19th Annual Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program Academic Conference
RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE INTERNET AGE
July 25-26, 2013 Hitchcock Multipurpose Room Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture & History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Table of Contents History & Program Statistics………………………..pages 4-5 Schedule……………………………………………………..pages 6-8 Conference Panelist Biographies………………….pages 9-13 Alumni Panelist Biographies………………………...pages 14-15 MURAP Faculty Mentor Biographies……………..pages 16-21 MURAP Staff Biographies……………………………..pages 22-26 MURAP Student Biographies & Abstracts……...pages 27-50 Acknowledgements……………………………………...page 51
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Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program History This year marks the 19th anniversary of the MURAP Academic Conference and the 24th anniversary of the MURAP program. This mission of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) is to contribute in a significant way to achieving diversity in academia by increasing the number of students in the US—both from underrepresented minority groups as well as others with a proven commitment to diversity— who pursue doctoral degrees in the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts. MURAP is named after our first doctoral recipient, Dr. Mignon Moore, now an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and past director of Columbia’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUP) program. Professor Moore’s educational and professional pursuits are a model of the academic excellence and dedication to academic diversity that MURAP strives to uphold for all of its student fellows. In order to foster the entrance of talented students from diverse backgrounds into graduate school and faculty positions within our targeted areas, we provide a 10-week intensive residential summer program. The 20+ student in each year’s class, all rising juniors or seniors in colleges and universities from across the nation, work one-on-one with UNC-Chapel Hill faculty mentors to design and execute high-caliber research projects of their own. In addition, they attend four workshops geared to preparing them for the challenges ahead (GRE Review, Communication Skills, Writing Techniques and Clinic, and Graduate Professional Development) and participate in social and educational activities organized by the program’s graduate assistants or chosen by the members of the cohort. With the generous continued support of the Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, the Office of the Graduate School, and the Institute of African American Research, MURAP aims to achieve its mission by identifying and training students of great promise and helping them to become scholars of the highest distinction. Please see our list of “Summary Statistics” on the following page to gauge our program’s results as of our last graduating class. For more information about MURAP please visit our webpage at http:// www.unc.edu/depts/murap.
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MURAP Program Summary Statistics (as of June 2013)
Number Total number of MURAP Alumni (1989-2012)
404
Percent of Total 100%
Alumni who enrolled in graduate and professional school Alumni holding positions in Academia
208
55%
46
12%
Alumni who enrolled in UNC graduate programs Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the PhD Alumni who have earned a doctorate
38
10%
114
30%
63
17%
52
14%
94
25%
84
22%
10
3%
Doctorates in progress Alumni who have pursued or are pursuing the Master’s Degree Master’s degrees earned Master’s degrees in progress
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19th Annual MURAP Academic Conference Conference Title: “Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice in the Internet Age” Thursday July 25th & Friday July 26th Hitchcock Multipurpose Room Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 150 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599 Day 1— Thursday, July 25, 2013 8:00-9:00am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30am
Welcome, Prof. Karla Slocum, Director, Institute of African American Research Opening Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter, Director, Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program
9:30-10:00am
Introduction of the 2013 MURAP cohort of students, mentors, and staff
10:00-11:30am
A Sampling of MURAP Students’ Research—Part I Rachel Harmon, Cornell University “Sustaining Inequality: The Role of Prisons in Perpetuating Systems of Social Stratification in the United States” Christopher Robinson, North Carolina A&T University “Anti-Gay Bullying, Homophobia, and Violence: Student Experiences, Educational Outcomes, and the Limitations of NC State Policy” Amanda Rolon, The City University of New York—Hunter College “What it Means to be a Man: How Men Negotiate Privilege in Contemporary American Witch Literature”
11:30-12:00noon
Break
12:00-1:30pm
Scholar Panel I: Fashioning Identities and Change in Cyberspace Moderator: Prof. Kennetta Perry, East Carolina University Prof. William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr., Duke University “Tweeting in Color: Black and Latino Scholars on Twitter” Prof. Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University “B(l)ackChannels: The Interiorities of a Proper Black Life” Sa’ed Adel Atshan, Harvard University “Violence, Nonviolence, and Social Media: Trajectories of the Arab Spring”
1:30-2:30pm
Lunch
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2:30-4:30pm
Scholar Panel II: Media and Racial Identity: Insights for the Social Media Age Moderator: Prof. Lasana Harris, Duke University Prof. Joseph Winters, University of North Car olina at Charlotte “Representations of Black Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture” Prof. Jonathan Rosa, University of Massachu setts-Amherst “Language Change as Social Change?: Contesting Popular Representations of U.S. Latinas/os” LaCharles Ward, Northwestern University “Tweeting and (Re)Tweeting: Deconstructing Racism on Twitter and Challenging Post-Racial Ideology” Prof. Lasana Harris, Duke University “Stereotype Context: How the Media Promotes Dehumanizing Bayesian Inferences”
4:30pm
Concluding Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter
Day 2— Friday, July 26, 2013 8:00-9:00am
Breakfast
9:00-9:15am
Welcome, Dr. Carol Tresolini, Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
9:15-10:15am Part II
A Sampling of MURAP Students’ Research— Chanté Thompson, North Carolina State University “Regional Repercussions: The Rosenberg Affair and the Evolution of Jewish and Communist Identities in North Carolina, 1950-1956” Edith Benavides, Harvard University “Can the Madwoman Speak?: The Surrealist Representation of Madness in Nadja and ‘Down Below’”
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10:15-12:00noon
Scholar Panel III: Breaking Down Barriers and Stereotypes in the Digital Realm Moderator: Dr. Seth Kotch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Prof. Ashley Lucas, University of Michigan “Blogging, Social Media, and Incarceration: Online Connections Between the Public and Prisoners” Prof. Philip Christman, University of Michigan “Be Sane, Be Sane, Be Sane: Literary Writers, Social Media, and the Surprising Value of Oversharing” Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emory University “Raging Against the Machine: The Case of Naomi Schaefer Riley and The Chronicle of Higher Education”
12:00-1:30pm
Lunch
1:30-3:30pm
MURAP Alumni Panel Moderator & Panelist: Prof. Lasana Harris (MURAP ‘02), Assistant Professor, Duke University Antoinette Landor (MURAP ‘05), Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tressie McMillan Cottom (MURAP ’09), Doctoral Student, Emory University Andrew Martinez (MURAP ’09), Doctoral Student, University of California, Los Angeles Jason Brouster (MURAP ‘10), Master's Student, University of Kansas LaCharles Ward (MURAP ’10), Doctoral Student (Fall 2013), Northwestern University
3:30pm
Concluding Remarks, Prof. Rosa Perelmuter
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Conference Speakers’ Biographies Scholar Panelists Sa’ed Adel Atshan is a Joint PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University where he is a Soros Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow. He received an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2008. Sa'ed also received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2006 and he completed high school at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker institution which has been in the West Bank for over a century. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the Government of Dubai. Sa'ed is a member of Al-Qaws, an organization promoting LGBTQ rights for Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He is also a Lecturer in Peace and Justice Studies at Tufts University and he will be starting a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies this fall. Sa’ed was born to a Palestinian refugee family and was raised in the West Bank.
Philip Christman lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches first-year English at University of Michigan. For three years he taught English composition at North Carolina Central University, the nation’s oldest public historically black college, and he served for four years as Writing Coordinator at MURAP, a summer program that prepares outstanding minority undergrads for graduate school in the humanities. His writing has appeared in Annalemma, Feminist Formations, Paste Magazine, Open Letters Monthly, Books & Culture, The Christian Century, and other places. He holds an MA in English Literature from Marquette University and an MFA in fiction writing from University of South Carolina-Columbia. Starting in 2014, he will edit the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Broadly Tressie organizations, inequality, and education. Specifically, her doctoral research employs mixed methods to examine why students choose for-profit colleges, if forprofit credentials are socially construed as legitimate, and what these interactions means for social mobility and labor outcomes across and within national contexts. Tressie lectures and publishes widely. She has been invited to speak on issues of social media, social justice, race, feminism, graduate school, and education at MIT, UGA, GSU, UC-Irvine as well as national and international public policy agencies in Canada, New Zealand and across the U.S. Her public writing has appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Huffington Post among 9
Conference Speakers’ Biographies others. She has also appeared on NPR and Dan Rather Reports. Her academic work has appeared in Contexts and forthcoming from Critical Ethnography. She will be a graduate fellow at the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis this fall. Her research examines the link between 1996 changes that purported to “end welfare as we know it” and the rise in for-profit workforce credentials among poor women. She is lead editor of a forthcoming book on for-profit higher education from AERA books with her former MURAP mentor, Sandy Darity. She was selected for an Emory faculty appointment to the Public Voices Though Leadership program and was formerly an Engaged Research Fellow with Emory’s Office of UniversityCommunity Partnerships.
