IDOL FAMILY FELLOWS PROGRAM
The McNulty Institute created the Idol Family Fellows Program, an exciting new fellowship aimed to create innovative, scholarly collaborations that will advance gender equity and promote social change. The Program fosters collaborative cross-disciplinary communities of scholars committed to the development and dissemination of scholarship that addresses the most pressing issues related to gender equity.
Project Title: Taught by Literature: Recentering Early Black Women Intellectuals
Denise Burgher
ABD, English, University of Delaware; African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow
Brigitte Fielder, PhD
Associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; author, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020)
Jean Lutes, PhD
Luckow Family Endowed Chair of English Literature, Villanova University
Student Affiliate Fellows
Janine Hazlewood ’26 CLAS
Trinity Rogers ’24 CLAS
Cynthia Choo's ’23 CLAS
Arianna Ogando ’23 CLAS
Taught by Literature - A collaborative digital humanities project focuses on making visible the work of Black women writers to a new generation.
American poet, journalist and political activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson in a 1915 photograph by Addison Scurlock and a typescript copy of her short story “His Heart’s Desire”
A prolific and thought-provoking author, activist and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) influenced some of the most celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance—and yet, her works don’t appear on many K–12 school reading lists.
Read more about the project:
- Villanova Magazine feature - Overlooked No Longer by Megan Walsh-Boyle
- Villanova English Department Blog feature - The 'Steenth Street Research Team attends Association for the Study of African American Life and History
- Villanova English Department Blog feature - Reading Books like Browsing Costco Aisles by Trinity Rogers, AY 2023 Idol Family Student Fellow
Visit our Website at www.taughtbyliterature.org
Project Title: The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood.
Denise Burgher
ABD, English, University of Delaware; African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow
Brigitte Fielder
Associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; author, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020)
Jean Lutes
Luckow Family Endowed Chair of English Literature, Villanova University
Student Affiliate Fellows
Kashae Garland ’22 CLAS
Cynthia Choo's '23 CLAS
Trinity Rogers ’24 CLAS
Project Title: You Okay Sis? Electoral Politics and Representation in Tumultuous Times.
Our Sisters in Politics data is being rolled out in article-length manuscripts. Our first article How Black women get their political news matters for this election, is a new study that analyses where Black women get political information and what educates and facilitates their involvement in the American political system.
This article discusses how they engage with media and news, and how generation, education, and income shape their social media posting patterns.
The authors suggest that there are key variations in how Black women consume political news and how they engage with this information. Politicos must take these variations into account when reaching out to younger and older and higher- and lower-resource Black women.
Nadia E. Brown, PhD
Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Purdue University
Camille D. Burge, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Villanova University
Student Affiliate Fellows
Danielle Burns '21 MA
Gia Beaton '20 CLAS