Dept. of History Welcomes Five VITAL Scholars

On October 17, 2022 UB welcomed 34 VITAL Scholars (UB’s Visiting Future Faculty program). Of the 34 outstanding scholars 5 are PhD candidates in History. During their weeklong visit the VITAL Scholars will participate in workshops and events in the Department of History. The Department of History is pleased to welcome:

Elizabeth Barahona, U.S. History, Northwestern University

Elizabeth Barahona is a 5th year doctoral student specializing in Latinx, African American, and United States history at Northwestern University. Her dissertation will chronicle how Black and Latinx communities created grassroots organizations and coalitions to fight white supremacy in the Deep South, specifically Durham, North Carolina. Elizabeth is first-generation, from Orlando, FL and her family is Mexican and Colombian. Elizabeth graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University studying borderlands, Latinx history, and human rights. Elizabeth wrote the first history of Latino students at Duke University which was converted into an exhibit at the Duke University Library. Elizabeth led the protests to change Duke University"s policy to accept undocumented students, provide them full need­blind financial aid, create a Latinx center, and hire Latinx program staff. While in graduate school, Elizabeth co-founded a monthly wellness workshop for graduate women of color. She was the president of the History Graduate Student Organization, served on the executive board of the Latinx Graduate Student Association, and is a member of the Graduate Workers Union.

Adam Mcneil, History, Rutgers University

Adam McNeil is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University focusing on Black women's lives during the Revolutionary and Founding eras in the Chesapeake Bay. Adam's scholarship focuses on how enslaved women were key contributors to the Chesapeake's culture of rebelliousness during the Age of Revolutions, which, by implication, centers the region as a critical site of slave insurrection and revolutionary activity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Secondarily, Adam's focus on histories of Appalachian mountain slavery and labor histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Adam's research has been supported by fellowships from the University of Michigan's Clements Library, the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (01). Of note, in 2021, Adam became the Omohundro's inaugural 01 Audio Fellow, a new fellowship meant to present "fresh histories of the American Revolution" via the narrative podcast medium. In addition to academic writing, Adam regularly contributes to academic biogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, along with interviewing scholars on the New Books in African American Studies podcast, where Adam has interviewed nearly one hundred scholars about their works in African American studies and African American history. Follow him on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, History/Africana and American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Daniel Morales-Armstrong is a joint PhD candidate in Africana studies and history at Penn, where he studies emancipation and memory in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, placed more broadly within Caribbean and Atlantic contexts. His research focuses on newly freedpersons' responses to the systems of forced labor that followed abolition, centering those stories which have been marginalized in the (mis)constructions of the emancipation narrative within and beyond the colony's shores. Beyond his work as a historian, he is an educator and has coordinated study abroad programming through which Black Latinx high school students in his native New York City have studied Black Latin American history in Cuba, Peru, and Puerto Rico.

Udodiri R. Okawandu, History, Harvard University

Udodiri R. Okwandu is a doctoral candidate in the history of science department and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. Broadly, her research explores the intersection of race, gender, and medicine and social and cultural constructions of health and disease. Her dissertation traces how medical understandings of maternal mental illnesses - such as postpartum depression and psychosis -have been used to rationalize the "'transgressive" behavior of childbearing women from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. In doing so, she demonstrates how these rationalizations served to either excuse or pathologize women in ways that mapped onto existing racial and class hierarchies. She illuminates the consequences of these discourses by examining various sites, including the courts, asylum, family planning clinic, psychoanalytic research "'lab," and sterilization laws.

Clifton E. Sorrell III, History, University of Texas at Austin

Clifton E. Sorrell Ill is a history PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, studying slavery and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world with an emphasis on the early modern Caribbean under Professor Diana Ramey Berry. He earned a double major BA in African American studies and history at the University of California, Davis. His dissertation project addresses the making of Black freedom practice and community in Spanish Jamaica and explores its relationship with the development of the Caribbean·s geopolitical configuration between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working between English and Spanish archives, this project examines the island's free and enslaved communities and their transition into Maroon societies to trace how they forged and (re)elaborated meanings of freedom, community, and sovereignty. It also considers how these developments shaped and were shaped by the region's political economy, the contexts of Afro-European cross-cultural encounters, and the ways these different groups understood these complicated landscapes in staking competing and overlapping claims in the early modern Caribbean.

Lear more about the VITAL Scholars and the VITAl Scholar program in UB Now's "Vital Scholars Return to UB."