Peters Fellows: 2005/2006
Candidates for 2005-2006
Quincy T. Mills
University of Chicago
Quincy T. Mills is a doctoral candidate in United States history at the University of Chicago, where he also earned a Master of Arts in Social Sciences in 1999. He received his B.S. in 1997 from the University of Illinois at Urbana. His research interests include 20th Century United States, African American, urban, and social history, and black politics. Mr. Mills recently published an essay on public discourse in a barbershop on homeland security; “I've Got Something to Say”: The Public Square, Public Discourse and the Barbershop,” Radical History Review. Issue 93, Fall 2005. With Melissa Harris-Lacewell, he coauthored “Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop” in Harris-Lacewell's Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Mr. Mills is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of New York State ( New York : Syracuse University Press, 2005) and the Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Featured at the end of Showtime Network's airing of Barbershop in 2004, Mr. Mills discussed the historical development of black barbershops at the turn of the twentieth century. He has received academic and research awards that include University Trustee Fellow, University of Chicago, (2000-2005); Black Civil Society Project Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago (2001); Mellon Dissertation Seminar Fellow, University of Chicago (2003); Summer Oral History Seminar Fellow, Columbia University (2004). In addition, the University of Chicago awarded him several dissertation research grants including the Arthur Mann Research Grant (2003); Freehling Research Grant (2003); Doolittle Research Grant (2003); and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Research Grant (2003, 2004) were awarded him. His essay ““You're a White Man's Bahbah:” Black Barbers and the Color Line in the Literature of Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar” won the Fuller, Kent, Turner, Gayle Award for Literary Criticism from the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, Chicago State University in 2004. Courses taught by Mr. Mills in African American and 20 th century United States history were at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, DePaul University, and Harold Washington Community College.
Dissertation Summary
“‘Color-Line' Barbers and the Emergence of a Black Public Space: A Social and Political History of Black Barbers and Barber Shops, 1850-1970” illuminates the role and representation of black barbers and black-owned barbershops in urban communities in the South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. In his dissertation, Mr. Mills investigates the inter and intra racial struggles that black barbers encountered with white and black customers, unionist, progressive era reformers, and black communities. This dissertation examines processes through which black barbers historically negotiated their personal and collective identities around race, class, and manhood. This study also reveals how these negotiations materialized at home and at work through an articulation and re-articulation of patron-client relations, social and racial ideologies of service work and entrepreneurship, and struggles over urban space. Mr. Mills also highlights the work that racial custom does for de facto segregation and racial surveillance, the complicated strategies of negotiating that surveillance, issues of race and labor regulation, and the importance of autonomous, black public spaces in American cities during Jim Crow.
LaReine-Marie Mosley
University of Notre Dame
LaReine-Marie Mosely is a Sister of Notre Dame and a doctoral candidate in Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to being an Erskine A. Peters Fellow, Sister Mosely is an honorary Dissertation Year Fellow with the Fund for Theological Education. She earned a M.Th. from Xavier University of Louisiana, Institute for Black Catholic Studies, and graduated with a B.S. in Education from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She has been awarded other doctoral fellowships from the Fund for Theological Education (2001-2003), and the University of Notre Dame (2003-2005). Selected to be an emerging theologian respondent at the “The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology Conference” (October 2002), her essay “A Heart as Wide as the World: Particularizing and Concretizing the Preferential Option for the Poor” is included in a forthcoming volume of emerging liberation theologians (University of Notre Dame Press). As a productive member of her community, Sister Mosely served as president of the Graduate Theological Society at Notre Dame (2002-2003) and as consultant and convener for “Uncommon Faithfulness: The Witness of African American Catholics,” a national conference sponsored by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (March 2004). Her essay “Daniel Rudd's American Catholic Tribune: An Instrument for the Transmission and Development of Tradition” will appear in a volume of this conference's papers. Sister Mosely has achieved in a variety of teaching and administrative capacities related to Catholic education that include classroom lectures, editing, and diversity advising.
Dissertation Summary
“Salvation Despite the Death of Jesus? The Cross in the Soteriology of Edward Schillebeeckx: An African American Christian Female Perspective” brings a refreshing and new perspective to bear on Flemish theologian, Schillebeeckx's treatment of the cross in the context of his larger soteriological project, thus testing the adequacy of his claims within a particular historical and social context. Sister Mosely illustrates how African American women's historical and present engagement with suffering provides them with hermeneutical insight into doctrine and lived experience that enables them to link the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ with the plight of suffering humanity, including and especially their own and that of the African American community. In her dissertation, she demonstrates the importance of African American female theologian's insight in concretizing Schillebeeckx's soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and in offering critical lenses from which to identify both its strengths and its limitations in a North American context.
Reanna A. Ursin
University of Notre Dame
Reanna A. Ursin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned a Master of Arts in English in 2004. Her teaching and research fields include 20th century American literature and 19th and 20th-century African American literature, particularly in relation to race, subjectivity and the historical novel. Ms. Ursin graduated summa cum laude from Xavier University of Louisiana as a Harcourt Foundation Scholar. She was also awarded a Beinecke Scholarship for Graduate Study in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. She recently participated as an invited panelist at the Black Humanities Collective at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and has presented papers at several conferences. Courses taught by Ms. Ursin have included contemporary African American literature and composition at Notre Dame. She organized and served as President of the English Graduate Student Association, served on the Intellectual Life Committee, and was a Representative to the Graduate Student Union.
Dissertation Summary
Ms. Ursin’s dissertation titled, “Intersubjectivity and the African American Historical Novel: Redefining the Legacy of Slavery,” offers an analysis of the representation of interracial interaction in three contemporary historical novels about slavery: Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986), Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River (1993), and Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003). Ms. Ursin contends that each novel historicizes slavery in a way that resonates with the rhetoric of respective debates about feminism, diasporic identity, and reparations. All three novels represent slavery through the intersection of multiple narrative voices, critiquing the ways in which contemporary debates about gender, nation, and race are grounded in archetypes of antebellum interaction. Ms. Ursin argues that by depicting slavery from the perspective of intersubjective formation—the mutually constitutive relations between beings—these works advocate an approach to slavery’s historicization that underscores dynamic interracial engagement. This shift in representation provides the conceptual space necessary to perceive slavery’s cross-cultural legacy, facilitating a collective rather than antagonistic approach to evaluating slavery’s significance.