Uc Santa Barbara Department Of Black Studies Dissertation Fellowship
Dissertation Fellowship Application
- Dissertation Scholars
Owen James Hyman
Department of Black Studies
South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA
Owen James Hyman is a PhD candidate in the Agricultural, Rural, and Environmental History Department at Mississippi State University. His dissertation, “The Cut and the Color Line: An Environmental History of Jim Crow in the Deep South’s Forests, ,” explores the material foundations of the American South’s culture of white supremacy as well as the environmental resources African Americans mobilized to accumulate capital and build communities after the Civil War and Emancipation. By analyzing the forests and forest industries of the Deep South, particularly those in Louisiana and Mississippi, the project shows how forms of racial violence, economic exclusion, and black resistance changed in relation to a changing landscape.
The study further examines the “cut-over color lines” that have been obscured by a century of timber extraction in the region, especially the agricultural potential African Americans found in the forests and swamps of the Deep South as well as the legal means timber companies used to strip black landowners of their holdings. Through a close reading of oral histories, timber cutting contracts, lawsuits, and soil surveys, this study will demonstrate that white supremacy hastened the collapse of the South’s old-growth forests while reforestation perpetuated white supremacy. In turn, it will highlight the ways in which black voices provide an important counter-narrative to understandings of the southern environment perpetuated by the forest industries.
Vineeta Singh
Department of Black Studies
South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA
Vineeta Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests center on social movement history, black feminist theory and methods, and critical university studies.
Her dissertation examines how higher education intervenes in academic and popular common senses about the place of black subjects in the U.S. nation-state. This critical university studies project is centered on black history, and uses black studies, cultural studies, critical gender studies, and Marxist geography theory and methods to tell a relational, intersectional history of American higher education. Through a series of case studies examining normal schools, land-grant colleges, vocational institutes, community colleges, and leadership training programs, this project brings to light the dialectic relationship between black political imaginaries and the racial projects embedded in twentieth century higher education innovations.
Dissertation Scholars
The Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for two dissertation fellowship scholars for the academic year Applicants must be advanced to candidacy at an accredited university. This fellowship is also open to international applicants. The department is interested in scholars whose research focuses on intersections of race, class, gender or sexuality in African/Caribbean/African-American or Diasporic Studies.
The duration of the award is nine months beginning fall quarter of the academic year. The fellowship grant is $27, Scholars are required to be in residence during the entire fellowship period. There is an expectation that the dissertation will be completed during the term of residency. Dissertation scholars will teach one undergraduate course and present one public lecture. The Department is especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through research, teaching and service.