William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr. is Arts & Sciences Professor of Public
Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. He also serves as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and as Co-Director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality. Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economies, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization's highest honor. He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association. He also has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College and Claremont-McKenna College. He has served as Editor in Chief of the latest edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (Macmillan Reference, 2008) and as an Associate Editor of the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (2013). His most recent books are Economics, Economists, and Expectations: Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004) (co-authored with Warren Young and Robert Leeson) and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpande titled Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003) both 10
Conference Speakers’ Biographies published by Routledge. He has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals. Darity lives with his family in Durham, N.C. where he plays harmonica in a local blues band, occasionally coaches youth sports, and especially enjoys reading science fiction and speculative fiction.
Lasana T. Harris is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psycholo-
gy and Neuroscience, and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Harris was born and raised in Trinidad in the Caribbean. He joined the MURAP program (Class of 2002) as a rising senior, before receiving his B.S. in Psychology from Howard University and his MA and PhD degrees in Psychology from Princeton University. He also spent time as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at New York University, before assuming his current position at Duke. Research in his laboratory takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding social cognition, that is, how we figure out what someone else is thinking. Recent research suggests that this basic human ability is fungible and can be extended to agents that do not have minds, resulting in anthropomorphism, or withheld from human beings with minds, resulting in dehumanized perception. Social cognition is necessary for social interaction, and anthropomorphism and dehumanized perception represent boundary conditions for this important phenomenon.
Ashley Lucas is Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama and Director of
the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan. She holds a B.A. 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. 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. Her book manuscript, entitled We All Looking at Walls: Ethnographic Theatre in Prison Contexts, is currently under review at University of Michigan Press. Lucas was recently invited to be the lead writer for the Methuen Critical Companion on Prison Theatre, which will analyze 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, with 11
Conference Speakers’ Biographies sociologist Jodie Lawston, Lucas guest edited a special issue of the National American Music, and Revista de Literatura Contemporania de México. Together 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 entitled Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists (SUNY Press 2011) and write a blog by the same title: http:// razorwirewomen.wordpress.com.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the De-
partment of African & African-American Studies at Duke University where he teaches courses on race, gender and sexuality in popular culture, popular music studies, including Hip-Hop studies, Black intellectual history and the Digital Humanities. Neal received his PhD in American Studies from University at Buffalo-The State University of New York. He is the author of five books including 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), New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), and the recently published Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (2013). Neal is also co-editor of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004; 2011). His pioneering work on black masculinity and Hip-Hop has opened up important spaces for future generations of scholars. His transformative approach is equally evident with his blog New Black Man (In Exile) and his weekly web show Left of Black. Neal is a frequent commentator for National Public Radio and a regular columnist for theLoop21.com. In 2012, the Words, Beats and Life Foundation named him Hip-Hop Scholar of the year. Most recently, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University selected Neal as a 201314 Fellow at the Hip-Hop Archive Research Institute. Highlighting the power and potential of scholarship and critical commentary that extends beyond the classroom, Dr. Neal is a bridge leader within the academy, serving as a link between scholars, communities, theories and conversations on and offline.
Jonathan Rosa is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At UMass he holds affiliations with the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration in the School of Education, and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies. He also serves as the founder and director of the Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology Digital Laboratory. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis 12
Conference Speakers’ Biographies and Latina/o Studies Program at New York University. Jonathan received his MA and PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. in Linguistics and Educational Studies from Swarthmore College. His research analyzes the joint creation of linguistic and ethnoracial categories, with a particular focus on language ideologies and practices associated with U.S. Latinas/os. He is currently completing a book manuscript, titled Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Constructing Latina/o Ethnolinguistic Identities in an American High School. In addition to these scholarly commitments, Jonathan is an ongoing participant in public anthropology projects focused on media representations of immigration, language, and U.S. Latinas/os.
LaCharles Ward (MA, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale) is a
Doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Public Culture program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His research and academic interests lie at the junctures of communication and public culture, critical race theory and racism, critical media studies, and Black popular culture. His thesis, "Oh, You Are An Exception!": Narratives of Academic Success and Black Males Resistance to Systemic Racism," used Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explore how Black male students at Traditionally White Institutions defined, described, and spoke back to the imposition of systemic racism. Currently, he is working on an article entitled “Tweeting, (Re) Tweeting, and Racist Discourse: Virtualized Racism and Deconstructing Post-Racist Ideology on Twitter.”
Joseph Winters (B.A., Harvard University; M.T.S., Duke Divinity School; PhD, Princeton University) joined the UNC Charlotte faculty in 2009. His research interests lie at the intersection of Modern Religious Thought, Africana Studies, and Critical Theory. He teaches courses on race and religion, race and film, religion and critical theory, as well as courses on literature and literary theory. His current book project, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, examines the relationship between loss and hope in the black literary tradition (WEB DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison) and the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin). Overall, he is interested in the ways in which our social worlds both produce and deny various forms of trauma and loss. He is also interested in locating discourses and practices (religious, aesthetic, political) that articulate and respond to these all too human conditions. In his spare time, he tries to figure out how he can develop a research project that involves The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Rescue Me.
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Conference Speakers’ Biographies Alumni Panelists Jason Brouster is a graduate of Wayne State University where he re-
ceived his BA in Africana Studies in the Fall of 2011. He is currently a MA student at the University of Kansas majoring in African & African American Studies. He will be entering his third semester this coming fall and will begin his MA Thesis entitled Radical Race Man: The Life and Times of Chester I. Lewis. Jason’s research interests include the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, urban policy, criminology, gender and sports. This past February he was invited to present his paper titled Motor City Showdown: Police Brutality, Black Power, and the Carceral State in Detroit at the Duke University 2013 Graduate Student History Conference Navigating Place and Power. Jason has also presented this paper at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill sixth annual Triangle African American History Colloquium New Perspectives Conference in February 2012. Jason also wrote the selected bibliography for an essay written by Distinguished Professor and Africana Studies Chair Melba J. Boyd. The essay is titled The Legacy of Darwin T. Turner and the Struggle for African American Studies and was published in the Winter 2012 issue of the Black Scholar journal. Most recently, Jason is working on several projects at the University of Kansas Spencer Library where he currently works as a research assistant. These projects entail researching the contributions of African Americans during WWII in Kansas and Missouri, and the history of African Americans in the medical field in Kansas and Missouri.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (see Scholar Panelists’ Bios). Lasana Harris (see Scholar Panelists’ Bios). Antoinette M. Landor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center
for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She earned her PhD in Human Development and Family Science from the University of Georgia in 2012. Her research focuses on the functionality of intimate relationships by investigating the predictors of sexual behavior and romantic relationship experiences in adolescence and emerging adulthood. She also examines the impact of skin tone on these and other life chance outcomes both within and outside the family context. Her dissertation research investigated whether the skin tone of over 600 African American adolescents and parents impacted family processes and racerelated outcomes. The findings from her dissertation were the catalyst to her present research on how skin tone influences sexual health and relationship outcomes. Dr. Landor is currently serving as an Emerging Scholars Representative for the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA). 14
Conference Speakers’ Biographies In addition, she recently won the 2012 Best Proposal Award from the Research and Theory Section at the National Council on Family Relation (NCFR) Conference in Phoenix, AZ and was a 2012 winner of the Society for Research on Adolescence Student Poster Award Competition during the national conference held in Vancouver, Canada.
Andrew Martínez studies Culture and Performance at UCLA. His research seeks to convey the way choreographing of national identity is made material through the example of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba as a repository of 1959 revolutionary conditions. He is interested in the ways artistic practice can uphold, critique, or reinscribe national ideologies. He was recently awarded the Elaine Klein Krown Fine Arts Scholarship. This summer he assisted Professor Ashley Lucas in Brazil, and he voyages to Cuba for fieldwork later this summer. He delights in taking ballet class and playing the piano.
LaCharles Ward (see Scholar Panelists’ Bios).
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MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies
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MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies 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 coinvestigator 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 entitled, Gender, Race, and Health Equity in Brazil: Intersectional Perspectives on Policy and Practice.
Reginald F. Hildebrand is an Associate Professor of African American
Studies and History at UNC-Chapel Hill. He received his BA and MA from Howard University and his PhD from Princeton University. He is author of 17
MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies 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 entitled "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, Professor 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. 18
MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies 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. She 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 entitled “Black Masks, German Rebels: Music, Mimicry and Black Masculinity in Postwar German Culture.”
