Peters Fellows: 2004/2005

Brandi C. Brimmer

University of California at Los Angeles

Senior Fellow of History

Ms. Brimmer is a doctoral candidate in United States history at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Senior Erskine A. Peters Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Her fields of expertise include 19th-century U.S., African American, and women/gender history. Brimmer graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1995 and earned an 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. Davis Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society (2002), and a Mary Lily research grant from the Sallie Bingham Research Center at Duke University (2002). Brimmer is a contributor to the second edition of the Black Women in America Encyclopedia (forthcoming, Oxford Press). During the 2004-05 academic year, Brimmer also holds an appointment as an instructor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, where she will teach an undergraduate seminar on women in the United States South.

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Brimmer’s dissertation, “‘All Her Rights and Privileges’: Women and the Politics of Civil War Widows’ Pension Claims, 1866-1920,” recasts the history of American citizenship in the United States through an analysis of Civil War widows’ pension claims. Focusing on eastern North Carolina, the study illuminates what the application process for such a claim involved and how that process was socially and politically constructed at the local level. Brimmer’s interpretation sheds light on the ways in which women, local professionals, and Military Pension Bureau representatives shaped the definition of what constituted a legitimate claim on the federal government. Brimmer argues that the interpretation of the conditions necessary for a valid claim differed dramatically between African American women and the Bureau, providing a different framework for understanding women’s citizenship at the turn of the century. When viewed from a perspective that places the political debate over federal resources at the local level, as Brimmer contends, the range of political issues that women were debating during the late 19th century expands significantly. Her approach suggests a new model of political history that draws on conceptual frameworks in the fields of women’s and African American history.

Sara Busdiecker

University of Michigan

Sara Busdiecker is currently a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Michigan where she previously earned a Master of Arts Degree in Anthropology and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Comparative Literature and Anthropology. Ms. Busdiecker’s research interests include race, ethnicity, nation, “mixed-ness,” blackness, and the African Diaspora, all as both concepts and lived experiences, and in particular as they relate to black populations on the geographical, socio-political, and scholarly periphery of the African Diaspora. Her geographical areas of interest include Latin America, with an emphasis on Andean South America, and the United States. Busdiecker has been awarded a variety of fellowships and grants that have funded her graduate studies and research including a Fulbright Fellowship, Smith College Mendenhall Fellowship, Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship, NIH Minority International Research Training Fellowship, and others from the U of M’s Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Department of Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center, International Institute, and Office of Academic and Multicultural Initiatives. During her graduate career Ms. Busdiecker has visited some 30 countries in pursuit of personal and professional adventure and enrichment, most notably spending a year in Chile and two years in Bolivia.

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Busdiecker’s dissertation, We Are Bolivians Too: The Experience and Meaning of Blackness in Bolivia, examines the contemporary culture and identity of Bolivia’s very small and overlooked black population, descended from African slaves. More broadly, it deals with the experiences and meanings associated with blackness and race in Bolivia and the roles of scholarly, political, and popular representation, cultural performance, and a dominant Indian/mestizo-centric paradigm for organizing difference and Bolivian national identity, in these meanings and experiences. This dissertation is based largely on two years of research and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, and in a small rural community in the neighboring Yungas region. While in Bolivia, Busdiecker’s work earned her invitations from the U.S. Embassy to do radio interviews and a panel presentation, funding to organize a photo exhibit on Afro-Bolivian culture, an invitation from the Vice Ministry of Culture to accompany an Afro-Bolivian dance group to an Afro-Andean encounter in Venezuela, an invitation to contribute an essay to the latest edition of An Insider’s Guide to Bolivia, and opportunities to raise funds for community needs at her field site.

Shayla C. Nunnally

Duke University

Ms. Nunnally is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and a certificate candidate in the Program of African and African American Studies at Duke University . She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in political science from North Carolina Central University in 1998, and she holds an M.A. in political science from Duke University . She has received numerous accolades, including the Aleane Webb Dissertation Research Award ( Duke University , 2003); The Center for the Study of Democracy, Institutions, and Political Economy (DIPE) Best Graduate Student Theme Paper Award ( Duke University , 2003); honorable mention for the Ted Robinson Award for the Best Dissertation Proposal in Minority Politics (Southwestern Political Science Association, 2003); Summer Dissertation Research Awards ( Duke University , 2003 and 2004); and the Samuel DuBois Cook Society Graduate Student Award for Community Service (Duke University, 2004). Nunnally specializes in American politics, with a concentration in African American political behavior and race and American politics. Her research interests include themes related to her dissertation – racial socialization, political socialization, racial trust, social trust, and political trust – as well as African American political development in the 19th and 20th centuries, social capital, political psychology, and comparative analyses of intraracial and interracial political behavior among various racial and ethnic minority groups. She has several working papers related to these topics.

