Jenifer Lee
FDI Scholar in the Department of Criminology
I am a proud native of Charleston, West Virginia. I attended West Virginia University, where I completed a B.A. in Psychology in May 1997. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I entered the M.S. program in Criminal Justice at Marshall University. I completed my M.S. degree in May 1999.
I have worked in the West Virginia Supreme Court, both in the Administrative Office and the Office of Counsel. It was during my time at the West Virginia Supreme Court that I applied (and was subsequently accepted) to the Ph.D. program in Criminology here at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
I began the Ph.D. program in January 2001 and will complete all coursework in May 2003. I have been selected as a teaching associate within my department to begin Fall 2003, and my expected graduation date is May 2005. Upon graduation I expect to attain a position at a college or university as an assistant professor. I believe that it is important (as an instructor of any level) to offer students in higher education the opportunity to think critically and question openly.
My research interests include prosecutorial discretion, hate crime, courts, social inequalities, women’s issues in crime and corrections, and criminology/criminal justice education.
Diane Hinton Perry
FDI Scholar in the Department of English
I’m a native of Washington, D.C., who has spent my years of higher education in the midwest. My undergraduate institution is Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where I received a B.A. in English in 1971. I hold an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1996), and I’m currently an M.A. student in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. My area of concentration is literature. I expect to complete the M.A. degree in August 2003.
While an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, I was awarded a Graduate Opportunity Fellowship my first year and a Teaching Assistantship in the African-American World Studies Program my second year. I designed and taught an upper-level course entitled Oral Tradition in African-American Storytelling. This class examined the influence of oral genres, both spoken and musical, on African-American literature, concentrating on the short story. For both years here at Indiana University–Bloomington, I have been an associate instructor, teaching the two-semester course Introduction to Writing and the Study of Black Literature.
Besides the short story, my research interests include American Indian lacrosse, the Iroquois Confederacy, and historical relationships between African-Americans and American Indians. My M.A. thesis project is a novel about the friendship between two young men, one African-American and the other Iroquois, brought together by their love of lacrosse. Because this sport is deeply rooted in the cultural values, spiritual traditions, and expressive forms of American Indians, it offers a unique setting for a fictional work to explore a friendship that reaches across geographical and cultural boundaries.
My publications include the short story “Legacy” in African Voices, Fall/Winter 2001, and the essay “The Radical Amelioration of Womankind,” forthcoming in the Spring 2003 issue of WarpLand: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas published by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. This essay discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book A Voice from the South.
Other honors have included a fellowship from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation for their summer writer’s week, a writer’s residency grant from Vermont Studio Center, and a three-year tenure as a member of the Carleton College Alumni Council and cochair of the Multicultural Alumni Network Committee. Prior to pursuit of graduate studies, I had a twenty-year career in Research Administration and Contract Management, including ten years at American University in the Office of Sponsored Programs.
Jesse Scott
FDI Scholar in the Department of English
I am the oldest of five children. As a child, I loved my grandmother’s dramatic readings of stories. Later, prompted by teenage angst and the woes of love, I began writing stories. My love of stories and the languages we use to tell them led me to complete a B.A. in English at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1996. While I was completing my undergraduate degree I became interested in popular culture, particularly film and popular music. This interest led me to Bowling Green State University, where I completed my M.A. in Popular Culture in 1998.
Currently, I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition to continuing to study popular culture, my work has focused on twentieth-century African-American literature. Toni Morrison has been the most influential writer and critic for my intellectual projects. In Beloved, Baby Suggs reminds the ex-slaves that the only grace they will have is the grace they imagine, and the end of the text, when Paul D. is searching for a way to help Sethe, he recalls Sixo’s rationale for his visits to the thirty-mile woman—“she gather the pieces I am.”
My dissertation project, Gathering the Pieces and Imagining Grace: African American Literature and Reparations, takes its title from these two critical moments in Beloved. It is the possibility of gathering pieces and imagining grace that fuels my current research. My project argues that reparations is a complex and multifaceted endeavor that requires the term reparations to be extricated from current and historical legal discourses. Narrowly focused on monetary reparations, the legal engagements with reparations disregard other types of reparations. My project situates literary texts and other cultural forms as critical sites where questions about how to repair historical wrongs are engaged and in doing so help to (re)conceptualize reparations.
