Pictures courtesy of Dr. Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper and the UNCF/Mellon Programs Office.

 

UNCF/Mellon Fellows! Please click on the "Students" tab above to access tips on writing the statement of purpose/personal statement!

WELCOME

We are most happy to share information with you about the exciting suite of Programs offered to UNCF undergraduates and faculty through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Scholars Transforming the Academy is the slogan that describes the work of the UNCF/Mellon Programs.  This slogan is operationalized through a variety of undergraduate and faculty programs. 

We hope that you will find a program that interests you and that you will be able to join us as we work with others within the Mellon Mays family of Programs to Transform the Academy.

Sincerely,

Cynthia Neal Spence, Ph.D.
Director, UNCF/Mellon Programs


Upcoming Events

2013 UNCF/Mellon Summer Institute, June 2-29, 2013 in Atlanta, GA.

2013 UNCF/Mellon International Faculty Seminar, July 5-17, 2013 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

2013 UNCF/Mellon Programs Conference, October 3-5, 2013 in Atlanta, GA.

2013 Southeastern Regional Conference, November 8-10, 2013 in Atlanta, GA

 

News & Info

UNCF/Mellon Undergraduate Fellow Dr. Erica Edwards, Spelman College C'99, received tenure from the University of California, Riverside in 2012 and also served as a co-editor on Black Literature, Black Leadership, Volume 112,Number 2, Spring 2013. Congratulations!

 

UNCF/Mellon Undergraduate Fellow Melissa Garcia will be the Valedictorian for the Fisk University, C'13! Congratulations!

 

UNCF/Mellon Undergraduate Fellow Alexia Williams, C'12, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Grant! Congratulations!

 

"Benjamin Mays found a voice for civil rights." Please click here to be redirected to the University of Chicago's website to access a feature story written about Dr. Benjamin E. Mays.

 

Congratulations to Dr. LaRose Davis, Hampton University UNCF/Mellon Fellow, C'00, who celebrated the release of Posers: A Shifters Novel, the second novel in the Shifters Novel series!

 

Congratulations to Dr. Alisha Knight, Spelman College UNCF/Mellon Fellow, C'93, whose book on African American writer Pauline Harris was recently published by the University of Tennessee Press! Dr. Knight's book is entitled, Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer's (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success.

 

Newly Minted Ph.D.s!

Dr. Danica C. Tisdale Fisher

Danica C. Tisdale Fisher is a 2012 Ph.D. graduate of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies' program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Danica is a 2001 cum laude graduate of Spelman College and a 2003 graduate of Temple University with B.A. and M.A. degrees, respectively, in English. Danica's dissertation, titled "The Pageant Politic: Race and Representation in American Beauty Contests and Culture," was inspired by her academic interests in feminist theories of beauty, the body, and popular culture, and by her experience as the first African American woman to represent the state of Georgia in the 2004 Miss America Pageant. In June 2012, Danica was appointed as the Fellowships Coordinator in the Center for Global Education at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) in Claremont, California. Prior to her work at CMC, Danica served as a Program Associate for the California office of the Children's Defense Fund.

Dr. Gabriel Williams

Gabriel Williams was born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in Atlanta, GA. After developing an interest in Mathematics and Physics while in high school, he enrolled at Morehouse College in 2002. Because he expressed interest in a career in academia, he became a UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow in 2004. Upon graduating with a BS magna cum laude in Mathematics and Physics, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2006 to pursue graduate studies in Gravitational Wave Astronomy. After graduating with a MS in Physics in 2008, he enrolled at Colorado State University, from which he received his PhD in Atmospheric Science in 2012. His dissertation was entitled The Effect of Environmental Flow on the Internal Dynamics of Tropical Cyclones. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Louisiana at Monroe with research interests in tropical cyclone dynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and vortex dynamics.

Dr. Micheal Hicks

Micheal Hicks, an UNCF Mellon-Mays fellow, received his Ph.D. from Howard University Program of Atmospheric Science (HUPAS) in May 2012. There he conducted research utilizing LIDAR, radiosonde, and anemometer technologies to improve understanding of the impact of urbanization on atmospheric boundary layer processes. His dissertation is titled “The Characterization of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Depth and Turbulence in a Mixed Rural and Urban Convective Environment.” As an undergraduate mathematician at Paine College, Micheal was inducted into the UNCF Mellon-Mays fellowship in 2004, where he was inspired to attain a PhD degree and diversify the academy. In addition, as an undergraduate mathematician, Micheal completed two summer interns with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he developed his sustaining interest in the Atmospheric Sciences. He now works for NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) under the Department of Commerce (DOC) as a Physical Scientist in Sterling, VA, and even though he is grateful for his current employment, he still desires to one day conduct research and teach Atmospheric Science at an academic professorial level.

Dr. Marcus Harvey

Currently a visiting scholar on faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Harvey obtained his Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in August of 2012. Dr. Harvey’s teaching interests focus primarily on African and African Atlantic religious cultures. His research interests are fundamentally oriented toward the problem of African American religious interpretation. In the main, African American religious scholarship finds itself especially beleaguered by widely shared assumptions about the superiority of Christian intellectual paradigms as conceptual and theoretical models for the interpretation of African American religion. In an effort to highlight new theoretical trajectories for the study of African American religion that are not limited by coercive Christianizing logics, Dr. Harvey’s research aims to set the stage for the development of a phenomenology of African American religious consciousness grounded in African religious epistemologies and in cognate religious epistemologies poetically articulated in African American fictional literature. His dissertation, entitled “’Life is War:’ African Grammars of Knowing and the Interpretation of Black Religious Experience,” explores the religious epistemologies of the Yorùbá of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.