2020 Grant and Fellowship Recipients
2020-21 McColl Fellows
The Center for the Study of the American South offers the McColl Dissertation Year Fellowship in Southern Studies to support the completion of a dissertation by a doctoral candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill on a subject related to the history, culture, or society of the American South. These applicants received other dissertation year funding, but will retain the title of McColl Fellow.
Diamond Holloman – Environment, Ecology, and Energy
Isaiah Ellis – Department of Religious Studies
Summer Research Grant Recipients
With the support of the Southern Futures initiative, the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective, and our donors, CSAS was able to fund candidates from a pool with an unprecedented number of qualified applicants. Grant recipients represent a wide variety of departments, broadening the scope of research on the diverse and changing South.
Danbi Choe is a Ph.D. candidate in School Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Danbi received her master’s degree in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Quantitative Research Methods from Seoul National University of Education. Before joining the doctoral program, she was an elementary school teacher in Seoul, South Korea for five years. Her research focuses on understanding risk and protective factors related to school adjustment of children and adolescents, with her dissertation on developing and evaluating an intervention designed to support social-emotional learning among Korean immigrant adolescents in North Carolina. As a part of her dissertation project, Danbi’s CSAS-funded summer project will seek to develop a mental health program tailored to fit the unique needs and experiences of Korean immigrant youth in North Carolina, a group that has understudied despite their increasing needs.
Ariana Ávila is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, where her focus is on medical / bio-cultural anthropology. Her interests are in applying intersectionality theory to U.S. immigration policies and how stress-induced by U.S. structural and political factors affect the biological outcomes on the health of immigrants of color in rural Florida. She is interested in the transgenerational effects of health on mixed-status families. The CSAS summer research grant will support Ariana’s archival research efforts in examining Florida’s complex history of immigration, race, ethnicity, health and its inclusion in the U.S. South.
A daughter of Mexican immigrants, Ariana is originally from Arcadia, Florida, a rural and agricultural town in Southwest Florida.
Dane Emmerling is a PhD student in the Department of Health Behavior at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. His research focuses on the possibilities for experiences and programs that shift individuals’ and institutions’ attitudes and behaviors about their participation in systems in ways that create a more healthy and just world. Specifically, Dane is investigating how the Racial Equity Institute’s Phase 1 training on recognizing and intervening on structural racism changes participant’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Before returning to school, Dane worked in global health evaluation and in service-learning offices supporting universities’ linkages with community organizations.
Deanna Corin is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill. With a focus on wildfires and the utilization of prescribed burns, her dissertation research investigates the intersections between environmental management, emotion, and climate change in the US South. She investigates how land management strategies impact people’s sense of place amidst precarious climate futures. Using ethnographic methods, she highlights the significance of place-based knowledge formations in studying the impacts of climate change. These insights drive her approach in analyzing affective responses to environmental changes to illuminate the entangled social, emotional, and ecological processes that are involved in land management and climate mitigation. In a departure from traditional climate change research, she seeks to assess how memory and emotion play a role in understanding climate change and sense of place, how community engagement may mitigate climate anxieties, and how communities respond to different forms of environmental management within the US South.
Montana A. Eck is a PhD student in Geography and a Research Associate for the Southeast Regional Climate Center here at UNC Chapel Hill. Inspired by his experiences growing up in the southern Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, Montana’s research focuses on understanding the impact of meteorological hazards in rural communities. Rather than place emphasis on economic loss, Montana focuses his attention on the societal impacts of extreme weather, such as power outages and motor vehicle accidents. This allows him to highlight disparities of disaster response in our rural communities by local, state, and federal agencies in the Carolinas. With funding support from CSAS, Montana will assess the influence of precipitation on the rate of motor vehicle accidents and investigate how this relationship varies across the rural-urban continuum of North Carolina. Data visualizations created from this project will be included in the development of the Hazardous Extremes Risk Assessment (HERA) tool which is designed to assist community agencies in planning for extreme weather events. Ultimately, Montana hopes that his research and engagement with interactive data visualization projects will provide an opportunity for stakeholders, emergency managers, and policymakers to address disparities of climate change impact in our rural and vulnerable communities.
