Jean Beaman and Nadia Brown
Please join me in congratulating Jean Beaman, assistant professor of sociology, and Nadia Brown, associate professor of political science and African American Studies, who were awarded $55,000 as co–principal investigators for their project “‘BlackLivesMatter’: Racial Tension and Police Violence in the Midwest and Beyond” from the Humanities Without Walls consortium.
Nadia and Jean will utilize humanistic methods to address the relationship between race, grassroots activism, and state-sponsored violence through examining how Blacks in the Midwest have (re)created Black identities and ideas of Blackness that have national and global impact. They will focus on responses to the 2014 death of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, by examining the responses of Black lawmakers in Missouri to state-sponsored violence. They will also explore the reverberations of Black political and grassroots activism abroad in the wake of the events in Ferguson by focusing on how Black populations in France relate the events of Ferguson.
This project is supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls Consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Congratulations, Dr. Beaman and Dr. Brown!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts