Du Bois Institute welcomes 16 fellows

Sixteen new fellows have joined the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard this fall for one or two semesters of the 2001-02 academic year. Founded in 1975, the institute is the oldest research center of its kind, and has supported the scholarly work of nearly 300 alumni.

“These fellows represent the cutting edge of new scholarship in our field,” said Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and director of the Du Bois Institute. “We give them a supportive environment in which to work and they give us the benefits of the most exciting new scholarship.”

The 2001-02 fellows, including their project titles, are as follows:

Joan Bryant, assistant professor of African – American history, Brandeis University, “Reluctant Race Men: American Resistance to the Idea of Race”; John Conteh-Morgan, associate professor of French and Italian and of African and African-American Studies, Ohio State University, “Cultural Performance and the Search for Form in Black Atlantic Theater”; Barrington Edwards, lecturer in the history of science, Harvard University, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Empirical Social Research and the Challenge to Race, 1868-1910”; Stephen Hall, visiting assistant professor of African-American history, Ohio State University, “To Give a Faithful Account of the Race: History and Historical Writing in the African – American Community, 1817-1915”; Coleman Jordan, assistant professor of architecture, University of Michigan, “Scripting the Legacies of the Black Atlantic: Spaces of Oppression and Liberation”; Janis Kearney, independent scholar, former diarist and presidential historian to President Clinton, “William Jefferson Clinton and the African – American Community: The Ties that Bind”; Tyson King-Meadows, instructor of political science, Middle Tennessee State University, “From Footnote to Main Text: W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, and Anthropological Notions of Race”; Anthea Kraut, doctoral candidate in theater, Northwestern University, “Staging the Vernacular, Choreographing Race: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham”; Emmanuel Obiechina, independent scholar, “Slavery and the Fall of Africa: Textualizing a Historic Tragedy”; Terri Oliver, assistant professor of minority literature, Bryant College, “Disease, Disablity, and Death: An American Rhetoric of Minority”; Naomi Pabst, Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Department of Afro-American Studies and the committee on degrees in Women’s Studies, Harvard University, “Freedom Tropes and Representation Struggles: A Politics of Blackness”; Barbara Rodriguez, assistant professor of English, Tufts University, “The American Slave Narrative: Slavery and the Persistence of Form”; Fikeni E.M.K. Senkoro, Rockefeller African Humanities Institute Senior Fellow, associate professor of literature, University of Dar es Salaam, “Transcription, Translation, Analysis and Writing of a Full Length Bilingual Anthology of Folktales from Zanzibar”; Mason Stokes, assistant professor of English, Skidmore College, “Straight, No Chaser: Harlem, Heterosexuality, and the 1920s”; Aaronette White, scholar-in-residence of African – American Gender Studies, Wilberforce University, “About Face: Turning Points in the Lives of Black Men Who Support Feminism”; and Stephanie Williams, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, “Searching for a Place in the American Art Museum: A Study of Middle Class Black Americans.”