Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellows 2007-2008
Tony Carey
Department of Political Science, SUNY at Stony Brook
(Tony.E.Carey.41@nd.edu)
Tony E. Carey, Jr. is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a Masters of Arts in Political Science in 2005. Tony graduated with distinction from Vanderbilt University in 2001. His general teaching and research interests include racial and ethnic politics, African American politics, political behavior, public opinion and survey methodology. Mr. Carey’s primary interests concern African American political thought as well as the effect of inter-racial relations on attitudes toward public policy and political candidates. Currently, he is preparing to submit a manuscript for review that examines the influence of black nationalism on African Americans’ civic behavior. While at Vanderbilt, Tony was inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha, a political science honorary society. He also was awarded the W. Burghardt Turner Graduate Fellowship at SUNY-Stony Brook in 2003 and served on its advisory committee from 2004 to 2006. In addition to his research, Mr. Carey has taught courses on U.S. government and the U.S. Congress at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Outside of the academy, Mr. Carey served as a legislative assistant at the Tennessee State Legislature and as a legal assistant at Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York City.
Dissertation Summary: “Politics in Black and Brown: The Influence of Personal and Group Interests on Relations between African Americans and Latinos” examines the social, political and economic factors that shape the prospects for political coalition-building between African Americans and Latinos in the United States. Since blacks and Latinos are presumed to share similar economic and political interests, many analysts contend that the groups should be political allies. However, empirical evidence indicates blacks and Latinos often compete for jobs, housing and political influence. The dissertation investigates the potential for certain economic and social contexts to undermine political coalitions between blacks and Latinos as well as the role of political elites in encouraging inter-group cooperation. Specifically, the first section of the study utilizes survey data to determine the perceived group competition and negative racial attitudes between African Americans and Latinos living within different neighborhood contexts, while the second component relies upon an originally-designed experimental survey to evaluate how campaign messages can either persuade or dissuade blacks and Latinos from voting for each other’s candidates. The work sheds light on the potential for strong, durable inter-minority political coalitions to form by revealing under what conditions one should expect blacks and Latinos to pursue their separate in-group interests as well as contexts under which both groups will work together to achieve their shared goals.
Denise Challenger
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 Caribbean history, the Social History of Medicine, African Canadian history, British Colonial history and Atlantic World history. As a researcher, Ms. Challenger is most intrigued by historical questions related to issues of gender, sexuality and race. She is most interested in how ideas about morality and sexuality shaped the material realities of formerly enslaved women in Barbados during the nineteenth century. Ms. Challenger has received numerous fellowships, most notably the Organization of American States Scholarship, the David Nicholls Memorial Trust Fellowship offered by the Society for Caribbean Studies, and Albert Tucker Graduate History Award in British Studies from 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” seeks to historicize the social construction of sexuality in nineteenth century Barbados, 1807-1887. The dissertation examines the formation of post emancipation society through the prism of sexuality. It seeks to understand the historical processes involved in the construction of colonial sexualities in general and Afro Barbadian female sexualities in particular. It seeks to demonstrate links between the social constructions of heteronormativity and the emerging political and social ideas about morality, civilization and citizenship in the newly ‘freed’ society. It seeks to uncover how the interplay between competing understandings of freedom and normative sexual behavior, held by the laboring populace, the imperial and the colonial elite, contributed to the gendered and disparate degrees of ‘freedom’ experienced by Afro descended women and men in the post emancipation period.
Marlene Daut
English Department, University of Notre Dame
(Marlene.L.Daut.1@nd.edu)
Marlene L. Daut is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include nineteenth- to early twentieth-century U.S. American, French, and Francophone Caribbean literatures, with a particular emphasis upon the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and the Atlantic World. Ms. Daut graduated with honors from Loyola Marymount University in 2002, where she earned a B.A. in English and in French. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and travel grants including a French Governmental Teaching Assistantship for eight months of teaching in France, a Foreign Language Area Studies grant for her participation in the Haitian Summer Institute at Florida International University, the Joseph F. Downes Memorial Travel Grant, a Nanovic Institute Grant to support research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and at the Centre des Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and she was the Department of Africana Studies’ Mentor Fellow for the academic year 2006-2007. Ms. Daut is a member of the Haitian Studies Association and recently presented a paper at their 18th-annual conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dissertation summary:
Ms. Daut’s comparative project entitled, “Representations of the Haitian Revolution, 1790-1865,” argues that late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century French, U.S. American, and Haitian expressions of and responses to the Haitian Revolution (1790-1804) like Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), Eméric Bergeaud’s Stella (1858), and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) betray coded anxieties about the connection between race and revolutionary thought. The widespread portrayal of the Revolution as a conflict between blacks and whites or slaves and their masters, she argues, masks a larger concern for and obsession with the position of the children of mixed-race sexual unions in the revolutionary context. One of the ways that this concern manifests itself lies in the depiction of interracial sexual relationships as either forbidden love affairs or perfidious and criminal rapes, as well as the ways in which many authors consequently painted mixed-race characters as inherently corrupt, degenerate, tragic, and/or as ultimately responsible for the violence of the revolution. In questioning the dialectic between history and fiction, her project also addresses the problematic of representation. This literary-historical approach to the Haitian Revolution, thus, reveals the underlying ways that the concept of race helped to shape and transform the nature of both literary and historical representation in the Atlantic World during the “Age of Revolution.”
