Peters Fellows: 2003/2004

Brandi C. Brimmer

University of California at Los Angeles

Brandi C. Brimmer is a doctoral candidate in United States history at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a current Erskine A. Peters Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Brimmer graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA in 1995 and earned a M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA in 1999. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her research. These include a research grant from the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA (2003), an Archie K. Miller Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society (2002), and a Mary Lily research grant from the Sallie Bingham Research Center at Duke University (2002). In 2000, Ms. Brimmer was appointed to the Education, Media, Arts, and Culture (EMAC) Division of the Ford Foundation where her work focused on knowledge building around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as issues related to diversity in higher education policy. While at the Ford Foundation, Brimmer participated in the design of EMAC’s Emerging Voices, New Directions project that provided seed grants to emerging leaders and organizations in the United States, Russia, and Brazil. Before working at the Foundation, Brimmer worked as a research assistant for the Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora at UCLA and for the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. She has taught African American History 1865-Present and Interracial Dynamics in American History, Literature, and Law, an interdisciplinary course that examines the relationship between African Americans and Asian Americans to each other and to the mainstream of America from the 19th century to the present.

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Brimmer’s research focus is 19th century United States history with an emphasis on African Americans, Women, and Social Welfare in the post emancipation South. Her dissertation entitled Gender and the Politics of Widow’s Pension in North Carolina, 1880-1920 examines the relationship between African-American Civil War widows and the Military Pension Bureau. Brimmer’s analysis recasts turn of the century African-American and women’s political history by illustrating how poor black women, in particular, used the pension bureau as an alternative arena to claim and define civil and political rights for themselves.

Sherwin K. Bryant

The Ohio State University

Sherwin Bryant, currently an Erskine A. Peters Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. He has been the recipient of awards from the Office of the Provost at Kenyon College (2002), the Ford Foundation (2001), and The Fulbright Commission of Ecuador (2000). As a visiting instructor of history at Kenyon College (2002), Mr. Bryant taught a survey of early Latin America and a senior seminar on the African Experience in Latin America. While at Kenyon, he also directed an independent study on race in Latin America and mentored students in the development of their honors and senior theses.

Dissertation Summary:

Mr. Bryant’s research explores themes of racial, ethnic and cultural identity among Africans and Afro-criollos (Africans born within the Spanish empire) in the Andean countries of South America. His dissertation, Slavery and the Process of Ethnogenesis: Africans, Afro-Quiteños, and the Realities of Bondage in the Kingdom of Quito (modern Ecuador and southern Colombia), 1600-1800, examines processes through which Africans and Afro-criollos negotiated the dual impositions of slavery and colonialism in a primarily indigenous environment. This comparative study traces the social, intellectual, economic, and cultural networks of enslaved Africans and Afro-criollos in three areas of the Kingdom of Quito: 1.) Popayán, a gold mining region; 2.) The highland areas of Ibarra and Quito, where agro-pastoral enterprises dominated; and 3.) The port city of Guayaquil, where masters assigned slaves to various skilled tasks.

Paul A. Minifee

University of Texas at Austin

Peters and Marten Program Fellow

A current Erskine A. Peters and John S. Marten Program in Homiletics Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Paul A. Minifee is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. He received the David J. Bruton Fellowship and Scholars for the Dream Award. Additionally, Minifee was nominated twice as an outstanding teacher for the Maxine Hairston Teaching Prize. With a double concentration in English and Psychology, Minifee earned a B.A. from UT Austin in 1994 and subsequently moved to Seoul, Korea where he taught English conversation and composition for two years. In 1997, he returned to UT Austin to study English Literature and completed coursework for the M.A. in 1999. As an assistant instructor at UT Austin, Mr. Minifee designed and taught courses centered on the African American experience, including Rhetoric of Blaxploitation, African American Literature and Culture, and African American Rhetoric. Though Minifee considers his early years in Louisville, Kentucky, the most crucial to his personal development, he was born in Texas and has lived most of his life in Galveston and Austin.

Dissertation Summary:

Mr. Minifee’s dissertation, Roots of Black Rhetoric: AME Zion's Pioneering Preacher-Politicians, examines AME Zion's influential role in the development of a distinctive African American rhetorical tradition. As the church home of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, AME Zion produced some of the century's most prominent black rhetoricians and stood at the forefront of the antislavery movement. His dissertation also explores AME Zion as a socially and politically progressive mediator between the marginalized black community and the hegemonic white culture through historical and rhetorical analysis of two principal leaders, Reverend Jermain Loguen and Bishop James W. Hood, of the AME Zion ministry.

