HBCU FACULTY FELLOWS 2008 - 09

This recently inaugurated FHI program provides one-year fellowships for
faculty members at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCUs). The program is made possible by a major grant from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.

Jelani M. Favors
Assistant Professor of History, Morgan State University
209 Franklin Center | jelani.favors@morgan.edu

Jelani M. Favors, Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University, earned his Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University in 2006, where his research interests included the Civil Rights Movement, slavery and the Nadir. He received his B.A. in History from North Carolina A&T State University. He is in the initial stages of preparing his first manuscript, Shelter in a Time of Storm: Black Colleges and the Rise of Student Activism. This ongoing project focuses on the role historically Black colleges and universities played in the African American Freedom Struggle as well as the larger Civil Rights struggle, a topic which previous historical scholarship and research has consistently overlooked. Uniquely, Favors’ current research concentrates on the activist energies and practices of local African American students rather than those affiliated with national institutions or coalitions. His work will greatly contribute to increasing our historical knowledge regarding black student activism, and the role of HBCUs in shaping national politics.

Fatimah Tuggar
Assistant Professor of Art, Winston-Salem State University
Franklin Center Experimental Gallery | ftuggar@gmail.com

Fatimah Tuggar, Assistant Professor of Art at Winston-Salem State University, is a Nigerian-born artist who creates digital photomontages that juxtapose scenes from African and American daily life. Her works comment on themes such as ethnicity, technology and post-colonial culture that extend beyond simple cross-cultural comparisons. Her aim is to technically and conceptually elucidate critical cultural issues that emerge from the various ways in which new media technologies temper social relationships and shape existing mediatic power structures. Her web-based interactive pieces which oftentimes incorporate animated elements, construct non-linear narratives that top explore the way media, as a specific type of cultural commodity, impacts our reality. The pieces can best be described as digital collages that explore cross-cultural issues through visual means.

Tuggar completed her MFA at Yale University in 1992. Since then she has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2005), Paris and the Bamako Biennalle, Mali (2003), to name a few. She has received numerous grants from distinguished institutions such as The Rema Mann Hort Foundation, New York, the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and the The Wheeler Foundation, Brooklyn. She has lectured and presented her work at several institutions including Claremont Graduate University and California State University, Wellesley College, and the New School. Tuggar continues to draw on popular advertisements, entertainment and folklore to explore the broader implications of technology in our lives.

Dana Williams
Associate Professor of English, Howard University
220 Franklin Center | d_williams@howard.edu

Dana Adrian Williams, Associate Professor of English at Howard University, specializes in contemporary African American Literature. She earned her B.A. in English from Grambling State University in Grambling, LA in 1993, her M.A. in 1995 from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in African American Literature from Howard University in 1998. A recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar award in 1999, she was a visiting research fellow at Northwestern University, where she completed extensive research on her dissertation author Leon Forrest. Recently she completed the first book-length study on Leon Forrest, In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP 2005). Before returning to Howard University as a faculty member in 2003, Dr. Williams taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge for four years.

Dana Williams’ other major publications include, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood 1999), which she completed as her Master’s thesis at Howard University, and August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) which she co-edited with Sandra G. Shannon.

In addition to her book projects, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (edited by Emmanuel Nelson), Approaches to Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God (edited by John Lowe), and the Cambridge Companion to African American Women Writers (forthcoming).