Melissa Stuckey

Yale University

Melissa Stuckey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. She earned a Master of Arts degree and a Master of Philosophy degree from Yale in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Ms. Stuckey graduated with honors from Princeton University in 2000 as a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow. Her research interests include: Post-Civil War United States history, 20th century social and political history, African-American history, and race and ethnicity in the American West. She is most interested in questions of race and citizenship in the Post-Civil War United States. Ms. Stuckey has received numerous fellowships and awards. She is a Mellon Mays University Fellow and was a 2000-2004 Jacob K. Javits Fellow. In 2003, she received the Huggins-Quarles Award by the Organization of American Historians, and was the first recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s John Hope Franklin Dissertation Fellowship in 2005. In addition to her studies, Stuckey is active in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale.

Dissertation Summary: “‘All Men Up’: Race, Rights, and Power in the All Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, 1903-1939” reveals a heretofore overlooked history of civil rights activism in Boley, Oklahoma during the period termed the “nadir” for African Americans in the United States. Prior to statehood in 1907, the Oklahoma and Indian Territories attracted black settlers hungry for social and political freedom. Black Oklahomans participated in all levels of government and politics, and helped the Republican Party maintain a competitive edge. When blacks were disfranchised in 1910, Boley became the center of the struggle to regain voting rights. In spite of many setbacks, Boley’s citizens tenaciously challenged discriminatory elections laws until the mid 1920s. Although Boleyites did not emerge unscathed from their protracted battle against white supremacy, their efforts contributed to two landmark United States Supreme Court victories and helped lay the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Era.

Katrina Thompson

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Katrina Thompson Katrina D. Thompson is a doctoral candidate in United States History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she has earned a Master of Arts in History in 2002. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth and twentieth century United States history, African American history and culture, mass media and the African Diaspora. Ms. Thompson graduated from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History. She was awarded a W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000 and received Commendation Awards from two government agencies, the Office of Personnel Management and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Ms. Thompson is also a forthcoming contributor to the African American National Biography which is a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. In addition, she has recently presented papers at several conferences including the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Mid-West Popular Culture Association. She has also served as the Africana Studies representative for the Stony Brook University Black History Month Planning Committee. Ms. Thompson is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana but currently resides in South Bend, Indiana.

Dissertation Summary: Katrina Thompson examines the theme of black performance arts from the Enlightenment through the postbellum period, emphasizing the cultural exchange and misrepresentations that constructed the racial organization of modern North America. Her dissertation, “The Staging of Race: The Development of Black Culture and Whiteness through the Performance Arts,” examines slave narratives, travel journals, popular literature and theater to investigate a wide variety of performance scenes and their influence on the construction of racial categories. Specifically, Ms. Thompson analyzes the pressure placed on blacks to sing and dance for whites and how white hegemony contributed to the subjugation of black culture in the public sphere, while simultaneously reinforcing whiteness. Blacks continued to exhibit their West African culture in lyrical and dance expression; however, whites distorted black performance by forcing blacks to create images reinforcing a justification for slavery, subjugation and otherness.

Nazera Wright

University of Maryland at College Park

Nazera Wright Nazera S. Wright is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She received a B.A. in English and African American Studies from the University of Virginia and a M.A. in English from Howard University. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century African American literature, Archival Studies, and the Bildungsroman in African American Literature. Wright is the recipient of national fellowships that include the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, an Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, and a Gilder Lehrman Research Fellowship with the Institute of American History for archival research at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. The University of Maryland at College Park awarded Ms. Wright several dissertation research and travel grants, including an Ilene H. Nagel travel grant and a QCB Travel Grant to conduct research at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Ms. Wright taught courses in African American literature and Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Maryland, Howard University and Bowie State University.

Dissertation Summary: “Girlhood in African American Literature, 1850-1950” argues that representations of the girl in African American literature have certain thematic tendencies which contribute to her impact as a political weapon in the fight for citizenship. The portrayal of the black girl’s growth from an often depicted untutored, orphan to a moral and intellectual race woman reveals political significance as it lays the foundation for racial progress. Her coming of age implies a move away from the body of the girl and towards the development of her mind, a necessary path to citizenship for the race. Post Reconstruction works by African Americans foreground the reformation of this type of girl. If she acquires conduct and education, the orphaned black girl, like the disfranchised race after slavery, may join the nation at large and expect equal rights and citizenship under the law. Ms. Wright examines nineteenth-century newspaper columns, Christian and civilizationist rhetoric in the work of the Black Women’s Club Movement and in speeches by Alexander Crummell and Anna Julia Cooper, nineteenth century novels, black conduct discourse, “New Negro” texts, and Gwendolyn Brooks’ collection of poetry, Annie Allen. This chronological approach to the study of girlhood in African American literature reveals the significance that evolving moral discourse had on black people’s historical access to citizenship into American culture.

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