Visiting Fellows 2012-2013
Visiting Fellows Archive

Beyond the Johnson Institute visiting scholars will have two institutional homes: Emory’s School of Law and one of five sponsoring departments. These departments are African American Studies, English, History, Music and the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. In designing the program, the leadership of the Johnson Institute considered carefully the complex and special needs of visiting scholars; a desire to maximize their productivity; and the opportunity to effectively use the resources resident at Emory University and in Atlanta, widely recognized as the spiritual home of the modern civil rights movement.

Faculty Hosts
During the period of the residency, visiting scholars will be paired with faculty hosts from the five sponsoring departments and the School of Law. Faculty hosts constitute an important source of support and information for visiting scholars beyond the Johnson Institute. Faculty hosts are senior Emory faculty members who will work collaboratively with the director of the Johnson Institute in order to make the residencies of the visiting scholars productive and meaningful. Faculty hosts are the liaison between the Johnson Institute and colleagues in sponsoring departments as well as the School of Law who share the research interests of visiting scholars. Faculty hosts contribute to the realization of some of the important goals of the Visiting Fellows Program.

Teaching
While the Johnson Institute remains committed to supporting new research and scholarship on the modern civil rights movement, it is equally committed to the creation of new opportunities for learning for undergraduate and graduate students in this field. With the support and cooperation of the sponsoring departments and the School of Law, visiting scholars will teach one undergraduate or graduate course during the period of their residency. All matters related to the advertisement, cross-listing, and the evaluation of courses will be administered by the sponsoring departments and the School of Law.

Monthly Colloquia
The monthly colloquia are the dynamic framework for the presentation of research by visiting scholars. The objective of this structure is to cultivate the widest possible audience for the monthly colloquia, and to foster a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue. Equally important, this structure seeks to foster the creation of a community of scholars that includes the visiting scholars, the faculty and students of the sponsoring departments, the School of Law, along with other visiting scholars in residence at Emory University.

Scot Brown is a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.  He received a BA in History at the University of Rochester and went on to earn doctoral and master’s degrees in Africana Studies and History from Cornell University.  Brown has taught at the Rochester City School District, Prince George’s County Public Schools, The University of Rennes (France), San Francisco State University, University of Houston and Cornell University.   He is the author of the book Fighting for Us (2003), a study of cultural nationalism and the Black Power movement during the 1960s and 70s. Brown has appeared in prize-winning film documentaries -- 41st and Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers (2009) and The Black Candle: A Kwanzaa Celebration (2008).  Brown also serves as a music historian and commentator on the TV ONE documentary series Unsung.  While in residence at the James Weldon Johnson Institute he will be writing a book examining the impact of arts education and the politics of race in the development of a distinctive African American music tradition in Dayton, Ohio.   Beyond the disproportionately large number of soul and funk bands hailing from this mid-western city and its surrounding area--Ohio Players, Slave, Aurra, Lakeside, Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame, Sun, Heatwave, Faze-O, Roger Troutman and Zapp--is a rich story of Black cultural innovation in the midst of the social politics of residential segregation and access to working class jobs.

Michan Andrew Connor is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies in the School of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington. He completed his PhD in 2008 from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California after earning a BA in American Studies from Northwestern University.  In his research, including articles forthcoming in the Journal of Urban History, Connor seeks to develop a metropolitan framework of historical analysis, using interdisciplinary approaches to synthesize the fields of urban and suburban history, paying particular attention to the ways that fragmented local government both supports and rationalizes racial inequalities.  His project as a visiting fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute is Fulton and Milton: Metropolitan History and the Political Spaces of “Color-Blind” Racism.  This study will use the federal voting rights lawsuit Lowery v. Deal, which was filed in 2011 and dismissed in 2012, as a launching point for evaluating the past and present racial politics of local government boundaries in metropolitan Atlanta, encompassing the resistance of outlying parts of Fulton County to annexation by the city of Atlanta, the incorporation of majority-white suburban municipalities, and ongoing efforts by residents of the cities north of Atlanta to secede from Fulton County. Connor’s research will develop historical context for current controversies about political organization in greater Atlanta, evaluate the proposition that metropolitan fragmentation and place-based inequality constitute the newest front in struggles for social justice, and explore the relationship between race-neutral political discourses about community and local government that prevail today and older patterns of racial conflict and inequality.

Anastasia Curwood is Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and affiliated faculty in history at Vanderbilt University. She earned an AB from Bryn Mawr College and an MA and PhD, both in History, from Princeton University.  She specializes in the history of African-American women, gender, and sexuality, the black family, and African-American intellectual, political, and cultural history in the twentieth century.  Curwood is the recipient of several grants and honors, including a 2008-2009 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a 2004-2005 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship.  Her first book, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars (2010) centered on the cultural and social contests over African-Americans' marriages in the early twentieth century.  During her time at the James Weldon Johnson Institute Dr. Curwood will be at work on a second book entitled Aim High: The Life of Shirley Chisholm. This critical biography combines political and social history to explain why Chisholm was both the first woman and the first African American to mount a serious campaign for the United States presidency, and how her political career shows the possibilities and limitations of the civil rights and women's liberation movements. 

Mary E. Frederickson is Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She received her BA from Emory University and her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, race, labor studies, and the social impact of disease and health care. A Visiting Bye-Fellow, Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK in 2000, she also taught at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and completed her post-doctoral training at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. At Miami, she has been awarded the Distinguished Educator Award from the College of Arts and Science and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Ohio Academy of History. In 2010 she was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.  In 2011, she published Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor, a study of the low-wage, anti-union and state-supported industries that marked the creation of the New South and now the Global South. She is the co-editor of Sisterhood and Solidarity and Gendered Resistance, a new edited volume that will be published in 2013. Her published articles include works on labor and cultural history, new trajectories in women’s history, and the relationship between historical consciousness and activism. While at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, she will be working on a new book project entitled The Genetic Imaginary: Sickle Cell Disease in Global Perspective which examines the social, legal, and medical history of sickle cell disease (SCD).

Eric Darnell Pritchard is an assistant professor in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BA in English-Liberal Arts from Lincoln University, and an MA in Afro-American Studies and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests include: literacy history and theory, rhetoric, African American literature, Black queer theory, Black feminist theory, hip hop studies, and fashion studies. His writings appear in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Southern Communication Journal, Home Girls Makes Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, African American Review, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.  He recently completed his first book-length manuscript titled Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy. While in residence at the Johnson Institute, he will work on a project that explores the role of literacy in the activism of 1970s and 1980s grassroots Black LGBT organizations, which drew upon the connections of race and sexuality to create unique forms of intervention steeped in LGBT of color history, culture, and experience.