Enrique W. Neblett, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Lab Director of the African American Youth Wellness Laboratory at UNCChapel Hill. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, also in psychology, at Howard University before joining the faculty in the Department of Psychology at UNC in 2008. Dr. Neblett’s research examines the association between racism-related stress and health in African American and ethnic minority youth, with a focus on racial and ethnic protective factors and mechanisms that promote youth wellness. His work has been presented at several national and international conferences and published in journals such as Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, Child Development, The Journal of Counseling Psychology, The Journal of Research on Adolescence, and The Journal of Black Psychology. In addition to Neblett’s research accomplishments, he regularly teaches courses such as Racism, Racial Identity and African American Mental Health, Developmental Psychopathology, African American Psychology, and Psychological Disorders of Childhood and Adolescence. The Faculty Advisor of the Minority Psychology Student Association, Dr. Neblett has served as the Co-Chair of the Diversity Training Committee in the Department of Psychology. In 2013, he served as Chair of the 19th Annual Black Graduate Conference in Psychology, a national conference that provides Black graduate students in psychology with opportunities to present their research, gain professional development experiences, and network with Black faculty and other Black graduate students from across the nation. Dr. Neblett has been recognized by the Department of Psychology on several occasions for teaching excellence and, in 2010, he was named the UNC Psychology Club’s Faculty Research Mentor of the Year for “outstanding mentorship 19
MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies to undergraduate students conducting research in psychology.” He is also a past recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, a two-year research and training award to examine racial identity, coping with racism, and cardiovascular physiological responses to stress. Dr. Neblett is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Society for Research on Adolescence.
Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Assistant Professor in the Depart-
ment of History at East Carolina University where she is responsible for teaching courses in Atlantic World History and African & African American Studies. Dr. Perry was a member of the summer 2000 MURAP cohort and received a doctorate in Comparative Black History at Michigan State University in 2007. She has completed a predoctoral research fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American Studies and a postdoctoral research appointment in the Department of History at Duke University. For the 2012-2013 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.
Michelle Robinson is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at
UNC-Chapel Hill. She earned an AB in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University and a Master’s of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School before receiving her PhD in American and New England Studies from Boston University. She is the author of a collection of poems, The Life of a Hunter, published by Kuhl House Press at the University of Iowa in 2005. At UNC, Professor Robinson teaches courses in film, literature and U.S. religious history. Her articles have appeared in Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Places for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor and Detection in American Literature.
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MURAP Faculty Mentors’ Biographies Isaac Unah is Associate Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He earned his B.S. in economics and management science from SUNY-Cortland and both his MA and PhD in political science from SUNYStony Brook. From 2005-2007 Unah served as visiting scientist and program director for the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Prof. Unah’s research and teaching interests focus on judicial institutions and their collective influence on public policy and bureaucratic behavior. His research has been published in several political science, law, and interdisciplinary social science journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Law & Policy, Business and Politics, and several major law reviews. His first book, The Courts of International Trade: Judicial Specialization, Expertise, and Bureaucratic Policymaking (University of Michigan Press, 1998), examines the role of specialized courts in U.S. trade policy implementation. His second book, The Supreme Court in American Politics (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) uses an evolutionary perspective to give readers a firm understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court. Among his ongoing projects, Unah is researching punishment politics, especially the political motivations underlying the use of capital punishment in the United States.
Ariana Vigil is an Assistant Professor in the department of Women and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in English from Cornell University in 2008. Her research focuses on Latina/o cultural production, transnational activism, and state-backed violence in the Americas. Her book manuscript, Ni Aquí Ni Allá: Military Intervention, Domestic Violence and Latina/o Literature (1979-2005) examines U.S. Latina/o responses to military intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Iraq. Dr. Vigil's other research interests include gender and transnationalism, Jewish Latina/o studies, art and activism, and the relationship between transnational violence, nation-state formation, and sexuality. She teaches courses that explore violence, immigration, and identity in Latina/o literature.
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MURAP Staff Biographies
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MURAP Staff Biographies Antonio De Jesus Alanís (MURAP 2012) is a first-generation college student who graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in May 2013. Prior to his senior year in UNC-Chapel Hill, in the summer of 2012, Antonio joined MURAP and investigated some cultural representations of the United States and Mexico in two historical novels: Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela and Pocho by Jose Antonio Villarreal. For this winter, Antonio plans to apply to multiple Spanish literature programs throughout the nation where he will most likely study a combination of Mexican and Mesomerican literature.
Kanisha Coleman (MURAP 2011) received her BA in Psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill in May 2012. She is MURAP’s Alumni Coordinator, a second year doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Social Work, and a recipient of the Sam & Betsy Reeves Doctoral Fellowship. During her first year of graduate school, Kanisha interned and conducted research at a domestic violence agency in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her research interests include child mental health and the development of children who have suffered various forms of maltreatment. She is also interested in improving parent-child relationships and the differential effects the child welfare system has on families from diverse backgrounds. Kanisha will serve as a chair of the Black Student Caucus, a student organization committed to improving diversity, beginning Fall 2013.
Marissa Garcia received her BA in Psychology and Spanish from UNC-
Chapel Hill in 2012. Marissa is the Program Coordinator for MURAP as well as a research assistant for the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. She spent the summer of 2012 participating in the University of Southern California’s Latino Mental Health Research Training Program. As a research trainee, she worked at the National Autonomous University of Mexico for 10 weeks and during that time tested the reliability and validity of the Familism Scale with a sample from Mexico City. Marissa plans to apply to graduate school this Fall and pursue a dual degree—a master’s in healthcare administration and a master’s in business administration. In her free time, she enjoys running and watching soccer.
Keith Gavigan is an actor and educator, recently seen in The Mexican with the Teatro Latina/o Series at UNC. He has worked in theatre and film with credits including a lead role in Drymount, which won the 1996 Sundance Film Festival short film award. As an instructor, Keith taught presentation skills and acting for the camera in seminars and workshops in Chicago and Cincinnati and has served as guest lecturer in theatre courses at UNC. Keith has a passion for combining the arts and sciences 23
MURAP Staff Biographies and was successful in his creative contributions to save rhinos, sharks, whales, and tigers as a conservation educator at a number of organizations, including Carolina Tiger Rescue, The John G. Shedd Aquarium, Aquarium of the Bay, Cincinnati Zoo, and San Francisco Zoo. He is a member of the Society of American Fight Directors and recently worked on staging fight choreography for Robin Hood at Trinity High School in Chapel Hill. He received a MFA in Dramatic Performance from the CollegeConservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati and a BA in Theatre from Western Illinois University.
Isaura GodĂnez (MURAP 2012) graduated this May from the California State University at Chico. She received a BA in anthropology and Latin American studies and a minor in biology. Last summer she completed the MURAP program under the guidance of Dr. Debra Skinner. Her research focused on the sociopolitical restrictions placed on a specific antiretroviral in Zambia. She is interested in continuing research in health disparities and particularly interested in differential disease prevalence among populations, especially diseases with a genetic basis. She plans to begin a doctoral program in molecular anthropology in the fall of 2014. Jan Hendrickson-Smith is training program coordinator at the Carolina Population Center (CPC) and lead instructor for the MURAP/CPC GRE workshop. She holds a Master’s degree in economics from the Pennsylvania State University, where she also served as director of computing at the Population Research Institute, and taught courses in statistical programming and introductory computing. As CPC training program coordinator, she coordinates all administrative aspects of a population 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.
Maria Obando (MURAP 2008) is a rising fifth-year doctoral student in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in 20th century Latina/o and African American literature, particularly how Latinos and African Americas are represented in drama. Her focus on dramatic texts includes their historical, cultural and literary contexts as well as their performative aspects. She has served as Graduate Assistant for the past four summers.
Ezelle Sanford III (MURAP 2011) is a matriculating doctoral student at Princeton University, studying the history of medicine. He is an alumnus of 24
MURAP Staff Biographies Washington University in St. Louis where he studied Anthropology and Public Health. His research interests include the role of black medical professionals in movements for social equality, the institution of the black hospital, health policy, medical activism, and the intersection of social and biological factors that influence racial health disparities. As a Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellow, he pursued these interests which resulted in the publication, “Re-Thinking the Black Hospital: Race, Community, and Healing in the Jim Crow and Contemporary Eras.” As an activist in his own right, he has worked with the Charlotte Coalition for Social Justice as a community youth organizer and as a researcher studying disparities in access to mental health services in his hometown of Charlotte, NC. He won the John B. Ervin Scholarship, which recruits passionate, diverse and intellectually capable students to Washington University. Recently, he traveled to South Africa with the School for International Training studying community health and social policy. His studies abroad culminated in a paper entitled “Health is Our Terrain of Struggle: Physicians’ fight for medical equality in the anti-apartheid movement of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.”
Samanthis Smalls (MURAP 2008) is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Duke
University’s department of history; she is also a Duke Dean’s Graduate Fellow and Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. She received her BA in History from Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. Her research interests include the United States broadly with a focus on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South. Her dissertation, “Slaves, Jails, and the Question of Ownership” examines the use of power by nineteenth-century South Carolina state government in policing its enslaved population, particularly the imprisonment of enslaved people in antebellum jails and workhouses. Her research explores the intersections of government, power, and the discipline of black bodies with a particular focus on slavery, slave labor, property and the law.
