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 at Harvard University has announced the 2020-2021 class of fellows.
“We are happy to welcome one of our most distinguished and exciting cohort of 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. Queer visual cultures in the African diaspora; migratory routes and artistic practices in the Black Mediterranean; the “monstrous” aesthetics of black women’s work; dialect in the early Anglophone Caribbean; the history of Norfolk Prison Colony, the first “community prison”; postmillennial technologies and the practice of race; black diasporic women's engagement with digital and social media; cruciform churches in Medieval Ethiopia as architectural palimpsests and products of cross-cultural exchange; the intersections of race, space, and the law in the construction of race and citizenship; and Stuart Hall’s unfinished manuscript The Symbolic World. Meaning and Power are among the important projects which the 2020-2021 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”
The W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows and their projects are as follows:
- David Bindman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London. In residence as the Image of the Black Archive & Library Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Bindman will be at work on the volumes The Image of the Black in Latin America and the Caribbean and Art and Scientific Racism in the 19th Century.
- Darius Bost is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. In residence as the Cohen Fellow for Fall 2020, Bost will be at work on Diasporic Perversions: Black Queer Visual Cultures and the Politics of History.
- Alessandra Di Maio is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo, Italy. In residence as the Cohen Fellow for Spring 2021, Di Maio will be at work on The Black Mediterranean. Migratory Routes and Artistic Practices in the African Italian Diaspora.
- Eve Dunbar is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. In residence as a Du Bois Fellow for Fall 2020, Dunbar will be at work on Radical Satisfaction: The Monstrous Work of African American Women Under Segregation and Beyond.
- Belinda Edmondson is Professor of English and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for Fall 2020, Edmondson will be at work on Creole Noise: Early Caribbean “Dialect” Literature and Performance.
- Garrett Felber is Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the University of Mississippi. In residence as the Hutchins Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Felber will be at work on The Norfolk Plan: The Community Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
- Carlton Keith Harrison is Associate Unit Head and Chief Academic Officer at the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida. In residence as the Nasir Jones Fellow for Fall 2020, Harrison will be at work on Carry on Tradition: From Nas to Nipsey the Business Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurial Hustle.
- Scott Heath is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans. In residence as the Nasir Jones Fellow for Spring 2021, Heath will be at work on Automatic Black: Technologies of Race and Culture Design.
- Jessica Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for Spring 2021, Johnson will be at work on Dark Codex: History, Blackness, and the Digital.
- Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz is the Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art History in Honor of Roy Sieber in the Department of Art History at Indiana University. In residence as the Mamolen Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Martínez-Ruiz will be at work on Caribbean Foundations: African Art and Visual Culture in the Making of Caribbean Art.
- Mikael Muehlbauer is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. In residence as a Porter Fellow for Spring 2021, Muehlbauer will be at work on Prestige Architecture in Early Medieval Ethiopia.
- Martha Patterson is Professor of English, English Department, McKendree University, Illinois. In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for Fall 2020, Patterson will be at work on The Harlem Renaissance Weekly.
- William Henry Pruitt III is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. In residence as a Porter Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Pruitt will be at work on Barack Obama and Three Archetypes of Hypothetical Black U.S. Presidents Prior to His Presidency: Comparative Analyses.
- Bill Schwarz is Professor of Modern Literature and History in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, at the University of London. In residence as the Stuart Hall Fellow Foundation Fellow for Fall 2020, Schwarz will be at work on Stuart Hall’s unfinished manuscript The Symbolic World. Meaning and Power.
- Jesse Weaver Shipley is the John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory at Dartmouth College. In residence as the McMillan-Stewart Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Shipley will be at work on PERFORMING REVOLUTION Violence and Charisma in Ghanaian Uprisings, 1979-1983.
- Justin Steil is Professor of Professor of Law and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In residence as the Du Bois Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year, Steil will be at work on Race, Space, and Law: Municipal Segregation Ordinances and the Racialized Construction of Citizenship and Belonging Through Control Over Space.
The W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellowship program invites scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and activists across the humanities and social sciences to pursue independent projects encompassing Africa and the diaspora. Fellows arrive from the U.S., Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe to be in residence at the Hutchins Center for either a full academic year or one semester.
The Hutchins Center is closely monitoring Harvard University’s directives regarding a return to campus in the fall, and the fellowship program can easily adapt to a virtual format, pending decisions by Harvard and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research supports research on the history and culture of people of African descent the world over and provides a forum for collaboration and the ongoing exchange of ideas. It seeks to stimulate scholarly engagement in African and African American studies both at Harvard and beyond, and to increase public awareness and understanding of this vital field of study. As the preeminent research center in the field, the Hutchins Center sponsors visiting fellows, art exhibitions, publications, research projects, archives, readings, conferences, and new media initiatives that respond to and inspire interest in established and emerging channels of inquiry in African and African American research.