Alison Nulty is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on the biological and social factors that influence maternal and child health during the first 1,000 days (conception through child age 2). With the CSAS support, Alison will analyze data from a sample of women who received prenatal care and gave birth in North Carolina. Her project will assess the potential for maternal meal patterning and physical activity during pregnancy to increase the likelihood of spontaneous labor.
Colleen Betti is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on rural African American Schools in Virginia in the late 19th-mid-20th centuries and the material culture of schools and childhood. She is excavating three schoolhouses in Gloucester County, Virginia, including two Rosenwald schools, to examine how the material world of schoolhouses contributed to the socialization of students and how large of an impact the Rosenwald Fund made on the education of children attending Rosenwald schools compared to non-Rosenwald black public schools. This research combines archaeological excavation, historical document research, and oral histories.
Jennifer Standish is a PhD candidate in history at UNC Chapel Hill. Her dissertation project is on right-to-work laws in the South and their impact on working-class social movements and organizing. Her previous research examined whiteness and racial power dynamics within interracial labor organizing in the South. With the CSAS summer research grant, Jennifer will be able to continue her archival research on right-to-work laws through state and labor archives.
Joy Mersmann is a Ph.D student in the Anthropology Department at UNC Chapel Hill. She seeks to combine traditional paleoethnobotanical methods and recent innovations in digital archaeology to explore the cultural components of the Eastern Agricultural Complex, specifically as it developed in the American Southeast. This period in time and space provides a unique look at how cultural norms and identity shape subsistence choices, and how changes in subsistence method can be used a lens to examine cultural change. The vast majority of her research has taken place in the American Bottom and Lower Mississippi Valley regions, both of which are river valleys associated with monumental earthworks, long histories of occupation, and uniquely large-scale ritual and social phenomena. She received her BA in Archaeology and Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.
Emily Wager is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests primarily center around public opinion and public policy in the U.S. Her dissertation project, “‘People Like Us? American Preference for Bigger Government in the Age of Inequality,” examines why, despite stark economic disparities between citizens, many Americans do not support greater government redistribution of resources. Specifically, this project looks at the role of race and place in shaping voters’ attitudes toward redistribution in the context of inequality. In addition to quantitative analyses, her dissertation incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted with residents in West Virginia and the Carolinas. This project has benefited from funding through the UNC Graduate School and the National Science Foundation. For more information about her work, see www.emilymwager.com .
Cortland Gilliam is a scholar, poet, and educator broadly committed to the exploration and illumination of the hues and textures of racialized experiences, identities, and histories. He is both an alumnus (Class of 2014) of UNC-CH, where he received a B.A. in Economics, and a current doctoral student in Education, with a concentration in Cultural Studies and Literacies. His graduate studies strive to investigate the implications of school discipline, political education, and youth activism for greater conceptualizations of citizenship, belonging, place, and politics. For his 2020 Summer Research Award project, Cortland plans to research episodes of school-age-youth-led protest and resistance within the state of North Carolina throughout the twentieth century. In addition to recovering descriptive, historical accounts of various episodes and modes of youth-led political activity within the state, the project seeks to generate a kind of socio-political commentary on youth citizenship through its investigation of the political and social responses to these instances of resistance from key education system stakeholders. Additionally, this project will examine how public school district policies and district configurations changed throughout periods of protest. This research will become the foundation of his forthcoming dissertation proposal.
Eduardo Sato is a PhD student in the Department of Music at UNC. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, he completed his M.A. in Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo, after receiving his B.A. in Social Sciences from the same institution. His current research focuses on the musical transnational networks between the United States and Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s. Using the CSAS summer research grant he will expand his research in the sound archives of the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890—1972). Specifically, he will focus on the field recordings that Turner had made during his travels to the Sea Coastal Islands of the states of South Carolina and Georgia in 1932, and to Brazil in 1940. Eduardo is interested in the ways in which sounds, recordings, and archives contribute to the constitution of racial and national discourses. You may contact Eduardo at etsato@live.unc.edu.