Robin Smith is in her fifth year of the PhD program in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. This year she defended the prospectus for her dissertation, which will examine poetic representations of industrial labor in antebellum America. Specifically, she argues that for both industrial workers and professional authors, two new occupations created by the industrial revolution, poetry was a major site for representing hopes and anxieties about industrialization because of poetry's association with leisure and self-making. This is her third summer working for MURAP, and this ear she is serving as the Writing Coordinator and a GRE Verbal tutor.
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MURAP Staff Biographies Ben Wilson received his B.S. in mathematics from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 2009. He serves as the math instructor for MURAP’s GRE workshop, a post he has held for three summers. Ben is a rising fourth year doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill in Pure Mathematics. He has taught undergraduate math courses for seven semesters including: College Algebra, Calculus I and Calculus II. Ben has also tutored college and high school students in the Chapel Hill area.
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MURAP Student Biographies
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Edith Benavides Faculty Mentor: Priscilla Layne Edith Benavides is a rising senior at Harvard University studying Romance Languages and Literatures. Her academic interests include the historical understandings of mental illness in Spanish and French literatures. In 2012, Edith received the prestigious Susan Anthony Potter Prize in Literature for her research on madness during the Spanish Golden Age. That same year, she received the Cashin President’s Innovation Fellowship, a merit-based research grant given to three Harvard undergraduates each year. Edith plans to earn a PhD in Spanish Literature and continue to be an advocate for social justice as a professor in higher education.
“Can the Madwoman Speak? : The Surrealist Representation of Madness in Nadja and ‘Down Below’” Scholars of Surrealism, an artistic movement intent on destabilizing society by exalting madness in art, agree that madness played an integral role in the development of the movement. Andre Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) portrays the madman as a gifted seer who poses a threat to societal conventions, giving madness revolutionary potential. Breton, however, diverges from this initial ideology in Nadja (1928), the first Surrealist novel. In Nadja, a sane narrator is selfishly infatuated with a madwoman who, once institutionalized, poses a threat to his intellectual well-being. It is not until 1944 that Leonora Carrington’s short story “Down Below” (1944) venerates madness in a Surrealist narrative. Conversely, “Down Below” is the story of a madwoman striving to break away from an asylum, driven by insanity to liberate war-torn Europe in the 1940s. Carrington’s madwoman finds hope for life beyond institutionalization, while Breton’s narrator sees madness as an endangering condition. Literary scholars have overlooked this representational discrepancy in Surrealist literature. In comparing these distinct portrayals of madness, this project shows how Surrealist literature representatively transformed madness from a debilitating illness to a normalized condition. This project also explores how literary constructions of madness delve into the politics of exploiting marginal groups for aesthetic purposes. 28
Imani Cooper Faculty Mentor: Priscilla Layne Imani Cooper is a rising junior at The City College of New York-CUNY, pursuing a degree in English with a minor in French language studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and English honors student, Imani explores the commonalities between French and English Romantic poetry. As a City College student ambassador, she serves as a tour guide and peer mentor for incoming freshman and transfer students. Imani also serves as a District Leader in her hometown of New Rochelle, N.Y., where she advocates for educational rights and budget expansion for foreign language resources in grades K-12. After MURAP, Imani will study abroad at the Universite Paris 8, Vincennes-Saint-Denis, where she will expand her research on Phyllis Wheatley using a transatlantic lens. Imani plans to obtain a PhD in either Comparative or English Literature.
“Fancy a Rebellion? An Analysis on Phillis Wheatley’s Poetic Defiance of Romantic and Enlightenment Limitations” According to Enlightenment thought, Imagination was a faculty of childlike folly, and false truths. In the late 18th century a group of poets pushed against the Enlightenment movement, which centered on reason, rationality, and science, by advocating for a philosophical approach to Imagination. In this essay I closely analyze the critical conversations on Imagination surrounding 18th century through America’s first African-American poet to be published, Phillis Wheatley. I argue that Wheatley’s poems were in fact in dialogue with the Romantic poets of her time. Wheatley’s works provide a profound outlet for the African-American voice and through these works, she remained in conversation with other poets during the Enlightenment. I will examine several poems, including “On Atheism” “On Deism” and “On Imagination” in order to investigate Wheatley’s contribution to the intellectual thought of the early Romantics. Additionally, I will consider how Wheatley frames Imagination within her work and how her ideas reflect the social expectations of her time. Wheatley’s ideas contrast with popular Romantic thought. Through my analysis I draw a clear image of Wheatley’s rebellion against her restricted social status, orthodox aesthetics, and Romantic and Enlightenment thought, in order to claim Imagination as the supreme deity.
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Khemani Gibson Faculty Mentor: Kennetta Perry Khemani Gibson is a rising senior at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, studying history, Pan-African Studies, and Spanish. As a Baldwin Honors Scholar, Khemani will continue the work started at MURAP in his honors thesis. By graduation, Khemani will have contributed 400 hours to improving access to education in urban communities with the Civic Scholars Program. He is a member of several national honor societies such as Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta (History), and Sigma Delta Pi (Spanish). Khemani plans to obtain a PhD in Caribbean and Atlantic History, concentrating on the African Diaspora. He plans to investigate how Twentieth-century legacies of slavery and colonialism played a role in constructing race in Latin American and Caribbean nations, and how different definitions of race clashed with those in the United States.
“The Point of Empire: The Intersection of Jamaican Labor Migration and Western Imperialisms in Panama, 1881-1904� By the 1850s, less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, black West Indians began to exercise their newfound freedom by choosing to migrate to the Isthmus of Panama to start new lives and search for economic opportunities. Low wages, the lack of job opportunities and land ownership, and disenfranchisement forced West Indians to seek other labor opportunities outside of the confines of their islands. Therefore, when the French started construction on an inter-oceanic canal in 1881, approximately 20,000 West Indians would leave for Panama between the years of 1881-1888, the majority of who were Jamaicans. This study seeks to examine how the French canal construction attracted Jamaican laborers seeking economic opportunities in Panama and how it created a foundation for West Indian labor in Panama that would be expanded under the American period of construction. Understanding the historical context behind this migration in the 1880s sheds light on why Jamaicans returned to work on the American construction project in 1904. Taking a transnational approach, this project explores how Jamaicans used labor migration to reimagine their freedom and economic opportunity in the changing political and imperial dynamics of the Caribbean region. Moreover, it intends to examine the extent to which the United States capitalized on the large unemployed Afro-Caribbean workforce following the failed attempt at canal construction by the French. 30
Rachel Harmon Faculty Mentor: Isaac Unah Rachel Harmon is a rising junior studying Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her academic interests are rooted in her commitment to social justice and include community -driven economic development, economic inequity, theories of social change, and the social, political, and economic costs of racialized mass incarceration. Last summer Rachel served as a research intern with the Restaurant Opportunities Center, which focuses on improving working conditions and wages for restaurant workers through participatory research, policy work, employer engagement, and workplace justice campaigns. At Cornell, Rachel is a recently selected Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a recipient of the Presidential Research Scholarship, which supports select undergraduate students by providing faculty mentorship and financial research support. She is also a Public Service Center Scholar, a distinction that supports her academic work and civic engagement, and she is a teaching assistant through the Cornell Prison Education Program. “Sustaining Inequality: The Role of Prisons in Perpetuating Systems of Social Stratification in the United States� The rapid growth, vast size, and racial imbalance of the carceral system in the United States is the focus of a great body of academic inquiry as well as popular news and commentary. Past research on mass incarceration has focused on examining the causes of the rise in incarceration rates and on the efficacy of incarceration in reducing crime, however, recent research has turned to examining the social, political, and economic costs and consequences of four decades of increasing levels of incarceration. This study contributes to the literature by examining the long-term consequences of mass incarceration in terms of reproducing and exacerbating patterns of social inequality. I explore the impact of increased incarceration rates on economic indicators in the United States using a dataset from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) on the impact of state sentencing policies on incarceration rates between 1975 and 2002. This study employs instrumental variable techniques to isolate the effects of poverty and income inequality on incarceration from the effects of incarceration on poverty and income inequality, thereby assessing the impact of incarceration on economic well-being. This study will compare states by the amount of budgetary growth allocated to corrections spending relative to social welfare spending to determine if there is a significant difference in the impact of incarceration on poverty and income inequality between these states. 31
Stephanie Harris Faculty Mentor: Enrique Neblett Stephanie Harris is a rising senior studying Human Development in Education at Brown University. This summer, she is exploring the relationship between Africentric Worldview and perceived experiences of discrimination in AfricanAmerican college students. In the past, Stephanie has worked as an intern at the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health and the Bradley Hospital Inpatient Psychiatry Unit. At the Rhode Island Hospital Department of Outpatient Psychiatry, Stephanie gained experience in observing group counseling sessions and administering Structured Clinical Interviews for DSM-IV (SCIDs). She is an associate of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers and recipient of numerous merit-based scholarships, such as the Massachusetts Indian Scholarship and a memorial scholarship from the Delta Sigma Theta Boston Alumnae Chapter. At Brown, Stephanie works as a coordinator of the Minority Peer Counselor Friends, a group of students who work to spread awareness on social justice issues, particularly racism. Stephanie will be pursuing honors in her department at her home institution and plans to attend graduate school for a PhD in Counseling Psychology. “The Relationship between Africentric Worldview and Experiences of Racial Discrimination in African-American Men and Women� Numerous studies have examined how African-American college students cope with racial discrimination. Africentric worldview, a system of values and principles that influence the thoughts and behaviors of African Americans, is a cultural factor that may influence how African Americans cope with racial discrimination. Few studies investigating Africentric worldview have examined the role of gender. Given that spirituality is a central component of Africentric worldview and is an important factor in the coping strategies of African-American women, it may be that the impact of Africentric worldview is stronger for women than for men. This study investigates the role of gender as a moderator of the relationship between Africentric worldview and psychological distress resulting from experiences of racial discrimination. 288 African-American college students completed a measure of Africentric worldview and indicated the extent to which they had been bothered by discriminatory events. This study may have implications for the ways in which gender may influence other components of Africentric worldview, such as communalism and harmony with nature.
