2015-16 Grant & Fellowship Recipients

Elizabeth Lundeen

Elizabeth Lundeen, our 2015-16 McColl Dissertation Year Fellow, is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, where she is writing her dissertation on state-funded historically black colleges in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Virginia from the 1930s through the 1960s. Through an in-depth exploration of three schools—Jackson State University, North Carolina Central University, and Virginia State University—her dissertation illustrates how these institutions survived despite meager state appropriations and provided black students, faculty, and administrators with shelter from the storm of indignity created by Jim Crow segregation.

Kimber Thomas

Kimber Thomas is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at UNC. Her CSAS research grant funded summer work in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where she and a team of UNC and Duke University students completed a research project on the town’s founders and early settlers. Their work contributed to a burgeoning partnership between UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South and the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance, an organization that seeks to preserve and promote the history and heritage of all-black towns across the U.S. Kimber’s research interests include southern African American material culture and oral history.

Chris Hakkenberg

Chris Hakkenberg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology and a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow. His dissertation research is focused on assessing the ability of Earth observing sensors to derive forest community structure in North Carolina Piedmont forests. Specifically, Chris uses the tools of LiDAR, image spectroscopy, and time series of medium-resolution optical imagery to estimate spatio-temporal changes in emergent properties of forest communities, such as species diversity. His research is driven by a conviction in the critical role of model validation from detailed field data, as well as the explicit assessment of model bias and uncertainty.

Stephanie Gaskill

Stephanie Gaskill is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies. She is interested in the history and ethnography African American religions in the American South. Her dissertation uses “moral rehabilitation” at Louisiana’s Angola Prison to explore how the predominance of African Americans in U.S. prisons shapes the conception, implementation, reception, and public presentation of rehabilitative programming.

Willie Jamaal Wright

Willie Jamaal Wright is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. His dissertation research is a historical geography that investigates the spatial, cultural, and political outcomes of the Republic of New Afrika in Detroit, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi.

Rachel Cotterman

A lifelong North Carolinian, Rachel Cotterman is an MA/PhD student in Geography, where she is working on a master’s thesis about the politics of redevelopment and gentrification in a small former textile mill village in rural NC. She’s interested in place-making, housing justice, labor history, and the intersections of race and class in rural spaces.

Katie Yelton

Katie Yelton is a senior American Studies Major/Women’s Studies and Southern Studies Minor from Rutherford County, North Carolina. I received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF, 2015) from the Office of Undergraduate Research with a letter of support from the Center. I used the $3000 grant money to implement my brainchild, the “Mill Mamas Project.” I conducted oral history interviews with Rutherford County women who worked both as mothers and in textile mills. I created a short ethnographic film from selected clips of these interviews, published it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VOySaOb25Y, and presented this research to my community. Attached is a photo of myself with the original Mill Mama, my grandmother, at the presentation of The Mill Mamas Project in Rutherfordton, NC.