Welcoming the next cohort of Woodson Fellows

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celebrating 40 years

Welcoming the next cohort of Woodson Fellows

Since its creation, the highly competitive fellowship program has built a reputation for launching the careers of scholars at the leading edge of their disciplines.

Woodson alumni hold tenured and professional positions at numerous academic institutions, including Auburn, Berkeley, Boston College, Boston University, Fordham, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, Ohio State, Princeton, Syracuse, Tulane, University of Iowa, University of North Carolina, and our own, University of Virginia

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Oluseyi Odunyemi Agbelusi earned his PhD from Syracuse University’s department of Anthropology. His Woodson fellowship project is entitled "British Anti-Slavery, Trade, and Nascent Colonialism on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone." It focuses on the 100,000 Africans that were ‘liberated’ from ships embarking from different parts of the West African coast and relocated to a British Colony in Freetown. Agbelusi uses archival and archaeological data to reveal how these Africans adapted to this new environment, focusing on settlement patterns, architecture, socioeconomic activities, and trade relations.

Amber Henry joins the Woodson Fellowship program from the University of Pennsylvania where she earned dual degrees in History and Africana Studies. Her research project "The Politics of Paradise: Palenquera Women and Birthing the Post-Conflict Colombian Imaginary" investigates Black women’s activism in relation to tourism development in Colombia. Henry explores how women from the maroon community of San Basilio de Palenque accommodate and contest their designation as intangible heritage in order to contemplate the spaces being opened up for Black politicization in post-conflict Colombia.

Anna Duensing completed her PhD in History and African American and African Studies at Yale University. Her project “Strange Victory: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Black Freedom Struggle” unearths an antifascist tradition that is firmly rooted in histories of Black resistance. It tracks this transnational activist-intellectual tradition across the long civil rights movement from the 1930s to 1970s. It also illuminates the terms and substance of Black radical formulations of fascism unique to the United States.

Pre-Doctoral Fellows

Frances Bell is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the College of William and Mary. Her dissertation project "In a State of Flight’: The Struggle for Freedom in the Haitian Diaspora, 1791-1830" examines the struggles of diasporic Haitians for freedom in the age of emancipation.

Kelsey Moore is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation, “Clearing Black Knowledges in Jim Crow South Carolina,” focuses on the displacement of 901 black families and the plan to flood over 9,000 graves for rural redevelopment in South Carolina between 1938 and 1942.

Chrystel Olukoï is a PhD candidate in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation "Black Nocturnal: Maroon Ecologies of the Night in Lagos" explores the historical and ongoing conditions that make nighttime one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos as well as the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nighttime as a site of possibility in the shadow of the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism.

Alexis Trouillot is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at the Université de Paris. His dissertation, "Mathematics in the Desert: Computing Texts and Intellectual Authority in 19th century Sahara" is the first study of West African history to consider its Arabic tradition of arithmetic texts. It presents an intellectual history of 19th century Saharan West Africa focusing on manuscripts on arithmetical calculations (ḥisāb) and their applications to the elaborated system of rules of Muslim inheritance shares (farāʾiḍ).

In Case You Missed It

Sabrina Pendergrass quoted in NBC5 story "Fort Worth Among US Cities With Largest Growth in Black Population"

Ashon Crawley awarded a Crossroads Art Fellowship at Princeton University for his project to create an immersive sound installation honoring musicians in Black churches that died of AIDS complications in the 1980s and '90s.

Carter G. Woodson for African-American and African Studies
Website: woodson.as.virginia.edu Email: woodson@virginia.edu
Phone: (434) 924-3109 P.O. Box 400162 108 Minor Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904

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The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Affairs · 108 Minor Hall McCormick Road · Charlottesville, Va 22904 · USA