Woodson Fellows Alumni

Kumavie

Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through Air, Airplanes and Airports in Black Literature

Post-fellowship placement: post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Mahindra Center; tenure-track position at Syracuse University

This project is a critical ethnography focused on the experiences of a community in the Philippines known as the Black Amerasians (the progeny of African American servicemen and Filipina women). Employing a range of methodologies—including autoethnography, visual ethnography, and oral histories—the project is based on nine months of fieldwork centered on communities of Black Amerasians living near Angeles City and Olongapo City, home to two of the largest former American military bases and to the Philippines’ highest concentrations of Black Amerasians.

Parker

My current research positions rural East Africa within a broader global narrative of environmental management and social change by examining the role that access to water played in colonial Kenyan statecraft between 1938 and 1963. I study three development projects in the arid and semi-arid landscapes of Kenya, where the colonial government invested thousands of pounds expanding water access into the hinterland to spur agricultural production.

Ramsey

Nicole Ramsey completed her Ph.D. in the department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Originally from Los Angeles, California, she holds an MA in African American Studies from UCLA and a BA in American Studies from UC Santa Cruz. Nicole’s interdisciplinary approaches to blackness, indigeneity, migration and popular culture are grounded in a diasporic and transnational framework.

Armstead

Shaun Armstead is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation, “Imagined Solidarities: Black Liberal Internationalism and the National Council of Negro Women’s Journey from Afro-Asian to Pan-African Unity, 1935 to 1975,” charts the understudied international activities of one of the largest African American women’s organizations in U.S. history.

Smithson

Brian C. Smithson is a cultural anthropologist who studies the audiovisual cultures and religions of West Africa. As a Woodson Research Associate, Brian is completing a book titled Aesthetics of Praise: Making Movies Religious in Bénin—a story about cash-strapped movie producers, Christian–Muslim animosities, and professional rivalries in Yorùbá-speaking Bénin. The book shows how moviemakers overcome these hurdles by championing Yorùbá indigenous religion, its ethical principles, and its moral demands.

Seda

Abraham T. Seda is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His dissertation project “A Contested Ring: African Boxing, Social Control and Subversive Culture in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1980” examines how boxing and the boxing ring were appropriated by African men and used as platforms for cultural expression.

Moses

Under the direction of Michael Awkward, “A House to Sing In” considers the lives, times, and cultural expressions of Amina Baraka, Nina Simone, and Elaine Brown. By studying these three black revolutionary women together, I consider the extent to which they simultaneously complied with and resisted gendered formulations of revolutionary identities. I challenge African American Studies’ dichotomous misrecognition of black women as either extraordinary because they are, as Joy James states, “not bound to a male persona,” or ordinary because they are publicly bound to a male persona.

Mann Carey

My dissertation is an ethnographic and community-engaged study investigating the impacts of state violence on black women and communities in Brazil and Colombia. Centering the grassroots leadership of Black women, I examine how they organize and resist the myriad forms of state oppression that intersect and interact in their everyday lives. I use a framework of intimacy as a way to understand Black women’s political thinking and action by articulating how intimacy and activism intersect, through emotions, grief, homes as organizing sites, and the politicization of motherhood and care.

Little

Mahaliah Ayana Little is an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellow at Ohio State University. After graduating from Spelman College in 2013 as an English major, she attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for her master's in Women's and Gender Studies. As an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mahaliah is committed to diversifying the professoriate and serving underrepresented students.