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Lauren Henley Faculty Mentor: Kennetta Perry Lauren Henley is a rising junior at Washington University in St. Louis majoring in History and African and African-American Studies. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Phi Alpha Theta’s Gateway Journal and a recipient of both the merit-based John B. Ervin Scholarship and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, and the institutionalization of black female criminality. Under the guidance of Dr. Sowande Mustakeem and funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research, Lauren investigated black female juvenile delinquency at the height of the Progressive era. This resulted in an article publication entitled “Delinquents, Deviants, and Dependents: A Comparative Study of Young Black Females at the Missouri State Industrial School for Negro Girls and the Virginia State Industrial Home for Colored Girls” in the Washington University Undergraduate Research Digest. This summer, Lauren will delve into archival records of the North Carolina State Industrial School for Colored Girls. She intends to both connect this reformatory to its model establishment in Virginia and explore the lived experiences of criminalized black adolescents. “Institutionalized Identities: Autonomous Adolescents at the North Carolina State Industrial School for Colored Girls” In 1925, the North Carolina State Industrial School for Colored Girls, also known as Efland Home, was established to rehabilitate black female juvenile delinquents through the use of Progressivist and racial uplift ideologies. Through exploration of the contested notion of black girlhood in the early twentieth century, this work argues that these institutionalized bodies consciously fought against the projection of labels like “delinquent” and “criminal” by reappropriating expectations of blackness, femininity, and criminality to exert successful measures of autonomy. Acknowledging heightened control of female sexuality by clubwomen under Progressivism, this research focuses on the narratives of these seemingly wayward girls. This project appreciates age, particularly adolescence, as an often-neglected perspective which offers lived narratives of this racialized delinquent identity. Often, contemporary literature on black women’s history ignores age as a valuable category of experience, focusing instead on race, class, and gender as more quantifiable means of understanding identity. Lastly, this work reflects on the archive’s selective offerings of primary source material as a methodological limitation, acknowledging the role of these subjective collections in the creation of new knowledge. Thus, it is possible to understand how criminality is simultaneously mapped onto young black females in the 1920s and 1930s but also reiterated in the preserved historical record. 33
Shanna Jean-Baptiste Faculty Mentor: Priscilla Layne Shanna Jean-Baptiste is a rising senior at The City College of New York, CUNY, studying French literature and history. She grew up in Jacmel, a southern town in Haiti, where she received both Haitian and French Baccalaureats. From an early age, Shanna turned to novels written by Haitian authors for more intellectual engagement with her cultural heritage. The work of early twentieth-century realist novelist Fernand Hibbert (1873-1928) titled Les Thazar (1907) stood out to her for its unprecedented portrayal of the Haitian upper-class, particularly upper-class Haitian women. Fluent in English, French, and Kreyol, Shanna plans to engage with Hibbert’s novel and to consider the ways in which the novel fits into more transnational discourses on race, class, and gender. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Shanna has used this opportunity to further her general research interests, which include Francophone literature, post-colonialism, critical theory, and gender studies. “The Personal is Political: Gender and National Identity in Fernand Hibbert's Les Thazar” Haitian novelist Fernand Hibbert’s secod novel, Les Thazar (1907), narrates the story of a bourgeois family of Port-au-Prince, the Thazars, who try to find an adequate suitor for their daughter Cecile during the late 1890s. Her mother, Madame Thazar, disregards the Haitian Lionel Brion, and instead pushes her daughter to marry Schlieden, a clumsy yet successful German businessman. This paper examines Hibbert’s interpretation of how the women of the Haitian bourgeoisie fit in a discourse of nationalism. Long after its independence, the proper means of asserting Haiti’s national identity remained controversial, especially for the bourgeoisie. Many men believed that by marrying foreigners, women of the bourgeoisie jeopardized the integrity of national identity. Indeed, previous critics have argued that in a Postcolonial nation men define national identity through their actions in the public sphere, while women are in charge of maintaining national identity in the private sphere. Contrary to this approach, I argue that even though the female characters of the novel are primarily confined to the private sphere, Madame Thazar nonetheless uses marriage and consumerism to engage with foreigners and is consequently able to exert power in the public sphere. By offering a new analysis of Les Thazar, this project aims to show that, in the context of the Haitian bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century, the strict separation between the public and private spheres in a bourgeois culture is in fact not as rigid as has often been suggested. 34
Elisa Lee Faculty Mentor: Ariana Vigil Elisa Lee is a rising junior at Macalester College majoring in American Studies and minoring in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Elisa's academic interests include Women of Color Feminisms, Critical Race Theory, and Queer of Color Critique. This summer, Elisa hopes to investigate the experience of “coming out of the closet” for queer people of color from immigrant backgrounds and will conduct this research and analysis through interviews. Elisa's academic interests are informed and shaped by Elisa's community involvement. As an employee of the Department of Multicultural Life at Macalester College, Elisa facilitates and promotes critical dialogues surrounding social justice issues and the intersections of multiple identities. Elisa serves as a co-chair of FIA*STARSA (Feminists in Action*Students Together Against Rape and Sexual Assault) and is an active member of the Women's History Month Planning Committee and the Queer People of Color Identity Collective. Elisa plans to pursue a PhD in American Studies and remain involved with working-class, immigrant, women and gender non-conforming people of color communities.
“Counter Narratives to “Coming Out”: A Critical Reimagination” Despite the increasing number of scholars critiquing the narrative of “coming out of the closet,” this trope is still presented as the only way to achieve “liberation” and “legibility” for queer individuals in the United States. Through the oral histories of queer people of color from immigrant backgrounds, this research expands upon the current scholarship to illuminate the problems of enforcing this white, Western discourse on all queer bodies. This paper analyzes oral histories collected through inperson interviews and/or phone interviews from individuals who selfidentify with this community; interviews were conducted in the Chapel Hill area of North Carolina and the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Utilizing Women of Color Feminist Critique and a Queer of Color Critique, my analysis suggests that language, both verbal and non-verbal, plays a critical role in the “coming out” process, or lack thereof. Furthermore, this paper explores how queer people of color from immigrant backgrounds have found alternative ways to embody and express their queer sexuality that maintain a fine balance of subverting and reproducing existing norms and structures.