Cayla Colclasure is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social dynamics, identity, and daily practices during early European colonization of Native American lands in the southeast. She uses archaeological evidence of foodways and other plant use to explore these themes on the Georgia coast. The CSAS summer research grant will support her analysis of plant remains from archaeological sites on St. Catherines Island, Georgia. This analysis is part of her dissertation project which will examine the foodways of Guale Native Americans during the late precolonial period and Spanish Mission era. Annie O’Brien is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies, in the Religions in the Americas track. Her work considers race, religion, and violence in the US as interconnected elements of settler-colonialism, nation-building, and our creation of/entrance into the Anthropocene. Currently, her work focuses on soil, and how soil has become a medium for anti-racist work — contesting white supremacy, countering dominant narratives of American history, and claiming Black humanity and subjecthood. Courtney Canter is a proud North Carolina native and a dual MD/PhD student with UNC School of Medicine and the Department of Anthropology. Broadly, Courtney is interested in the sociocultural complexities that surround the issue of gun violence in the US. She holds an MA in Medical Anthropology for her work on gun violence preparedness among emergency management professionals in the Research Triangle region in North Carolina. For her dissertation research, Courtney has turned her attention to public schools and is interested in cultivating a better understanding of the ways in which schools are both impacted by and respond to the ongoing threat of school-based gun violence. Working in public high schools across southern Florida, Courtney utilizes long-term ethnographic field work to explore how community experiences with gun violence impact perceptions of safety and the perceived value of state mandated school shooting preparedness initiatives. Courtney also plans to complete the Digital Humanities graduate certificate and is interested in developing virtual spaces that make academic research more accessible to the public. Sherah Faulkner is a PhD student in the Department of Geography studying feminist spatial and geographical theory. Originally from Zip City, Alabama, she completed her BA in Art History and MA in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies in Atlanta, Georgia. Her CSAS-funded summer project, “Curating Southern Cosmopolitanism,” focuses on the spatial politics of public art involved in Atlanta’s urban redevelopment and gentrification processes. During her MA, Sherah mapped the distribution of municipally-supported public art across several neighborhoods to demonstrate a patterned correlation between genre (street art, graffiti, new genre public art) and residential demographics. In this project, she’ll examine this curatorial practice as a manifestation of the distinctly “Southern” cosmopolitanism guiding Atlanta’s current redevelopment program. Moriah James is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include African American heritage preservation, museums, and the intersections of race and class. Her current research is centered on exploring socioeconomic class formations in black communities and researching how African Americans have historically been able to generate and maintain wealth. Her CSAS-funded research will consist of an oral history project that aims to document space-making and class distinctions within a black enclave located in Virginia. Prior to her graduate studies, Moriah was a Robert Frederick Smith Fund intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and also worked at the Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center. Janelle Ashley Viera is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, migration, social mobility, and Latinxs in the United States. This summer, Janelle was awarded a research grant from the Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS) to fund the second phase of data collection for her dissertation, which takes a qualitative approach to examine racial formation among multigenerational Puerto Ricans living in New York City and Orlando. In particular, she seeks to understand how place-related factors influence how Puerto Ricans think about race, racial classification, and U.S. race relations. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Janelle earned a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College and M.A. in Sociology from UNC-CH. She is a Mellon Mays Fellow (MMUF), an alumna of UNC-CH’s Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP), and a member of CSAS’s inaugural Critical Ethnic Studies Graduate Working Group. Currently, Janelle holds a Graduate Teaching Fellow position and has taught introductory courses on race and ethnicity and sociological perspectives. Elias Gross is a PhD student in the Department of Music. His MA thesis centers on the musical labor of Appalachian balladeer, Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960). The CSAS summer research grant supports Gross’ work by allowing him access to over fifty hours of performance and interview recordings of Jackson held in the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC’s Wilson Library and in the Barnicle-Cadle Collection at ETSU’s Archives of Appalachia. Using musical analysis of Jackson’s compositional techniques and performance practices, Gross aims to elevate her musical legacy which has long been overshadowed by her role as an activist with the communist National Miners Union (NMU). Prior to beginning his graduate studies at UNC, Elias earned his master’s in music performance at the University of Delaware, participated in the Bang on a Can Media Fellowship, and served as executive director of the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington (Kentucky). Terence Johnson – School of Social Work Carlos Serrano – Department of Geography