Faculty Highlights Khalilah Ali, Ph.D., assistant professor of education and clinical supervisor for student teaching and field experiences, contributed book chapter, “Spirit, Passion and Sufferance: Articulations of Yemoja through Janie Crawford, in Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Velma Henry in The Salt Eaters,” in Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Practice: Yemonja Awakening.
Hyunjung R. Chung, DMA, associate professor of music, was named the 2020 winner of the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award. The award, given by The American Prize, recognizes the best performance of American music. Dorian Brown Crosby, Ph.D., C’91, assistant professor of political science, published her first book, Somalis in the Neo-South: African Immigration, Politics and Race. Her work chronicles three years of research she conducted with Somali communities in Clarkston, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee, and offers a look at Somalis in the United States.
In Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the PostEmancipation South, Brandi Brimmer, Ph.D., C’95, analyzes the U.S. pension system from the perspective of poor Black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of Black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer is also a National Humanities Fellow.
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SPELMAN MESSENGER
Division chair for the arts, founding director for Digital Moving Image Salon, and professor of art and visual culture, Ayoka Chenzira, Ph.D., directed several episodic TV shows, including “Trinkets” for Netflix, “Delilah” for OWN, and “Dynasty” for the CW network. Chenzira also received the Cultural Innovator Award for animation from Black Women Animate and the Cartoon Network.
In January, Alexa Hadd, Ph.D., assistant professor in psychology, published a book with SAGE, Understanding Correlation Matrices, as part of their Quantitative Applications in the social sciences series. This book is designed to be a short primer on correlation matrices — the mathematical structures that underlie many data analyses in the social and behavioral sciences. Correlation matrices have interesting properties and lend themselves to a variety of visualization techniques. Understanding Correlation Matrices assumes the reader has some introductory knowledge of statistics, making it the first book of its kind and ideally suited for students of advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate applied statistics courses. Robert Hamilton, along with fellow colleagues, and an interdisciplinary group of students are combining art, biology and technology to compete in the BioDesign Challenge 2021. Hamilton, senior instructor in art and visual culture, Jaye Nias, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer and information sciences, Tiffany Oliver,