Currently, Ms. Nunnally is a member of the Durham Area Politics Study Group (Paula D. McClain, Ph.D., Department of Political Science, Duke University, Principal Investigator). This group is analyzing the 2003 Durham (North Carolina) Study of Intergroup Relations, with respect to the impact of changing racial dynamics in the South on cross-racial group relations and political attitudes among blacks, Latinos, and whites. Nunnally is also a member of the Black Civil Society Project (Michael Dawson, Ph.D., Department of Government, Harvard University , Principal Investigator), which has allowed her to investigate black political development in the early 20th century. She is currently working on two chapters, “Mapping Hayti: Exploring Black Civil Society in Durham , North Carolina ” and “Private Versus Public Spheres: The Effects of Race and Gender on Social Capital and Social Stratification in the Late 19th and Early 20th-Century United States ,” that will be featured in a forthcoming edited volume, Fractured Rainbow: Race and Civil Society in the United States (Michael Dawson, Harvard University , and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, University of Chicago , editors). As an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Political Science at North Carolina Central University, Nunnally taught American politics courses (Fall 2001, 2003-2004). She has assisted with teaching in the Race and Politics section of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (2001-2004). She also has developed several courses in the study of race and politics, racial construction, and race and intersectionality, one of which she taught as her own course (“Race, Politics, and Policy”) at Duke University .

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Nunnally’s dissertation, “In Whom Do We Trust? The Effect of Racial Socialization on Black Americans’ Perceptions of Trust,” investigates African Americans’ social interactions concerning race and politics and the extent to which these socializations affect their perceptions of racial, social, and political trust. She has designed an original survey, The Black American Socialization and Trust Survey (BASTS), which she will use to analyze how black Americans think about racial groups, trust, and politics. In addition, Nunnally studies how certain socialization messages about race affect black Americans’ political attitudes.

Paul A. Minifee

University of Texas at Austin

Senior 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 has received the David J. Bruton Fellowship and the Scholars for the Dream Award in addition to twice being nominated 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, 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 the influential role of AME Zion (the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church) 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 19th century’s most prominent black rhetoricians and stood at the forefront of the antislavery movement. Through historical and rhetorical analysis of two principal leaders of the AME Zion ministry – Reverend Jermain Loguen and Bishop James W. Hood – Minifee’s dissertation also explores AME Zion as a socially and politically progressive mediator between the marginalized black community and the hegemonic white culture.

Shani T. Mott

University of Michigan

Ms. Mott is a doctoral candidate in American culture at the University of Michigan, and she graduated with high honors in English and African American Studies from Wesleyan University in 1998. A Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow and a Rackham Merit Fellow, she has maintained both civic and academic involvement at Michigan. Mott has taught a course on American literature and race, acted as a graduate student instructor for courses in both the American Culture (AC) program and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS), and has advised undergraduate CAAS majors. In addition, she worked with Arts of Citizenship, an organization designed to make history public and minimize the gap between the University and its surrounding local community. In efforts to reduce social disparities in the classroom and to enhance the mentor/mentee relationships between graduate students and faculty, Mott worked with the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. Her research assesses 20th-century American fiction to reveal how race – in particular blackness – has historically shaped American literature. She has presented several conference papers on various authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, and Ann Petry.

Dissertation Summary:

Ms. Mott's dissertation is entitled “Masquerade Narratives: Performing Race and Claiming Citizenship in American Literature, 1925-1955.” It examines literary and filmic crossings of the color line. Her focus includes literary artists who wrote novels using protagonists from different racial and/or ethnic backgrounds than their own. She also studies racial concepts in films of the 1940s that cast white actors as African Americans who racially passed for white and analyzes a Negro Digest series titled “If I Were A Negro.” The series, wherein a white celebrity would imagine him or herself as black, appeared each month in this African American publication. Her research explores how these fictional characters became literary and social vehicles for questioning and challenging mid-20th-century social and legal constraints. Many of the writers studied in Motts’ research created fictional characters with lifestyles, experiences, and voices of a racial “Other” to mask taboo and controversial content.

Jessica Wormley

Fordham University

Senior Fellow in the Program of Liberal Studies

Jessica Wormley is currently the Senior Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellow in the Program of Liberal Studies 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” and has spoken on such topics as “God Beyond All Names: Inclusive Ways of Imaging God” (Chestnut Hill College, 2001) and “Love Tenderly: A Contemporary Appropriation of the Micah Injunctive” (College of St. Elizabeth, 2001). 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. Wormley 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, “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” 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 (i.e., it does not study the methodological principles of interpretation). 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 an approach for distinguishing between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism. Wormley’s dissertation argues that this diacritical approach better grounds the normative claims of Christian faith and meets the demands of postmodernity as exemplified by Fiorenza.