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Monique McKenny Faculty Mentor: Enrique Neblett Monique McKenny is a rising junior at The George Washington University majoring in Psychology and minoring in Political Science. Her research interests lie in Developmental and Clinical Psychology. This summer, Monique will explore the relationship between dimensions of racial identity and the extent to which people are bothered by discriminatory experiences. This year, Monique was recruited by the DC Student Circle of the Association of Black Psychologists to serve as its Undergraduate Liaison. She is also the secretary for the GWU chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization dedicated to the support and empowerment of black women and their families. For the past two years, Monique has served her community by tutoring incarcerated youth weekly at the District of Columbia Juvenile Detention Center. Recently, she completed a year-long internship with Capital Partners for Education, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, which helps low-income students access higher education through mentorship, professional development training, and financial support. Monique hopes to pursue a PhD in Psychology to continue to study the intersection of race and psychological outcomes. “Impact, Identity and Environment: Analyzing Racial Ideologies and Bother in African-American College Students” African-American young adults can be severely psychologically impacted by encounters of racial discrimination. Previous research has examined the relationships between one’s racial identity, perceived discrimination, and coping mechanisms in response to these incidents. However, few researchers have addressed the level of bother or stress that participants feel following such events. In light of these limitations, this study investigates the association between racial identity, defined as the significance and meaning one places on their race group, and the extent to which black college students are bothered by racially discriminatory events. The racial composition of the students’ home universities will also be tested as a moderator to assess the influence of individuals’ educational environments. The study consists of 274 self-identified African American college students of which 27.4% attend a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) and 72.6% a Predominately White Institution (PWI). Participants completed self-report measures of racial identity and prior racial discrimination experiences. This study adds to the growing body of work that investigates the variations in racial identity within African-American young adults and the psychological influence of educational environments. 36
ShaVonteʼ Mills Faculty Mentor: Reginald Hildebrand ShaVonte’ Marie Mills is a first generation college student and a rising senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is a part of UNC’s Covenant Scholar program, which allows students from low-income backgrounds to graduate debt-free. Inspired by her family’s African-American history in North Carolina’s rural areas, she majors in history and minors in African and African-American Diaspora Studies as well as Social and Economic Justice. Her research interest is black resistance through education. At UNCGreensboro, her previous institution, Mills was an active member of the Black Student Movement and she was elected Chair for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. public service award. After graduation, ShaVonte' plans to travel abroad to research the history of assimilation through education and Christianity in South Africa and Botswana. Passionate about access to adequate education in low-income communities, Mills plans to obtain her Masters in Education and PhD in History in order to provide navigable pathways for minority students in high school, college, and beyond. “Which Shall We Choose?: The Educational Methods of Anna Julia Cooper and Charlotte Hawkins Brown” In his Narrative, Frederick Douglass revealed the self-evident truth that education was a gateway to freedom and education was ultimately a form of resistance. Vocational and liberal arts methods of education were incorporated by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anna Julia Cooper was a black principal of a liberal arts curriculum at M Street High School in Washington, D.C. from 1902 to 1906 and Charlotte Hawkins Brown was the founder of Palmer Memorial Institute, an industrial school that emphasized social graces, from 1902-1959. The importance of education was passed down in the African-American community post emancipation and its relevance in the black community is famously highlighted in the educational debates of Washington and Du Bois. However, the focus on these two figures has overshadowed educators who diverged from these two models. Cooper and Brown were two such educators. There are similarities and differences within Cooper and Brown’s educational philosophies as well as their approach in relation to Du Bois and Washington’s educational models of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, an analysis of correspondence, journals, and annual school reports demonstrates how Cooper and Brown adopted their own models of education. For example, Cooper promoted higher education for all classes in addition to women and men, while Brown emphasized a shared model of behavior within the African-American community. 37
Kim Ortiz Faculty Mentor: Isaac Unah Kim Ortiz is a rising senior and McNair Scholar at DePaul University in Chicago majoring in Public Policy with a concentration in Urban Studies. Her current research evaluates causal factors of wealth disparity in Chicago neighborhoods through the lens of critical race theory. Her passion for equality in community development came from her understanding of the role property taxes play in funding education. Volunteering for DePaul’s Community Peacemaker Initiative, she conducted workshops for Chicago Public High School students on systemic oppression and the roots of violence. While traveling from the wealthy campus neighborhood to the West Side neighborhood she taught in, she was disturbed by the evident disadvantages the students faced. Her past research includes an independent study examining the history of the Federal Housing Authorities’ role in housing segregation from the Great Migration to the implementation of the Fair Housing Act in 1969. She plans to receive her PhD in Urban Planning.
“The Great Black Migration: When Jim Crow Moved North” In 1944, the nature of black society in America changed when the invention of a cotton picker that could be mass produced ended the sharecropper system in the South. Under the impression that the North was opposed to Jim Crow laws, blacks moved to Chicago in unprecedented numbers. This event became known as the Great Black Migration, and significantly coincided with the Federal Housing Administration’s development of the concept of high-risk neighborhoods, color-coded maps, zoning laws, racial deed restrictions, and redlining practices. This system of oppression was how Jim Crow moved to the North implicitly. Using mapping data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2007-2011, this research covers the historical and social context of the Great Black Migration in order to juxtapose the current wealth disparity between historically black and white neighborhoods in Chicago.
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Marleni Perez Faculty Mentor: Isaac Unah Marleni Perez is a rising senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she majors in both History and Chicano/Chicana Studies.. As a member of various multicultural organizations such as the Latino Business Association (LBA) and Union Salvadorena de Estudiantes Universitarios (USEU), Marleni is actively involved in efforts to recruit and mentor students from diverse backgrounds, most recently through mentoring community college students at the Santa Barbara City College. Marleni has seen first-hand the devastating effects of mass incarceration in the lowincome suburbs of Los Angeles and therefore her research interests include mass incarceration and its intersection with juvenile delinquency. She plans to obtain a PhD in Sociology and hopes to inspire more students from minority backgrounds to pursue advanced degrees.
“The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Suspension Rates and its Effect on Minorities in Adult Correctional Facilities in California� Research suggests that if teachers take a more proactive role in the classroom, improved student behavior and overall class success are more likely. The school-to-prison pipeline is byproduct of mass incarceration and is part of the vicious cycle of criminalization in the United States. Because African-American and Latino men and women are disproportionately represented in prisons, there is a tendency to automatically equate minority youth with crime. My research examines the suspension rates of minority students in California high schools and looks at how expulsions increase the likelihood of minority youths becoming incarcerated as adults. I argue that the exclusion of adolescents from the school system is tremendously detrimental to their futures because suspension labels students as criminals in the eyes of teachers and peers. This research will look at the impact of suspension rates on high school students in California to prove that criminalization in the formative years of adolescence increases the likelihood of future incarceration. This research implies that solution lies in teachers and school administrators taking a more proactive role in the lives of school children.
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Mayelin Perez Faculty Mentor: Michelle Robinson Mayelin Perez is a rising senior and an English honors student at The City College of New YorkCUNY. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a member of the Kaye Scholars Program, a merit-based scholarship designed to attract and support promising students majoring in the humanities. Mayelin's areas of academic interest are eighteenth-century women’s literature, the Gothic novel, and feminist literary criticism. During the summer of 2012 she participated in The University of Chicago’s MMUF Summer Research Training Program, where she gained a foundation and interest in the critical conversation surrounding her research interests. This summer she has been furthering her experience at Chicago by researching the precarious position of Gothic literature in the English canon. Mayelin will be applying to doctoral programs in English for fall 2014.
“Killing the Gothic Heroine: Feminist Readings of the Female Gothic and The Politics of Canonicity” Second-wave feminist literary critics’ efforts to revise the male-centered English literary canon have been the focus of a wealth of scholarship. However, the reasons why these feminist critics selected the texts and authors that they exalted have generally been neglected by this scholarship. This project reassesses second-wave feminist critics’ project of literary revision in regards to their engagement with the Female Gothic. Second-wave feminist literary critics in the 1970s and 80s demarcated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers’ contributions to Gothic literature by coining the term “Female Gothic.” In doing so, they presented these women writers as both devoid of agency and only capable of protesting their oppression within a patriarchal society in the most understated of ways. In presenting such a specific narrative of women’s experiences, these critics did not allow for nonconformity. This project, then, reevaluates second-wave feminist critics’ project of literary revision by examining how the often-overlooked Gothic text Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre challenges the traditional definition of the Female Gothic. Additionally, this project examines the degree to which feminist challenges to the English canon affirmed or contested the conventions and criteria of literary canonicity. In doing so, this project explores the concessions that any revisionist project must make to successfully shift dominant discourses. 40
Evan Pipion Faculty Mentor: Reginald Hildebrand Evan Pipion is a rising senior at Xavier University of Louisiana, studying History with a minor in Sociology. As a member of the 2012 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, he has conducted research on how the 1918 influenza epidemic advanced medical education in New Orleans. This summer at MURAP he is building on that research and looking at the social effects of the epidemic on the black community of New Orleans. This research project reflects Evan's interest in the history of medicine, the study of social interactions, and cultural studies.. He is a member of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, a resident assistant, and the president of the History Club on his campus. As president, he organized a mentoring program for elementary and middle school children in the city of New Orleans. Evan has received the History Department Scholarship and the Anheuser-Busch Legends of the Crown Program Scholarship for academic achievement. He intends to pursue a doctorate in History. “Outbreak in the Bayou State: The Effect of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic on the Black Community” Unlike other authors who tell the history of the 1918 influenza pandemic as a narrative or general history, I explore how African Americans in Louisiana worked within the confines of segregation to achieve a measure of self-sufficiency during this time period. The influenza epidemic became an excuse to stress racial dominance via segregation, therefore African Americans were forced into self-sufficiency. For example, black colleges and universities opened medical training schools during this time period in order to fill the need for black medical personnel. My research goals are as follows: first, to reconstruct, analyze, and expose the historical and social effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic on the black community of Louisiana, and second, to understand how increased segregation due to the epidemic brought about innovation in the black community. Historical newspapers and journals as well as secondary scholarship will help me understand the epidemic’s social effects on African-Americans. This research covers a population that is often overlooked in American medical history especially in regards to epidemics.
