Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

Faculty Members Awarded Ford Foundation Fellowships

Two faculty members are spending 2007-08 on Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships. The Ford Foundation's goal is to increase the diversity of the nation's university faculties, by identifying and rewarding individuals who have demonstrated superior scholarship and show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers. Recipients are expected to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

The research program of Hasan Kwame Jeffries, assistant professor in the Department of History with a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, is perfectly positioned to show the benefits of diversity in higher education to the best advantage. Jeffries is conducting field work in Detroit and Alabama, and is working on the completion of his book, "Freedom Rights: Civil Rights and Black Power in Lowndes County, Alabama."

Koritha Mitchell, assistant professor in the Department of English, has also won a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2007-2008. Mitchell is using her time to focus on revising her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Enduring "Strange Fruit": Lynching Drama, African American Citizenship, and U.S. Culture, 1890-1930. She was chosen to represent the Humanities at a plenary session of the 2007 Ford Fellows, and has given an invited lecture at Northwestern University titled "'Re-creating Each Other': James Baldwin's Conception of Theatre." She has also submitted an essay on Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which reimagines the case of Emmett Till.

This is not the first time that the Ford Foundation has seen fit to reward the work of Professor Jeffries and Professor Mitchell: Mitchell received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2004-2005, and Jeffries received a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in 1994-1997. The College congratulates both on such promising starts to their Ohio State careers