DeLisa D. Hawkes Wins 2019 ALSCW Dissertation Fellowship

DeLisa D. Hawkes is the winner of the 2019 ALSCW Dissertation Fellowship. 

The ALSCW Dissertation Fellowship provides a three week residency at a fully equipped cabin nestled on nine acres atop a mountain in the West Virginia Highlands.  

DeLisa D. Hawkes is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland-College Park.  In her dissertation, “The Problem of the Prism: Colorism, Racial Passing, and the Politics of Racial Visibility,” she  argues that nineteenth and early-twentieth century African American activists and writers rework racist and colorist ideologies into black nationalist thought that sought to uplift the race and challenge the normalizing of white supremacy. These activists and writers responded to multifarious attempts to protect the symbolic and legal power of whiteness during the transition from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. She focuses on how writers repurpose and interrogate tropes of colorism and racial passing in a wide range of cultural materials and utilize skin color and the visibility of racial identity to critique racial formation, social hierarchy, and national belonging. Her project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Educational Advancement Foundation Fellowship. She has also been awarded the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship, the All S.T.A.R. Fellowship for Outstanding Scholars and Graduate Assistants, and several summer research fellowships.