Institute Professor Wins Prestigious Woodrow Wilson Fellowship

Assistant Professor Kaysha Corinealdi. Courtesy photo

Assistant Professor Kaysha Corinealdi of the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies has been awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.

The fellowship is awarded to approximately 30 early career faculty who, through their research, teaching and service, have demonstrated a commitment to “eradicating racial disparities in core fields in the arts and humanities.”

During her fellowship period, Corinealdi will complete revision work for her book manuscript Defining Panama, which examines how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians — the descendants of the Panama Canal builders and the targets of multiple national and imperial exclusionist campaigns throughout the 20th century — utilized diasporic networks to engage in a practice of worldmaking that both subverted and complicated questions of citizenship and belonging.

“It is wonderful to have dedicated time to write and pursue research on the very topics of citizenship, race, and power that shape much of my teaching at Emerson,” Corinealdi said.

The book traces this diasporic worldmaking as it grows in late 1920s Panama, traverses the anti-communism and hemispheric democracy discourse engulfing the mid-20th-century Americas, and further transforms in early 1970s Civil Rights New York.

Corinealdi will also use her fellowship period to conduct archival research in Panama connected to a second book project, present her work at various academic forums and begin work on a journal article regarding citizenship debates in Panama and the Dominican Republic.

In 2017, Corinealdi was awarded an Emerson College Faculty Advancement Fund Grant to complete Defining Panama.