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Uriel Rafael Faculty Mentor: Sherick Hughes Uriel Rafael is a McNair scholar at Pitzer College majoring in Psychology and Human Biology. Next academic year Uriel will continue his involvement in the Latino Student Union as Education Liaison with the ultimate goal of creating a pipeline between Pomona High School and Pitzer College. While serving on the Academic Planning Committee of the Pitzer Student Senate, he gained insight on how decisions are made in higher education. As research assistant to Prof. Roberta Espinoza, Uriel is learning more about the topic, especially with regard to easing access to higher education for low-income minority students. In the spring of 2013, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) gave him an award that allowed him to attend its annual conference in San Francisco and participate in professional development workshops. This experience solidified Uriel's resolve to pursue a PhD in higher education policy.
“Educational Outcomes of Marginalized Communities: A Comparative Case-Study of Latinos in the U.S. and Burakumin in Japan” Although education is commonly understood as a promising route to mobility, global counter evidence suggests that the inequitable/inadequate education of an ethno-political minority group can actually work to restrict their mobility. Latin@s represent one such ethno-political minority group, as they experience disproportionate poverty and the lowest high school graduation rates in the U.S. (U.S. Census Bureau). Japan’s Burakumin represent another such ethno-political minority group, as they endure under-resourced schools and the inability to access private tutoring—a major component of Japanese education (Gordon, 188). This paper compares the educational outcomes of Latin@s and Burakumin (1980spresent) to identify patterns linking their high school experiences of educational inequity to related socio-economic mobility patterns. Additionally, it will investigate how power, coupled with inequitable/inadequate education systems may work to reproduce stratification in the U.S. and Japan. This paper applied a Historical-Comparative Case Study Methodology to collect data from literature, archives and electronic databases. Ultimately, this project aims (a) to increase awareness about the educational inequities endured by Latin@ and Burakumin students during and after high school; and (b) to offer evidence-based recommendations to address them. 42
Andy Reid Faculty Mentor: Reginald Hildebrand Andy Reid is a rising senior at Elizabeth City State University majoring in History with a focus on black radicals of the 20th century. As an intern in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Andy located the abandoned graveyards of Civil War soldiers using GIS technology. He is the undergraduate president of the History/Political Science Department student organization and an active member of North Carolina’s chapter of the NAACP. Andy was inducted into Phi Alpha Theta National Honors Society in the spring of 2012. He plans to pursue a graduate degree in AfricanAmerican history, centering on early 20th century black radicals’ influence on black radicals during the Civil Rights Movement.
“What We Believe: Southern Garveyites Adoption of Garveyism as a Religion” Religion has heavily influenced the lives of African-Americans located in the South since the ending of slavery. Individuals such as Marcus Garvey grasped the understanding of the importance of religion in the South and capitalized on it. Garvey’s own philosophy which has been labeled “Garveyism” was introduced to the United States in the early twentiethcentury. Northern Garveyites were the first to follow the ideas of Garveyism in America, but Garveyites located in the South eventually adopted the understanding of Garvey’s philosophy and created their own meaning of Garveyism. Southern Garveyites not only followed Marcus Garvey’s philosophy, but also allowed Garveyism to be taught through black churches. This gave rise to prominent African-American preachers that were affiliated with the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The acceptance of Garveyism in southern black churches led to Garveyites located in the South embracing Marcus Garvey’s philosophy as a religion and also created a spiritual escape from the intense racism that affected the lives of African-Americans during the early twentiethcentury.
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Reuben Riggs Faculty Mentor: Navin Bapat Reuben Riggs is a rising junior majoring in Anthropology and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Reuben is interested in understanding how criminality operates as an oppressive system for people of color and the expression of this system through social media. Reuben is a Civic Scholar in the Gephardt Institute for Service, a program that develops civic leaders interested in activism and community engagement. He is also a recipient of the merit-based John B. Ervin Scholarship at his home institution. Reuben grounds his studies in real-life experiences through his involvement with the St. Louis community: he volunteers with The Organization for Black Struggle serving the local black community and City Faces mentoring under-supported youth in divested areas. Reuben also volunteers at a local juvenile detention center. As President of the Association of Mixed Students and Communication Director of the Social Justice Center, he has explored a variety of social justice issues related to identity and hopes to continue to explore these ideas by pursuing a PhD in African-American studies. “Hip-Hop Social Media: Expressing and Interacting with Criminal Identity” This research examines the implications of black criminal identity. Given the long history of the criminalization of blackness and the current culture of mass incarceration, African Americans face implicit suspicion of inherent criminality. This research looks at the resulting identity created by this criminalization. This research explores how black young adults express this identity through hip-hop social media, and in turn sheds light on the ways that criminal identity is reinforced in black young adults. I analyze the content of 50 randomly selected videos and their first 100 comments from the website worldstarhiphop.com to measure how these videos influence individual and collective identity. Using Labeling Theory as a lens, videos are analyzed for representations of criminality through displays of other identities such as masculinity and “realness” within them. The influence of videos on reinforcing criminal identity is measured by analyzing comment content. This examination, while increasing understanding of the complexities of criminality, also expands understandings of blackness. In further iterations, it has the potential to influence culturally effective intervention programs in order to mitigate the effects of black criminalization. It will add to the literature by reformulating, through sociological perspectives, the relationship between hip-hop, blackness, crime, and identity, and illuminate the implications of these relationships. 44
Christopher Robinson Faculty Mentor: Sherick Hughes Christopher Robinson is a rising senior at North Carolina A&T State University majoring in Social Work and minoring in English. Christopher’s current research includes a consideration of gender and sexuality that will build upon his previous McNair Scholar project, which examined how academic outcomes are influenced by racialization and economics. In the fall of 2013, he will continue to represent the School of Social Work at North Carolina A&T State University as a member of the Sociology & Social Work Honor Society and through his service on the Dean’s Student Advisory Board. Christopher plans to pursue a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies.
“Anti-Gay Bullying, Homophobia, and Violence: Student Experiences, Educational Outcomes, and the Limitations of NC State Policy “ Anti-gay bullying is the target of much research in the field of education because it poses serious concerns for high school students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or questioning (LGBTIQ). Unfortunately, existing literature tends to overlook strategies to prevent the anti-gay bullying of LGBTIQ high school students. Over the years, state legislators in North Carolina have increased policies against anti-gay bullying, yet the problem persists. In light of these gaps in research and policy, this paper intends to (a) describe LGBTIQ high school students’ experiences, (b) analyze LGBTIQ students’ educational outcomes , and (c) evaluate the extent to which North Carolina state policies address and prevent the anti-gay bullying of these high school students. This paper will examine sixteen peer-reviewed academic articles to gauge how LGBTIQ students’ educational outcomes may be linked to their experiences of antigay bullying coupled with the limited promise of anti-gay bullying state policies. The paper concludes with evidence-based implications for leaders in secondary education.
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Amanda Rolon Faculty Mentor: Ariana Vigil Amanda Rolon is a rising senior at the City University of New York - Hunter College. She is majoring in English: Literature, Language, and Criticism with a focus on American literature and a minor in Women’s and Gender studies. She is a McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Scholar. Amanda has also been accepted into the English departmental honors track at Hunter College where this fall she will be examining issues of race and gender in an honors course entitled “Politics of Color.” This summer she will compare representations of witches in contemporary American literature, specifically analyzing how race and gender impact the representation of powerful women. Amanda is a first-generation college student and this motivates her interest in mentoring fellow undergraduates. Through her participation at the Writing Center and weekly tutoring at the Student Resource Center she hopes to continue supporting novice students. Amanda plans to pursue a PhD in English with an interdisciplinary focus on American literature and Women’s and Gender studies. “Perspectives within the Privilege Prism: Queer Reconsideration of Male Privilege” For the past three decades, women's and gender studies scholarship has analyzed and discussed the institution of male privilege. Scholars have addressed issues ranging from recognizing the way it maintains gender inequality to becoming aware of the ways one encourages or participates in male privilege, whether consciously or subconsciously. Taking into account the scholarly work devoted to redefining the way individuals can embody maleness and masculinity, my research project adds to the discussion by analyzing how queer and gender non-conforming men relate to male privilege. I apply contemporary gender theory, in particular masculinity theory and queer theory, to personal narratives written by men who embody non-normative masculinities. I argue that their identities and experiences challenge the monolithic perception of men’s relationship with male privilege. The intent of this research is to add nuance to our understanding of male privilege by expanding the discussion to include the experiences of subordinated groups.
