PhD candidate Aaron Yates has been awarded a Mellon Summer Dissertation Writing Fellowship with the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP). This competitive fellowship is awarded to graduate students whose research has a decolonial historic orientation with an inersectional focus.
Aaron's dissertation, "Race, Religion and Resistance: Black Visions of Modernity, 1863-1963," analyzes the intersections of science, religion, race, and empire in processes of knowledge production. In line with WSIP's global and decolonial mission, this project attends to the global visions and voices of historically marginalized Black thinkers from the Americas in pursuit of greater understanding of the ongoing legacies of conquest and empire, race, and regimes of power and knowledge.
As part of this fellowship, Aaron will participate in upcoming seminars hosted by WSIP with other selected fellows, featuring dialogue around decolonial paradigm rethinking, particularly around the development of a Decolonial Global Studies certificate program at UMass Amherst.