Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, has announced the 2022-2023 class of fellows.
“We are happy to welcome our next cohort of distinguished and dynamic W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” says Gates. “We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year. A poetry collection, a musical, a transnational history of the Seminoles, belonging and justice in Caribbean visual and literary cultures, an album on Hiphop as an educational tool, a study of the slave market of colonial Guadalajara, artistic representations of Black grief, amateur ministrelsy, and the 1866 cholera epidemic and origin of public health as a field are among the innovative projects which the 2022-2023 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”
The twenty-three 2022-2023 W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:
• Aabid Allibhai is a Doctoral Candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Allibhai will be at work on the dissertation Belinda Sutton’s World: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Abolition in Revolutionary New England.
• David Augustine is a Hiphop Artist in New Orleans, Louisiana. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Augustine will be at work on the album Hip Hop Saved My Life – Examining Hip Hop as a Teaching Tool Inside the Black Community.
• Rhae Lynn Barnes is Assistant Professor of American Cultural History at Princeton University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Barnes will be at work on the book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface, about amateur blackface in the U.S., and Fugitive Sounds, a digital database of the descriptions of voices and music of enslaved and self-emancipated Americans recorded for use by blackface performers.
• Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor in American Cultural History and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Bernier will be at work on the book “Why not we endure hardship that our race may be free? The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Papers and Douglass Family Lives: The Biography.
• David Bindman is the Emeritus Durning-LawrenceProfessor of the History of Art at University College London. In residence as the Image of the Black Archive & Library Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Bindman will be at work on the volumes The Image of the Black in Latin America and Caribbean Art and The Image of the European in African Art.
• Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. In residence as the Richard D. Cohen Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Brown will be at work on Black Elegies, a book-length study of artistic representations of Black grief within and beyond the genre of poetry.
• Panashe Chigumadzi is a Doctoral Candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. In residence as a Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Chigumadzi will be at work on the dissertation The Israelites and the Ethiopians: Dylann Roof, the AME Church and the Transatlantic Apartheid.
• John J. Clegg is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economic History at Lund University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Clegg will be at work on the book From Plantation to Prison, co-authored with Adaner Usmani, which situates American mass incarceration in comparative and historical contexts.
• Jorge Delgadillo Núñez is a Chancellor’s Advance Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. In residence as a SlaveVoyages Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Delgadillo will contribute information on the slave market of colonial Guadalajara to the Slave Voyages Database and be at work on a study of the internal slave trade in the Spanish Empire.
• Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. In residence as a Shelia Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Downs will be at work on a history of the field of public health and the 1866 cholera epidemic, Deadly Water: A New Origin of Story of Public Health.
• Reighan Gillam is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Gillam will be at work on the book Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism which examines Afro-Brazilian engagement with African American culture, performance, and community.
• Mandy Izadi is a Broadbent Junior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute & St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Izadi will be at work on the book Born of War: Seminoles and the Making of America, a transnational history of the Seminoles from the mid-18th century to the 21st century.
• Nancy Jacobs is Professor of History at Brown University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Jacobs will be at work on The Global Grey Parrot, a book-length study at the nexus of African, environmental, economic, and Animal-Human histories.
• Rashauna R. Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Johnson will be at work on the book Strange Roots: Black Intimacies in the Global Plantation South, which weaves together family and regional stories to reveal a history of global assemblage in the rural plantation South.
• Stevie Johnson is a Hiphop artist and scholar. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Johnson will be at work on Little Africa on Fire, Still, a scholarly and personal study which situates the album Fire in Little Africa as an intervention in post-Civil Rights Black identity and discourse around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
• Tamary Kudita is a fine art photographer. In residence as a J. M. D. Manyika Fellow for Spring 2023, Kudita will be at work on the project Locating the Self Within the Black Photographic Archive Whilst Mapping the Postcolonial Terrain Across Different Geographies.
• Shirley Moody-Turner is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Moody-Turner will be at work on the book “Courageous Revolt”: Anna Julia Cooper, An Interpretive Biography.
• Jeffrey Murray is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. In residence as a Mandela Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Murray will be at work on a history of classical scholarship and education in Natal, Classics in Natal, 1843-2000.
• Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at University West London, Brentford. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Parkes will be at work on a new approach to African and Diaspora studies called The Remainder Project. His primary output will be a collection of poems entitled s(ang'st)ill.
• Antonia Gabriela Pereira is a Coordinator at "Biblioteca e Centro Cultural Preto Casa Futuro," Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In residence as a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow for the Spring 2023 semester, Pereira will be at work on the book Being Strong in Black Diaspora: Black Women's Bodies, Racial Violence, and Community Activism of Black Fighter Boxer Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and English, Brandeis University. In residence as a Hutchins Family Fellow for the Fall 2022 semester, Smith will be at work on DreadKin, a book-length study of literary and visual cultures that map belonging and justice in the context of the Caribbean’s complex experiences with sovereignty in the global present.
• K’Naan Warsame is a poet, writer, and musician. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Warsame will be at work on the musical The Storyteller and the novel Frog Legs.
• Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Associate Provost and North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University. In residence as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Zeleza will be at work on the book The Long Transition to the 21st Century: A Global History of the Present and the memoir Navigating the Ivory Tower: A Transatlantic Memoir.