Lisa Young
Lisa Young, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for 2016–2017. The fellowship recognizes doctoral students who are committed to research and teaching at the college or university level and demonstrate promise of future achievement as teachers and scholars who use diversity as a resource to enrich the education of all students. In addition to attending the annual Conference of Ford Fellows, Lisa will also receive access to mentoring and support from the Ford Fellows network.
Lisa’s dissertation, “Lethal Housing: Racial Restrictive Covenants and Urban Black Women’s Grassroots Health Activism, 1930–1980,” examines Black women’s contributions to housing justice through public health initiatives by tracing the ways Black women writers frame how racial restrictive covenants operated as environmentally hazardous agents in the lives of Black people. Restrictive covenants were contractual clauses in housing deeds prohibiting the sale and occupation of a home based on race. As part of her research on restrictive covenants, Lisa recently interned at the U. S. Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.
In addition to the Ford Fellowship, Lisa has been awarded the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Dissertation Grant and an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship on “Space and Place in Black Studies: An Institute on Spatial Humanities, Theories, Methods, and Practice for Africana Studies.” She will also be completing an upcoming summer fellowship at the University of Chicago with the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Congratulations, Lisa!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts