, and Education Policy & Leadership. She researches the social context of education, critical race studies, black educational achievement, and the school-‐to-‐prison pipeline. Her research interests are animated by her voluntary work on and off campus as an English teacher for native Spanish speakers, a tutor for low-‐achieving middle and high school students, and as a mentor for teens awaiting court dates or further sentencing in a local juvenile detention center. Alecia plans to pursue a PhD in Education Policy & Leadership in the fall of 2015. “Good Student” vs. “Horrible Student:” An exploratory case study of teacher expectations in the lives of two black males.

Contemporary education literature tends to emphasize the “achievement gap” between black and white students and an additional gender gap among black students. Unfortunately, these gaps are often defined narrowly by test scores. Over-‐emphasizing test score gaps can, in turn, over-‐ emphasize “high vs. low achievement” labeling, while de-‐emphasizing the social context in which achievement gaps are constructed. Moreover, insufficient attention is given to understanding how this labeling can influence black students’ perceptions of (a) black peers, (b) themselves and (c) student-‐teacher relationships. There is evidence in the literature suggesting that achievement labels can negatively influence how teachers interact with their black students, thereby limiting their opportunities to thrive academically. This paper applies autoethnography to begin understanding how teacher expectations and the formation of student-‐teacher relationships may have influenced my academic trajectory in relation to two of my black male peers (i.e., Jacob and Christopher). My experiential data provides evidence of how “achievement gap” labels from high school contribute to my perceptions of Jacob and Christopher, myself and student-‐teacher relationships. Ultimately, Jacob and Christopher represent different academic experiences and trajectories that complement and challenge each other and me. The paper concludes with evidence-‐based implications and recommendations for future research in this area.

Christopher Raymond Watkins Mentor: Prof. Reginald Hildebrand

Christopher Raymond Watkins is a rising junior at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) studying political science. Committed to public service, Christopher has helped many community members through his work with the Youth Leadership Institute, EmPOWERment, Inc., and the Henry Frye Society. As a Youth Leadership Institute peer mentor, he has taught middle and high school students to value volunteering. As an administrative assistant for EmPOWERment, Inc., he has empowered people and communities to control their own destinies through affordable housing, community organizing/advocacy, and grassroots economic development. As current treasurer of the Henry Frye Society, he helps the organization to analyze local, state, and federal case studies, promote political awareness, and develop mechanisms for improving NC A&T University. Christopher plans to earn a doctoral degree in Political Science, become a professor, and use his academic position to assist students who similarly aspire to enter the academy. "Identifying the Enhancement of Black Education in Western North Carolina, 1870-‐1940" In 1868, the North Carolina General Assembly created a system of free public education for all citizens of the state. However, for a century following the creation of this system, the state’s support of education for blacks remained inferior to that for whites in almost every way. This paper will examine the various mechanisms blacks implemented to enhance education for black students in Buncombe, Burke, McDowell, and Rutherford counties in Western North Carolina between 1870 and 1940. It studies different types of schools that existed during this period as well as their physical structures, teachers, students, and curricula. It shows that in many (if not most) instances, blacks had to build their own school buildings, create private schools, supplement teachers’ salaries, and modify the state-‐ prescribed curriculum to enhance the education of black students.

Destiny Hemphill Duke MMUF Speaker

Destiny Hemphill is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Duke University. She expects to graduate in May 2015 with a B.A. in African & African American Studies as well as a B.A. in the Program in Literature in Global Cultural Studies. Her research interests include Black and Chicana Feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. More specifically, her undergraduate thesis examines the politics of melancholia in Black and Chicana Feminist Literature. "Investigating a Politics of Melancholia in Chicana Feminist Literature" In the United States’ contemporary sociopolitical landscape, legal redress has arguably mitigated some of the U.S.’s history of injustices. Nonetheless, it also has been largely inadequate in securing a totalizing justice for historically marginalized and disempowered peoples. Indeed, historically oppressed peoples still must contend with a social order in which physical, psychical, sexual and epistemological violence is directed at them. The injuries sustained by such violence indubitably have material effects such as disparities in housing and education; however, the injuries also have immaterial effects. To elucidate, the reality of a political landscape that remains structurally, systemically, and institutionally oppressive requires complex psychical and immaterial negotiations on the part of marginalized peoples. Attention to the more material consequences on marginalized peoples has traditionally eclipsed attention to the more immaterial ones. Nonetheless, I argue that melancholia, a psychoanalytically-‐derived concept that describes an ever-‐enduring process of grieving, can be useful in understanding and marking the psychical negotiations produced from the engagement of marginalized peoples with the social order.

Moreover, in resonance with the considerations of scholars such as David Eng, Shinhee Han, and Antonio Viego, my project argues that melancholia as an affective, immaterial response is politically useful. Melancholia points to disenfranchisements that can be articulated as losses of culture, language, and ideals. As such, I argue that melancholia is then useful in identifying how systems of oppression and processes such as racialization and assimilation perpetuate these material and immaterial losses. Further, in this way, melancholia can operate as a non-‐pathological, collective structure of feeling that can be politically mobilized as a critique of internal colonialism. In this endeavor, I analyze in my larger project a number of Black and Chicana feminist literary productions that melancholically remark upon the disenfranchisements (or losses) that result from interlocking systems of racial, gender, class, and sexual oppression.

MURAP expresses its gratitude to the following staff members and individuals for their assistance with the 2014 Conference and for their continued support of the program:

Shelby Dawkins-‐Law, Conference Coordinator Marissa García, Program Coordinator Jan Hendrickson-‐Smith, GRE Workshop Director & Hostess Extraordinaire Ben Wilson, GRE Assistant Will Cole, GRE Quantitative Assistant Julie Fann, Writing Coordinator Laurel Foote-‐Hudson, Writing and GRE Assistant Keith Gavigan, Communication Skills Instructor María Obando, Senior Graduate Assistant Jason Brouster, Resident Graduate Assistant Shanna Jean-‐Baptiste, Dorm and Office Assistant Kanisha Coleman, Alumni Coordinator Prof. Karla Slocum, Director, IAAR Lisa Quarles, Program & Research Assistant IAAR Amy King, Business Liaison Geeta Menon, Communications Manager Randy Simmons, Facilities Manager, Stone Center April Spruill, Administrative Manager, Stone Center Videography by Peter Goswick Catering by Med Deli, Breadman's, Sweet Jane’s Bakery, Carolina Catering, and The Bagel Bar Transportation by Ebrima Sohna, In God We Trust Taxi 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://www.murap.unc.edu