NewsSubscribe

Amel Ahmed, associate provost for equity and inclusion, recently announced the 2021 Faculty Success Fellows. Fourteen faculty have been selected to participate in the program for the 2021-22 academic year, including Anne Kerth, assistant professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, and Jimmy Worthy II, assistant professor in the Department of English. 

The UMass Amherst Faculty Success Fellows Program supports faculty participation in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) Faculty Success Program (FSP), a tweleve-week online program designed to help tenure-track and tenured faculty acquire skills to increase research and writing productivity while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. For the Faculty Success Fellows Program, a group of fellows is selected each year from a pool of applicants. Fellows receive funding to defray the costs of the NCFDD Faculty Success Program as well as mentorship, feedback and support throughout the year.

Kerth's research interests include the history of slavery and emancipation, labor history, the history of gender and sexuality, and carceral history. Her current book project examines the lives and labors of enslaved and free African-American artisans in nineteenth-century South Carolina. She teaches courses on early African American and African diasporic history; slavery and emancipation; and race, labor, and gender. 

Worthy’s research focuses on Black lived experiences relative to death consciousness, African Diasporic literature, and the ways in which such literature inflects the trope of transformation with the characteristics of initiatory rituals found in many West-Central African faith practices. His book project, Defiant Resurrection: A Study of Subjectivity, Restoration, and Sacred Imperative in African American Literature, investigates the redemptory orientations of African American authors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. By analyzing West-Central African cosmology and Christianity as engendering belief systems, Professor Worthy situates authors’ resistance to white supremacist ideologies within an inherited, religious endeavor to achieve fundamental transformation. Defiant Resurrection argues that authors figure death as a porous boundary of exchange, making possible resurrected embodiment and community restoration.