A coveted Mellon Fellowship at Oxford University has been awarded to a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University. She plans to use it to research Afro-diasporic literature.
Anne M. Castro, lecturer in English at Vanderbilt, will analyze African American, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American prose, theater and poetry while holding the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature of the Black Americas at The University of Oxford. She was awarded a master’s degree in English from Vanderbilt in 2012.
“[Castro] focuses on unearthing works that have been missed—including neglected works by canonical figures as well as works by figures purposely marginalized by canon-makers, and illuminating what and how they push us all beyond what we think we know,” said Ifeoma Nwankwo, associate professor of English at Vanderbilt.
The two-year fellowship was created to aid promising academics with doctoral degrees to begin their second major research project.