Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellows 2008-2009
History Department, York University
(Denise.Challenger.1@nd.edu)
Denise Challenger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at York University, Toronto, Canada. She earned a Master of Arts Degree from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and graduated with a double major in History and Economics. Her research and teaching interests include Gender history, Caribbean history, Atlantic World history, British colonial history and the Social history of medicine. Research questions related to historical issues of gender, power in racialized colonial spaces most intrigue her. Ms. Challenger has received numerous fellowships, most notably the PRA Scholarship, Organization of American States; the David Nicholls Memorial Trust Fellowship, the Society for Caribbean Studies, Oxford; and the Albert Tucker Graduate History Award in British Studies, York University. In addition, Ms. Challenger is a contributor to the forthcoming edited collection on the Social History of Health and Medicine in the Caribbean, Routledge Press, 2008.
Dissertation Summary: Constructing the Colonial Moral Order: Discourses on Sexuality in Post Slavery Barbados, 1816-1897, interrogates the negotiation of power through the production of moral discourses as Barbados transitioned from a society of slaves to a society of citizens after full emancipation in 1838. It argues that various actors attempted to reconstruct the social relations of post slavery Barbadian society through moral regulation. As such, the prison, the school houses, the Contagious Diseases hospital and plantation households of both Afro Barbadians and white Barbadians became primary sites of political contestation. As it was within these spaces that power was constantly negotiated and that the conflictual processes of gender and racial identity formation were articulated and rearticulated and the moral order contested in material and symbolic ways. This project combines both gender discourse and social history techniques to explore the conflictual processes of identity formation. This exploration of the processes involved in the construction of hierarchies of difference in the past, adds further knowledge to the complex process involved in the persistence of social hierarchies based on bodily difference in the present day.
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.
Seth Markle
Department of History, New York University
(seth.m.markle.1@nd.edu)
Seth Markle is a doctoral candidate in History in the African Diaspora and Africa programs at New York University. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts University in 2000 where he majored in English and Africa and the New World Studies (cum laude) and also received Highest Honors for his Senior Thesis on African Americans living in Ghana from 1945 -1998. From 1998-2003, he was the co-founder/co-Director of the Nia Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to youth leadership development, grassroots community organizing and political popular education. Seth is the recipient of the Mitchell McCracken Fellowship and the Sattwa-Merriwheather Summer Doctoral Research Grant (2003 and 2004). His work has also been published in The Black Scholar (Winter 2008). His teaching and research interests include: African American history, back-to-Africa movements, black internationalism, civil rights and black power politics and anti-colonial nationalist movements, postcolonial state formation, and hip-hop culture in Africa.
Dissertation Summary: 'We Are Not Tourists’: The Black Power Movement and the Making of Socialist Tanzania, 1964 to 1974, explores the ways in which Tanzanian state formation shaped the ideological contours, strategies, tactics, networks of solidarity and diasporic political/cultural identities of the U.S. Black Power movement. This dissertation is based on research conducted both in the United States and Tanzania (East Africa) and is a comparative historical examination of the parallel ascendancies of the Tanzanian state and Black Power radicalism largely viewed through the lens of international travel and the transnational movement of radical ideas and theories. By concentrating on Tanzania as loci of pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist politics, Seth develops a theory of informal patronage to describe the contingent relationships between autonomous U.S.-based black nationalist organizations and the nation-state in order to explain how African American activists conceptualized and attempted to implement a sustainable political praxis in Tanzania, which ultimately resulted in the political marginalization of Black Power activism abroad and within the global Pan-Africanist movement as a whole.