Dorian T. Warren

Yale University

Dorian T. Warren is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University. He received his B.A., with honors, in 1998 from the University of Illinois and his M.A. from Yale University in 1999. Warren's research interests include American politics, African-American politics, race and ethnic politics, class politics, the politics of gender and sexuality, social science methodology and social movements. Warren has received numerous academic and research awards which include being named a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (2002), a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow (2002), a Yale University Nathan Hale Fellow (1998), and an Inaugural Arnold Aronson Fellow of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (1997). He also received a Queens College Labor Resource Center’s Inaugural Research Award Program Grant (2002). Among his publications are: "Will the Real Perestroikniks Please Stand Up?: Race and Methodological Reform in the Study of Politics," in Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed. Perestroika: Methodological Pluralism, Governance and Diversity in Contemporary American Political Science (Yale University Press, forthcoming); Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud: Black Pride Survey 2000, with Juan Battle, Cathy J. Cohen, Gerard Fergerson, & Suzette Audam (2002), a report published by the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, New York; and "Organizing at the Intersection of Labor and Civil Rights: A Case Study of New Haven" with Cathy J. Cohen, in University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law, vol. 2, no. 4, Spring: 629-655.

Dissertation Summary:

Mr. Warren currently writes his dissertation on the contemporary U.S. Labor Movement entitled, A New Labor Movement for a New Century?: Multiple Identities and Organizational Change in the U.S. Labor Movement. His dissertation examines to what extent and under what conditions unions represent and incorporate historically marginalized and excluded groups of workers (workers of color, women and gay and lesbian workers) in organizational and policy reconstruction. Warren’s research also examines the processes through which “single-identity” organizations change to “multiple-identity” organizations that also represent formerly excluded groups by addressing multiple social, class, and gender inequalities in the workplace and in society.

Jessica Wormley

Fordham University

Senior Fellow in Theology

Jessica Wormley is currently the Senior Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellow in Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University (Bronx). She graduated in 1997 from Chestnut Hill College (Philadelphia) with a B.A. in religious studies and a B.S.in chemistry. In 1999, Wormley earned the M.A. in systematic theology from the Washington Theological Union, where she was named the James A. Coriden Valedictor. In addition to being awarded a Presidential Scholarship (1999-2002) at Fordham University, Wormley also received doctoral fellowships (1999-2001) and a dissertation research fellowship (2003-2004) from the Fund for Theological Education, a Washington Theological Union Academic Scholarship (1997-1999), and a Women of Justice Award (1997). She has taught a course entitled “Faith and Critical Reason.” She has spoken on topics like God Beyond All Names: Inclusive Ways of Imaging God and Love Tenderly: A Contemporary Appropriation of the Micah Injunctive as a panelist at Chestnut Hill College (2001) and as a guest speaker at the College of St. Elizabeth (2001), respectively. Her areas of specialization include fundamental theology, the thought of Karl Rahner, and the interface of continental philosophy, specifically epistemology and hermeneutics, with theological discourse. She recently presented a paper at the University of Notre Dame entitled: Transcendence and Postmodernity: Irreconcilable Differences? in which she interpreted Rahner’s conception of God in light of Heidegger’s construal of pres-absence and Derrida’s critique of logocentrism.

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Wormley’s dissertation entitled Foundations of Christian Faith? Karl Rahner’s ‘Transcendental Hermeneutics’ and the Postmodern Critique seeks to provide a continued appeal to the theology of Karl Rahner in the postmodern context. Specifically, the dissertation offers a defense of Rahner’s fundamental theology in light of the critique leveled by Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Fiorenza, who roots his fundamental theology in a self-consciously nonfoundationalist stance, focuses his critique on the “mystagogical” or “maieutic” aspect of Rahner’s method; that is, its progression from implicit to explicit experience. Fiorenza determines that Rahner’s method fails to be appropriately hermeneutical. Wormley maintains that since Rahner always begins with historical experience, his fundamental theology is hermeneutical: it is a “transcendental hermeneutics.” Furthermore, through his appeal to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Rahner’s fundamental theology overcomes the subject-object dichotomy of a simple idealism and a naive realism, and it, therefore, offers a diacritical approach between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism. Her dissertation argues that this diacritical approach better grounds the normative claims of Christian faith and meets the exigencies of postmodernity as exemplified by Fiorenza.