Michigan Society of Fellows Post-Doctoral Scholar
Elizabeth Hinton recently completed her graduate work in United States History at Columbia University. A Ford Foundation Fellow, her research contextualizes the rise of mass incarceration in the late twentieth century by considering the critical but understudied shift from a national agenda premised on community action and combating unemployment as a means to address socio-economic inequality, to an agenda premised on repressing crime, disorder, and other manifestation of that inequality in the decades after the civil rights movement. As a history of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs, Hinton’s work contributes to debates about the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the United States and draws our attention to the federal government’s role in sustaining punitive policy that first emerged in the 1960s. From 2008 to 2011 Hinton served as the Managing Editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society and co-edited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) with the late Manning Marable. Hinton earned her B.A. in American Studies from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2005. (email: ehinton@umich.edu)
Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow
Didier Péclard is senior researcher at the Swiss Peace Foundation (swisspeace) in Bern and lecturer in political science/African studies at the University of Basel. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Institut D'études Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris (2005). His research interests include religion and politics, nationalism, as well as the dynamics of peace-building and state formation in Africa. An expert on Angola, he has worked on the impact of Christian missions on nationalism and state formation during the last decades of colonial rule, as well as on the politics post-civil war transition. His current main research project, conducted in partnership with the University of Bouaké (Côte d’Ivoire) and Addis Ababa University, focuses on struggles around the construction of public authority and statehood during and in the aftermath of armed conflict in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ethiopia. He was a co-founder and co-editor of the journal Social Sciences and Missions and is an editorial board member of the Journal of Religion in Africa and Politique Africaine. He is the co-editor, with Tobias Hagmann, of Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa (Wiley-Blackwell 2011) and co-author, with Caroline Jeannerat and Eric Morier-Genoud, of Embroiled: Swiss Churches, South Africa and Apartheid (LIT 2012). (email: dpeclard@umich.edu)
Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-Doctoral Fellow
Sakina Hughes recently received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Michigan State University. Sakina’s studies have focused on comparative African American and American Indian community across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, “Under One Big Tent: Native Americans, African Americans and the Circus World of Nineteenth-Century America,” explores the lives of black and Indian traveling performers from Reconstruction to World War I, and considers mobility, racial uplift, and the mutability of race and ethnicity during that era. The dissertation re-creates two Afro-Indian communities in the Midwest and examines their place in the early days of American popular entertainment. She argues that diversity was crucial to these communities and that the American circus of the nineteenth century provided African and Native Americans social and economic means to create and sustain robust communities and build national and international careers. Sakina has been an active organizer and participant in the CIC American Indian Studies Consortium. Her research has been supported by a Newberry Library D’Arcy McNickle Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies Graduate Student Fellowship, CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium Summer Fellowships, American Indian Studies Program Travel Grants, and a Michigan State University Enrichment Fellowship. While in residence in DAAS, Sakina will complete an article on a nineteenth-century Afro-Indian community in the Upper Sandusky region of Ohio and begin revising her dissertation into a book-length manuscript. She will teach a course on African American entertainers and the burgeoning music industry at the turn of the twentieth century. (hughe@umich.edu)
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies Research Fellow
Reighan Gillam received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her dissertation, “The Revolution Will Be Televised: Afro-Brazilian Media Producers in São Paulo, Brazil” documents the work of the TV da Gente (Our TV) television network, hailed as the first network in Brazil to include equal racial representation as part of its mission. She argues that media workers at TV da Gente extended the field of racial politics from the state and NGOs to the mediated arena of commercial television by producing images of Afro-Brazilians that deviated from and opposed mainstream public representations of blackness. Overall, her dissertation contends that commercial television acts as a new site of and resource for black cultural politics in Brazil. Her work has been supported by Sage Fellowships from Cornell University, a Five College Fellowship at Mt. Holyoke College, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship. Her work will be published in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences (Rutgers University Press 2013) and in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. (reighan@umich.edu)