Gladys Mitchell
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
(Gladys.L.Mitchell.129@nd.edu)
Gladys Mitchell is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. In 2004, she received a Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Chicago and in 2002 she received a Master of Public Policy specializing in international and economic policy at the University of Michigan. She graduated from Duke University in 2000 where she earned a BA in Political Science and African and African American Studies. She is the recipient of a number of awards. In 2006, she received the Overseas Dissertation Research Grant and the Center for Latin American Studies Travel Grant from the University of Chicago. She is a 2003 American Political Science Association Minority Fellow and a 2000-2002 Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow. Ms. Mitchell’s academic interest is in racial politics in Brazil, specifically the impact of black racial consciousness on Afro-Brazilian political choices in electoral politics.
Ms. Mitchell’s dissertation, “Racial and Electoral Politics in Salvador and São Paulo, Brazil” examines the extent racial consciousness among Afro-Brazilians influences candidate preferences and their support of racial policy. She is also interested in how local and federally elected politicians discuss race and racial issues. Past scholars did not believe that Brazil was a country where ethnic voting could occur. However, Ms. Mitchell avers that Brazil is not immune from the rise of black movements that has occurred throughout a number of Latin American countries and the implications of Brazils black movements on national politics. She conducted fieldwork in Salvador and São Paulo from October 2005 to July 2006. Using data from nearly 700 Afro-Brazilian respondents she uses statistical analysis to examine the relationship between racial identification and voter choice.
Shana Redmond
African American Studies Program, Yale University
(Shana.L.Redmond.6@nd.edu)
Shana L. Redmond is a doctoral candidate in the combined degree program in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. She earned Masters of Arts and Masters of Philosophy degrees from Yale in 2005 and 2006. Ms. Redmond graduated from Macalester College where she majored in African American Studies and Music with a History minor. While at Macalester, she was a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow. She is the recipient of numerous graduate fellowships and awards including the Mellon Mays University Fellowship and the Druscilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Award granted by the Association of Black Women Historians. Her research interests include the cultures and social movements of the African Diaspora, 20th Century U.S. History, African American History, working-class and labor studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, music, and popular culture. In addition to her research, Ms. Redmond invests in community service and action through participation in labor and community organizations.
Dissertation Summary: Anthem: Music and Politics in Diaspora, 1920-1970s, examines songs that have influenced the political and popular consciousness of the Black Diaspora and their use as political tools in movement cultures. Each chapter offers an historical reading of a popular Black song that performed the cultural work of constructing diasporic identity within U.S. and international contexts. Combining social, cultural, and political history, music theory, and social movement theory, this work resituates culture at the center of Black diasporic resistance. It argues that music has been and continues to be central to the way the Diaspora defines itself and its politics, particularly through its use by Black organizations and individual political actors. The project additionally highlights music as a political bridge between cultures as it examines the anthem’s use in other nations. The anthems become the point of departure for this analysis through their duality as a group of musical components and a set of organizing strategies in Black social movements. This vivid reexamination of Black music interrogates the political dimensions of cultural production while maintaining a focus on methods of resistance and organizing traditions within communities of color. The project contributes to the literature which posits a long Civil Rights movement and adds to an important body of scholarly work that re-periodizes the convergence of Black popular music and Black internationalism. Anthem offers a compelling account of global culture, resistance, and solidarity in the changing political dynamics of the twentieth century.
Peters Fellows by Year
Fellows 2006/2007
Fellows: 2005/2006
Fellows: 2004/2005
Fellows: 2003/2004
Fellows: 2002/2003
Fellows: 2001/2002
Fellows: 2000/2001