Woodson Fellows Alumni

Smith

Alexandria Smith completed her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Her research explores questions of sensation, embodiment, eroticism, and geography in literatures written by diasporic Black queer subjects. Her dissertation, Afrekete’s Room: Mapping the Shape of Space and Narrative in Black Queer Women’s Writing proposes sensual worldmaking as a literary strategy which employs lived and embodied experiences as a source of literary and theoretical knowledge about gender, Blackness, and queerness.

Beutin

Dissertation title: If Slavery’s Not Black: The stakes of the U.S. State Department’s campaign against human trafficking

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University (tenure-track)

Perry

Dissertation title: To Go to Nature’s Manufactory’: The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia (tenure-track)

Pickett

Dissertation title: Black (Ir)religious Fire: The Literary and Moral Imagination of James Baldwin and James Cone

Post-fellowship placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, New York University

Fleming, Jr.

Dissertation title: Technologies of Liberation: Performance and the Art of Black Political Thought

Post-fellowship placement: University of Maryland, College Park

Barber

Dissertation title: "Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art"

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at University of Delaware (tenure-track)

Hunter

Dissertation title: The Politics of Real Spirituality and its Embodiment in Gospel Music Discourse and Performance

Post-fellowship placement: Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University

Jones

Dissertation title: Enslaved Convicts in Imperial Spaces: Race and Penal Transportation during the Abolition Era

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History North Carolina State University (tenure-track)

Rockenbach

Dissertation title: Home Exile: Banyarwanda Settlers and the Making of the Ugandan State, 1911-Present

Samuel

Dissertation title: Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control, The Colonial Ear, and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (tenure-track)

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