CAAAS launches graduate research fellowship with support from the University Libraries
When doing research in African and African American studies, it’s not uncommon for students to need funding to support crucial research endeavors such as traveling to a region to access primary source materials or to disseminate findings.
To support CU Boulder graduate students doing research in these multidisciplinary areas, the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) has teamed up with University Libraries and the Graduate School to sponsor a fellowship program that connects selected students with a dedicated librarian and provides a stipend to cover additional research expenses.
This year, eight graduate students are named as fellows for the Center for African & African American Studies Graduate Student Fellowship Program from the history, theater and dance, philosophy, anthropology, journalism and media studies departments, the College of Music and the School of Law.
Top, from left to right: Reya Roussel, Antoinette Kendrick, Idowu Odeyemi, Trevor Egerton, Success Osayi
Middle, from left to right: Nandi Pointer, Tyreis Hunte, Ubochi Igbokwe
Bottom, from left to right: Dean of Libraries, Robert H. McDonald; Dean of Social Sciences, Sarah E. Jackson, Director of CAAAS, Dr. Reiland Rabaka; Dean of the Graduate School, E. Scott Adler.
“This program is campus-wide,” said Reiland Rabaka, founder and director of the CAAAS. “We have artists. We have social scientists. We have law—all mixing it up together. Our goal is to train the next generation of researchers and artists who will be interdisciplinary and work in entirely new areas of scholarship and creative work. I have been dreaming of doing this for the past 20 years I have been here at CU.”
The year-long fellowship is funded through a monetary grant from the EBSCO Family Foundation, a provider of research databases, e-journals, magazine subscriptions, ebooks and discovery service for academic libraries. Students were able to use stipends to attend and present at conferences or travel, both nationally and internationally, for research of primary source materials that might not otherwise be possible without this support.
Ubochi Igbokwe, a musicology PhD student, used the stipend to travel to Japan this summer to study Igbo African masquerade music and the cultural impacts of the Igbo African émigrés.
“While much of the current scholarship on Africa-Asia affairs tends to focus heavily on trade and economic relations, with particular attention to rising Chinese influence, there is a relative lack of attention on the cultural dynamics that equally shape the nature of the relationships,” said Igbokwe, who is gathering data through ethnographic and archival studies.
Trevor Egerton, a history PhD candidate studying race and outdoor recreation in the twentieth century American South, visited three formerly segregated state parks in Tennessee and South Carolina to interview local residents and workers and explore archival documents. At T.O. Fuller State Park in Tennessee, one of the first Black-only state parks east of the Mississippi River, he realized that he wanted to approach discussion of this park through the lens of labor as it was built or formed at different times through a Black Civilian Conservation Corps crew, enslavement, convict leasing and sharecropping.
Reya Roussel, a third-year law student and senior fellow with the Byron White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, is studying the theft of land from Black property owners and writing a critique of rural land reparations. “Millions of dollars of land has been systematically stolen from African Americans,” Roussel said. “It was happening throughout the 20th century.”
University Libraries Success & Engagement Librarian Katerina Allmendinger is assisting the students to locate materials needed for their research. Because the students are working in new areas, the materials they need may not already be part of the University Libraries collections. Allmendinger anticipates the students needing additional subscriptions to databases or help connecting with archivists and other area studies specialists across the country—or the world. In addition to supporting their information needs, Allmendinger and her colleagues in the libraries are working with the students to support a graduate research symposium that meets several times a semester to give fellows support in disseminating their research.
Dean of the University Libraries Robert McDonald said the libraries would do all that it can to support the students with their research. This may include enhancing current collections or finding new means of accessing the primary source materials that are needed.
“What they are doing and the collaborative, interdisciplinary research they are undertaking is challenging due sometimes in part to lack of documentation or inability to access many of the primary source materials needed for the research,” McDonald said.
“Since its inception, the CAAAS has been tireless in their support of graduate students and their ground-breaking research, and this new program with the libraries is no exception. I have no doubt that these eight students will go on to do great work,” said Dean of the Graduate School Scott Adler. “This program will be transformative for the academy.”