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Brionca Taylor Faculty Mentor: Kia Caldwell Brionca Taylor is a rising senior at the University of Florida, where she is pursuing a major in Sociology and a minor in Educational Studies. Her academic research interests include the sociology of education, specifically issues pertaining to the barriers faced by Black and African-American persons in the United States’ education system. This summer in MURAP, Brionca has been researching the effect of housing policies on the educational opportunities of African-Americans in the CharlotteMecklenburg school district. She currently serves as the Program Manager for the University Minority Mentor Program, which assists first-year minority students in acclimating to college. Additionally, Brionca is a Senior Ambassador at the Institute of Black Culture for the Multicultural and Diversity Affairs Department, where she organizes programs and events that highlight and affirm Black and African-American culture. Due to her scholastic achievements and community service efforts, she was recently inducted into Phi Kappa Phi honor society. Brionca plans to pursue a PhD in Sociology. “Where the Sidewalk Ends and the School Begins: Housing Policies and Educational Opportunities in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District (2002-2012)” This study examines the use of place, or school zoning, in the initial desegregation of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District during the 1960s and assesses the impact of the unitary status granted to the district in 2002 on racial segregation in the district schools. Recent research has shown that the efforts of American public schools to desegregate have been inadequate and that many schools are actually resegregating. To comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the CharlotteMecklenburg School District (CMS) in North Carolina used a busing system based on residential segregation patterns. Although the CMS is credited as one of the most successful districts with respect to racial desegregation practices, recent research indicates that racial resegregation in schools is increasing in the district. This study draws upon research that focuses on the relationship between residential racial composition and school racial composition. Sociologists have shown that African American residential neighborhoods yield predominantly African American student population in local schools. By examining racial desegregation efforts in the CMS and recent trends of racial resegregation, this study explores the link between race and place in the CMS district and examines its impact on educational opportunities for African American students. 47
Chanté Thompson Faculty Mentor: Michelle Robinson Chante Thompson is a senior studying history at North Carolina State University. While she enjoys comparative global histories, her specific research interests are American Jewish studies, the Hispanic experience in the United States, and minority migration movements in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Throughout much of her undergraduate career Chante has lead the International Studies Club as co-president, helping to initiate a language-learning program, hosting globally-focused programs, and organizing guest speakers. She has also worked to acclimate international students to life in the United States as an ambassador and advisor in the Global Village at NC State. In her coursework, Chante has researched the historical accuracy of theatrical interpretations of the story of Leo Frank, particularly by examining how the Broadway musical Parade and the Southern-Jewish descent of the production crew influenced the portrayal of the Frank’s story. Chante plans to apply to graduate programs in American Studies. “Regional Repercussions: The Rosenberg Affair and the Evolution of Jewish and Communist Identities in North Carolina, 1950-1956” Charged with disclosing secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. Both internationally and domestically, responses ranged from approval to outrage. This project addresses the effects of the Rosenberg trial and execution on Jewish and Communist communities in North Carolina, building on existing scholarship pertaining to cultural identity, Communism, and the Rosenbergs. Utilizing an array of primary texts and analyzing findings through the lenses of race relations, cultural identity, Cold War politics, and the discourse of capital punishment, I argue that the Rosenberg affair contributed to heightened political and ethnic discrimination in North Carolina. As opposed to taking direct stances on the outcomes of the Rosenberg trial, North Carolina’s government and parts of its citizenry localized their responses by targeting Communist leaders like Junius Scales and his family. As a consequence, the Rosenberg affair impacted regional antiCommunist sentiment and altered the North Carolina Jewish experience.
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Janelle Viera Faculty Mentor: Kia Caldwell Janelle Ashley Viera is a Mellon Mays undergraduate fellow at Swarthmore College, where she is pursuing a degree in Sociology. During her sophomore year, Janelle was the community overseer of Enlace, Swarthmore’s Latina/o organization. She also participated in Dare2Soar, Swarthmore’s youth mentoring program for elementary -school children. Her research interests emerged through those activities, as she learned about U.S. structural inadequacies. In the summer of 2012, Janelle explored various stages of the research process with Prof. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy at The City College of New York. Janelle more specifically engaged with issues concerning race and ethnicity, social stratification, residential segregation, educational inequality, and immigration in the U.S. During the spring of 2013, she participated in a Spanish immersion program in Madrid, where she studied the history and culture of Spain. This opportunity led to an increased international understanding of social class. Janelle hopes to attend a doctoral program in Sociology after graduation in 2014. “Surely Not the Beavers, But Definitely Not the Cosby’s: The Status of the Puerto Rican Middle Class in Central Florida” This study creates a profile of middle-class Puerto Ricans in Central Florida and considers how various socioeconomic variables such as income, occupational status, educational attainment, and homeownership rates function to determine middle class status for this group. Drawing upon existing research and census data, this study seeks to challenge the perception of the U.S. middle class as broadly homogenous in status by demonstrating the existence of outside groups such as the Puerto Rican enclaves of Florida. While previous sociological research has identified Florida as a state with an increasing geographic concentration of Puerto Ricans, it has not offered an in-depth comparison of middle socioeconomic status between Puerto Rican and white communities, nor has it suggested similarities in status between Puerto Rican and African American middle class groups. In response to this gap in scholarship, this research considers the frameworks used to study the black middle class and aims to expand the conversation on race and class beyond the black/white racial binary. Furthermore, it highlights the disparities that exist between the Puerto Rican and white middle classes of Florida to demonstrate the role that race plays in determining the achievement of middle-class status by people of color in the U.S. 49
Azmar Williams Faculty Mentor: Kennetta Perry Azmar K. Williams is a rising junior at Yale University majoring in History and AfricanAmerican Studies. This year he received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Azmar’s research focuses on twentieth-century United States history and African American history and culture. This summer, as part of MURAP, he will be exploring the ways in which the deindustrialization of America’s cities transformed African-American expressive culture in the 1980s and 1990s. He is an active member of the Yale Black Men’s Union—an organization devoted to uniting and empowering black men on Yale’s campus and beyond through community service and weekly discussion meetings. He will serve as the organization’s president next academic year and as president will oversee the restructuring of the Union’s mentoring program. He also volunteers as a tutor with the Yale Prison Initiative at Manson Youth Prison helping inmates prepare for the GED. He hopes to pursue a PhD in History upon his graduation.
“Shook Ones: An Interpretation of Black Youth Culture in the Queensbridge Housing Projects in Three Albums” This purpose of this project is to write a brief history of urban youth culture in the Queensbridge Housing community in the 1990s. Three albums released by the hip hop duo Mobb Deep between 1993 and 1996— Juvenile Hell, The Infamous, and Hell on Earth –will be used as primary sources for revealing the shared ideas, customs, and beliefs of young black men growing up in North America’s largest public housing development in the last decade of the twentieth century. When listened to together, these three albums can be understood as a bildungsroman, or coming of age text. As such, the music can be used to better understand how these youths positioned themselves within a changing economic, political and social landscape and how they seized an opportunity to define the terms and the ways in which they represented themselves and their communities. Though this project aims to explore what it meant to express one’s identity as a young, black male in the Queensbridge Housing Projects during the 1990s, the larger goal is to explore new methods for understanding the experiences of groups of people whose stories are often left out of history because they are not associated with major leaders or movements.
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Acknowledgements MURAP expresses its gratitude to the following staff members and individuals for their assistance with the 2013 Conference and for their continued support of the program. Antonio de Jesus Alanís, Assistant to the Director and Office Assistant Kanisha Coleman, Alumni Coordinator Laurel Foote-Hudson, Writing Assistant Marissa García, Program Coordinator Keith Gavigan Communication Skills Instructor and Presentations Coach Isaura Godínez, Resident Advisor and Office Assistant Jan Hendrickson-Smith, Director of GRE Workshop and Hostess Extraordinaire Dr. Joseph Jordan, Interim Director, Sonja Haynes Stone Center Amy King, Business Liaison Geeta Menon, Communications Manager Shaina Mitchell, GRE Assistant María J. Obando, Senior Graduate Assistant and Writing Assistant Ezelle Sanford, III, Resident Graduate Assistant Randy Simmons, Facilities Manager, Stone Center Dr. Karla Slocum, Director, Institute of African and African American Research Samanthis Smalls, Conference Coordinator Robin Smith, Writing Coordinator and GRE Assistant April Spruill, Administrative Manager, Stone Center Ben Wilson, GRE Assistant Videography by Peter Goswick Catering by Mediterranean Deli, Sweet Jane’s Bakery, Cafe Carolina& Bakery, and The Catering Company Transportation by Chapel Hill 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: www.unc.edu/depts/murap
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