2020 W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute fellows announced

The W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University recently announced the 2020-21 class of fellows.

According to Director and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the cohort will be pursuing a broad range of projects, including:

• Queer visual cultures in the African diaspora
• Migratory routes and artistic practices in the Black Mediterranean
• The “monstrous” aesthetics of black women’s work
• Dialect in the early Anglophone Caribbean
• The history of Norfolk Prison Colony, the first “community prison”
• Postmillennial technologies and the practice of race
• Black diasporic women’s engagement with digital and social media
• Cruciform churches in Medieval Ethiopia as architectural palimpsests and products of cross-cultural exchange
• The intersections of race, space, and the law in the construction of race and citizenship
• Stuart Hall’s unfinished manuscript “The Symbolic World. Meaning and Power”

“We are happy to welcome one of our most distinguished and exciting cohort of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” said Gates. “We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year.”

The W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellowship program invites scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and activists across the humanities and social sciences to pursue independent projects encompassing Africa and the diaspora. Fellows arrive from around the world to be in residence at the Hutchins Center for either a full academic year or one semester.

The Hutchins Center is closely monitoring Harvard University’s directives regarding a return to campus in the fall, and the fellowship program can easily adapt to a virtual format, pending decisions by Harvard and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.