Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellows 2009-2010
Jean Beaman
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
Jean.M.Beaman.2@nd.edu
Jean Beaman is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University. She earned a Master of Arts degree in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2006 and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and French from Northwestern University in 2002. During her time at Northwestern, Jean received many grants to support her research. Her areas of interest include urban sociology, place and space identities, racial and ethnic identity, race/class/gender intersectionality, sociology of culture and symbolic boundaries, and immigration and integration.
Dissertation Summary: “Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité”: Marginalization, Identity, and Second-generation North African Immigrants in France explores how second-generation North African immigrants understand and respond to their difference from and marginalization within mainstream French society and how they navigate and negotiate their identities, especially vis-à-vis their ethnic origin, in a society where identity politics and group categorization are not allowed. This dissertation is based on fieldwork and interviews in both Paris and its banlieues, or suburbs, with people of North African origin who were born and raised in France. Republicanism in France makes “difference” taboo to discuss even it exists in reality. Because of this, second-generation immigrants, particularly those of North African origin, are often perceived as foreigners by French society, even though they were born in France. As a consequence of this, many in this population adopt politics based on identity, such as ethnic origin or religion, that would distinguish them from native-born French. This dissertation therefore complicates the meaning of cultural, ethnic, and national identity in a society that fails to acknowledge its diversity and provides a more holistic understanding of how social difference manifests itself and becomes meaningful even when it is not officially recognized.
Jessica Graham
Department of History, University of Chicago
jgraham2@nd.edu
Jessica Graham is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She earned a Master of Professional Studies from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, with a concentration in African American History. Ms. Graham received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in African American Studies, with an emphasis in History. Ms. Graham has been awarded many fellowships and research grants, including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation and Research Abroad Fellowship (2007-08) and the Rockefeller Archive Center Grant-in-Aid (Summer 2007.) She also received a graduate prize lectureship from the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, for her self-designed undergraduate course, “Racialization in Postemancipation US and Brazil” (Spring 2007.) Ms. Graham’s research and teaching interests include: US and Brazilian racial ideologies and national identity formation, racial implications of state policy, culture in the African Diaspora, and the racial dynamics of sport. She will have an article published in the Spring 2008 issue of the Brazilian historical journal, O Tempo.
Dissertation Summary: Representations of Racial Democracy: State Cultural Policy, Race, and National Identity in the US and Brazil, 1922-45 is a transnational historical study of state ideology that links two simultaneous 20th century processes: the demarginalization of black culture and the hegemonic rise of racially pluralist nationalism, or racial democracy, in the US and Brazil. The dissertation examines the mutually influential trajectory of these states’ nationalist rhetoric as it shifted from an open exclusion of people of color to an ideological inclusion of all races. The dissertation demonstrates how these states attempted to navigate and control evolving domestic and international dynamics in part by deploying this ideology of racial democracy, which was reflected in state cultural efforts as an increasing embrace of black cultural iconography. The dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which the ideology reflected a new 20th century racialization of the very meaning of democracy, and how its emergence in racist environments reveals its inherent limitations to redress racial inequalities.
Nicole Ivy
Department of African & American Studies, Yale University
nicole.n.ivy.4@nd.edu
Nicole Ivy is a doctoral candidate in the joint degree program in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. She earned both the Master of Philosophy degree in American Studies and the Master of Arts degree in African American Studies from Yale University. Ms. Ivy graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the Cornell University Sage Fellowship and the Samuel Botwinik Dissertation Fellowship from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include 19th century African American literature and culture, theories of the body, legal and medical interpretations of black personhood, and race, gender and the biomedical fashioning of identity.
Dissertation Summary: Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors and Spectacular Gynecology in the Nineteenth Century U.S. considers the production and circulation of enslaved black women as objects of medical examination. Its chapter studies engage the logics and practices through which enslaved persons were divested of the rights to their own flesh and reconstituted as biological test subjects who were open to interpretation. Deploying an interdisciplinary methodology that brings critical race theory, visual culture analysis, and strategies of literary close reading to bear on the history of trans-Atlantic slavery and medicine, the dissertation investigates how the anatomized bodies of enslaved black women provided a physical terrain upon—and through—which white male fantasies of mastery, practice, and perfection could be played out. It seeks to locate the nineteenth-century expansion of gynecological science within the larger context of U.S. legal and medical discourses on sovereignty, personhood, and racialized sexuality. By exploring the ways in which black women, and their bodies, were represented within the popular medical culture of the nineteenth-century, the project places extant archival (re)sources in the service of foregrounding the black women’s lives that unfolded at the intersection of Southern antebellum slave economies and the industry of dissection.
