Goldsby, Stewart honored as Mellon’s Wilson fellows

Jacqueline Goldsby and Jacqueline Stewart, both Assistant Professors in English Language & Literature, have received 2002 Career Enhancement Fellowships for Junior Faculty from Underrepresented Groups from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which administers this program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The awards entail a year of research leave with a $30,000 stipend; a research, travel or publication award of $1,500; and participation in the 2002 Fall Retreat for fellows and their mentors.

Goldsby will use the fellowship to complete her book A Spectacular Secret: The Cultural Logic of Lynching in American Life and Literature. The book considers how literary representations of lynching in fiction, poetry and photography bear within them a “secret” or otherwise buried history of this specific mode of violence in their narrative forms. Next year, Goldsby also will begin preliminary research on her second book project, Birth of the Cool: African-American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s.

Goldsby also was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation, which she will decline to accept the Mellon fellowship.

Jacqueline Stewart, who also has an appointment in Cinema & Media Studies, will spend the first part of her leave finishing her book Migrating to the Movies: The Making of Black Urban Film Culture 1893-1920. Her next project concerns Spencer Williams, an African-American director who made nine films during the 1940s and who, so far, has received little critical attention.

Concurrently, Stewart was awarded a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which will provide support in 2002, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, which she will use during the summer of 2003.Stewart also won a postdoctoral fellowship in ethnic studies at the Institute of American Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a fellowship at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, but she will decline both in order to accept the Mellon Foundation fellowship.