2017-18 Grant & Fellowship Recipients

McColl Dissertation Year Fellow

Mishio Yamanaka is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. She studies African American community activism and race relations in the postbellum South. Her dissertation, “The Desegregation Movement of Creoles of Color in New Orleans, 1862-1900,” examines African American ideals of civil rights and racial equality in the United States through the activism of Creoles of color, a group of francophone free people of interracial descent. By focusing on Creoles’ campaigns for access and equality in public and social institutions such as schools, transportation, and churches, she reveals how African American communities pushed civil rights debates against the emerging Jim Crow system in the South. She also manages a digital history project, “The Fillmore Boys School in 1877,” which maps Creoles’ resistance to public school segregation at the end of Reconstruction. As an honorary southerner from Japan, she occasionally tries to create Southern/Japanese fusion recipes, but they are rarely successful.

Summer Research Grant Recipients

Robert Colby is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation, “The Continuance of an Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South,” explores the multiple ways in which Southerners utilized the domestic slave trade to confront the crises of civil war and to purchase a stake in their envisioned slaveholding future. It simultaneously examines the effects of continuing slave commerce on the progress and experience of emancipation for African-Americans. When not researching and writing, Robert enjoys reading to and exploring the Triangle with his wife and their two-year-old daughter.

Born in Montgomery, AL, Jackson Hall is a Masters in Folklore candidate in the Department of American Studies. An ethnography combining photography, poetry, and storytelling, his thesis chronicles the Jambalaya Soul Slam and Bull City Slam Team based in Durham’s Hayti Heritage Center. A collaboration with both current and former members of the team, the project explores how Bull City poets interrogate and celebrate—both in and outside of local, regional, and national slam competition—what southernness means in relation to their art and identities. Jackson also writes and performs poetry, and is a graduate of UNC’s creative writing program.

Gabrielle Purcell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation research focuses on Cherokee foodways during the Colonial period (16th to 18th centuries), and how Cherokees negotiated the incorporation of European-introduced foods into their diets. In addition to analyzing the archaeological food remains from historic Cherokee settlements, she also uses participatory research methods to engage with modern Cherokees about present and past foodways. This summer research grant will allow her to begin the participatory component of her research as she works with descendant communities of Cherokees to understand how language, culture, and other aspects of Cherokee society influence, and are influenced by, foodways.

Kimber Thomas is a native of Jackson, Mississippi. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Alcorn State University and her master’s degree in African American Studies from UCLA. She is currently a doctoral candidate in American Studies at UNC, where her research interests include black material culture, southern studies, and oral history. Her dissertation, “The House that Black Built: Black Women, Materiality, and the Creation of Culture in the Rural South,” uses oral history to explore the creative and material worlds of black women in the Deep South.

Daniel Velásquez is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History working on the intersection of Early American and Colonial Latin American history. His dissertation is on the transimperial trade and social networks that developed in the Gulf of Mexico in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is also an avid animal lover who counts two dogs and two cats among his family.