Laurence Ralph
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
lralph@nd.edu
Laurence Ralph is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He earned a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006 and a Bachelor of Science degree in History, Technology and Society from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004. Laurence has been awarded several fellowships, including: the University of Chicago, Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship (2009), the University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (2009), the National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology (2007-2008), the National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in Law and Social Science (2007-2008), the National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2005-2007), The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (2004-2005), and the University of Chicago, Trustees Fellowship (2004). His teaching and research interests include: Ethnographies of Gang Sociality, Critical Race Studies, Theories of the African Diaspora, and Disability Studies. His work has been published in The Anthropology Exchange (2006), in a forthcoming edited volume entitled, Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?, and in a forthcoming issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
Dissertation Summary: Of all major US metropolitan areas, Chicago has the highest homicide rate. Over a single weekend last April, there were 9 homicides and 36 people were gunned down—of these shootings, 14 of the victims subsequently became paralyzed. These numbers are consistent with national trends in which, every year, 4 times as many gunshot victims are crippled than killed. “You Never Hear About the Wheelchair”: Violence and Mobility in a Westside Chicago Gang emerges from this hazardous context, and thus, necessarily pays critical attention to the growing number of disabled and immobile gang members who most people fail to notice, on the one hand, and the palpable presence of drug dealing activities to which people routinely refer, on the other. Through 18-months of participant-observation on street corners, as well as in schools and churches that host gang prevention programs, Laurence’s ethnography adopts a novel approach in exploring violent crime in a street gang by examining physical and social disability using the lens of mobility: by framing his project in terms of mobility, he intervenes in time-honored questions about the human condition—namely, what motivates violent behavior and how do we cope with the consequences of violence-induced injury?
Marques Redd
Department of English, University of California Berkeley
mredd@nd.edu
Marques Redd is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of California-Berkeley. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree (magna cum laude with highest honors) from Harvard University in 2004, where he majored in Social Studies and African and Afro-American Studies. His senior project “Plato’s ‘Egyptian Voyage’: A Reading of Five Dialogues” won best thesis prizes in both departments. As a graduate student, his research has continued to focus on the importance of ancient Egyptian culture for the development of the Western tradition – particularly in the realms of literature, philosophy, and religion. He is also a scholar of hermetic traditions closely linked to Egypt – including alchemy, gnosticism, and kabbalah. Redd is the recipient of many academic prizes, including the Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Phi Beta Kappa Doctoral Fellowship Award, and Bancroft Library Study Award. Most recently, he has organized a panel for the 2009 Modern Language Association conference on “The Myth of Egypt and Twentieth-Century African American Literature.” He is also proud of non-profit work he has done outside of the academy, particularly for AIDS Project East Bay.
Dissertation Summary: Ægypt: Imaginal Mapping, Psychospirituality, and Trans-atlantic Romanticism is a theoretical fusion of ancient Egyptian mythography, quantum mechanics, and Neoplatonism that attempts to understand how literature stimulates and influences the psychospiritual development of consciousness. This interpretive paradigm is focused specifically on British and American Romantic literature of the late-18th and 19th centuries because Romanticism is one of the most intense periods of Egyptian influence on English literature due to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798; the deciphering of the hieroglyphics in 1822; Egyptocentric freemasonry, which inspired revolutionary activity in France, Haiti, and the USA; and the revival of interest in hermetic traditions. This dissertation analyzes a wide range of complexly interlinked topics – such as theogony (birth of the gods) in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; cosmogony (creation of the universe) in Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka; the multi-dimensional self in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; magic in Thomas Beddoes’ Death’s Jest-Book; and the afterlife and initiatic realms in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature.