Woodson Fellows

Shaun Armstead

Imagined Solidarities: Black Liberal Internationalism and the National Council of Negro Women’s Journey from Afro-Asian to Pan-African Unity, 1935 to 1975

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.

Matthew Greer

Matthew Greer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Syracuse University, where his studies focus on the archaeology of enslaved life.  His dissertation project, Assembling Enslaved Lives: Labor, Consumption, and Landscapes in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, uses historical archaeology, Black studies, and assemblage theory to write the stories of enslaved people in back into the history of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. By analyzing some of the objects, practices, and institutions that affected, and were affected by enslaved people as they labored, bought and used commodities, and inhabited local landscapes, the project assesses what life was like for those enslaved in the Valley and how enslaved Shenandoahans shaped the region’s political economies. The latter point is especially important because to demonstrate that enslaved people mattered in the Valley is to demonstrate that any history that ignores them is incomplete.

Mahaliah Little

Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women’s Post-Violence Sexuality

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. Her dissertation project, "Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women’s Post-Violence Sexuality," analyzes representations of Black women's sexuality in the aftermath of sexual violence in literature, memoir, and documentaries.

Jillean McCommons

The Black Appalachian Commission: Regional Black Power Politics and the War on Poverty, 1969-1975

Jillean McCommons is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. My dissertation project, “The Black Appalachian Commission: Regional Black Power Politics and the War on Poverty, 1969-1975,” is a social history of the Black Appalachian Commission (BAC), the first Black-led grassroots organization created to address the specific needs of Black people in the thirteen states that comprise the Appalachian region. My dissertation highlights the intersections of Black Power Studies and Appalachian Studies by examining Black Appalachian demands for structural change during Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty through Richard Nixon’s subsequent dismantling of liberal policies after 1972. To understand Black conceptualizations of regional identity, my dissertation also draws on theories from the field of Geography, including Black Geographies and Black Ecologies, to uncover Black Appalachian epistemologies of land, identity, and place.

James Parker

The Fluidity of Late Colonial Development: Water Management, State Building, and Rural Resistance in Kenya 1938-63

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. Rather than benefiting rural groups, these centralized projects altered the ecological properties of the land with dire consequences, as the rerouting and redistribution of water left entire regions parched and barren, and communities fighting for access to dwindling resources. By comparing policy proposals and implementation with the protestations and resistance of community groups, I foreground communal attempts to push back against their exclusion from water resources while examining how development policy altered local production and modes of survival. Based on extensive English and Swahili archival sources in Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, my project ultimately argues that the colonial Kenyan state’s obsession with profits over rural lives cut off communities from water, leading to drought, famine, and dispossession on an enormous scale. That the British government were frequently unaware of these outcomes further demonstrates the disconnect between global policy makers and localized experiences and demands the centering of rural voices. As such, my approach offers a new historical perspective on the implementation of development policies and provides a localized socioenvironmental perspective to a topic dominated by top-down political and economic analyses. Reinserting water, and the human relationship to it, is vital to understanding the role of economic policy in shaping environments in the global south. Centering the experiences of resistors and rural populations further draws attention to the inequitable distribution of resources and the role of capital and race in development ideologies.

Abraham Seda

A Contested Ring: African Boxing, Social Control and Subversive Culture in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1910 to 1985

Abraham Seda is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Abraham's research investigates African perspectives of boxing in a world in which the white settler colonial state in Zimbabwe was determined to dictate what constituted proper sporting etiquette befitting colonial subjects. His dissertation project, "A Contested Ring: African Boxing, Social Control and Subversive Culture in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1910 to 1985," interrogates how knowledge about Africa is produced, and the ways in which dominant narratives in colonial archives have the power to silence the past.