AI's honored by Woodson Institute IU Bloomington doctoral students

Candace Lowe and Tyrone Simpson have been awarded Woodson Residential Pre-doctoral Research Fellowships from the Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. Lowe, from Chicago, is a cultural anthropologist who came to IU six years ago to complete work for a doctoral degree. She has been an assistant instructor in cultural anthropology, and for the past two years, has worked in the Minority Achievers Program, where she established an international student exchange with students in Mauritius, an island off the coast of Madagascar. Simpson, from New York, has been at IU for six years working on a combined doctoral degree in English and American studies, with a minor in African-American studies. He teaches in IU's departments of English and Afro-American studies and also works in the Black Film Center/Archive. The fellowships are two years and are awarded for the support of projects in those disciplines of the humanities and social sciences concerned with Afro-American and African studies. Both Simpson and Lowe will spend the time completing research and writing for their dissertations. Lowe's work is focused on issues of nationalism, national historical memory, political economy and ethnicity in Mauritius, and Simpson's specialization is urban history, spatial theory, critical race studies and post-colonial theory, with his work centered on representations of the ghetto in 20th-century American literature.