MFA Candidate Hugo Ljungbäck has received a Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities from Carolina Public Humanities to work on his project tentatively titled “From the Pathé Baby to TikTok: 100 Years of Amateur Media Production.” He has also been awarded the HPG/NHC Humanities Futures Fellowship from the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative to work with the National Humanities Center to expand a local UNC undergraduate humanities mentorship program to liberal arts colleges across the nation. He’s delighted to participate in these fellowship programs, to get to know his cohorts over the next year, and to continue his advocacy for the humanities.

Congratulations to MFA Candidate Alena Mehic, who has been chosen as a 2021 Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellow! Each fall, department chairpersons from MFA programs in painting and sculpture across the country are invited to submit candidate nominations. A committee of distinguished artists, curators and critics determines the fellowship. An average of 2-4 MFA fellowships each year are awarded.  Alena will receive funding of $15,000. You can read more about her work on the Dedalus Foundation website here: https://www.dedalusfoundation.org/2021-alena-mehi%C4%87#/

PhD Candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a review of Caroline Walker Bynum’s latest book, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn: Zone, 2020) in Religion and the Arts. Check it out here: https://brill.com/view/journals/rart/25/1-2/article-p199_11.xml?language=en

The editors have invited Andrea to be a repeat reviewer. She looks forward to working with them in the near future.

Learn more about the work of MFA candidate Charlie Dupee in this great article from the Orange County Arts Commision: https://artsorange.org/human-way-dupee/

Congratulations to MFA candidate Krysta Sa, who has received The Center for European Studies 2021 Jean Monnet Center of Excellence EU Research Award for her project “Ancestral Soak: Sea Bathing in the European Union.”

Check out what our new MFA student Hugo Ljungbäck is doing with his semester. Hugo will have presentations as part of the two following upcoming events:

Carolina Queer MiniCon, October 9-13, 2020

Carolina’s first Queer MiniCon to showcase LGBTQIA+ research, art, and lived experience as part of National Coming Out Day 2020.

Keynote address on Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture to be delivered by Assistant Professor Antonia Randolph, Ph.D.

The UNC-Chapel Hill LGBTQ Center has partnered with Sexuality Studies and Honors Carolina Pride to host Queer MiniCon. QMC will be two days of online presentations, scheduled for October 9th and 13th, during Carolina’s ten-day observance of National Coming Out Day from October 6th to 16th. Dr. Antonia Randolph, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, will present the keynote address. Presentations will be open to the public via go.unc.edu/QMC2020.

In its first iteration, Queer MiniCon will feature seventeen presentations chosen by representatives from sponsoring UNC-Chapel Hill departments on LGBTQIA+ affirming research, lived experiences, passion projects, and creative expression. UNC System students, faculty, staff, and postdocs will queer,(that is to say, deconstruct or question assumptions around) everything from social network mapping technologies, in Katelyn Campbell’s “Lesbian Connections: Critical Social Network Mapping and Queer Archival Methods;” to self-perception and dream environments in Sergio Jiminez’s “blue-light-being;” and conventional ideas about masculinity within both dominant and Black culture in Antonia Randolph’s keynote “Wayne Loves Baby: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture.”

QMC Presentations At a Glance

• What is it with Queer People and Cryptids? – Oliver Cope, Undergraduate student in Biology and Anthropology
• Creating a Welcoming Space for LGBTQ Persons and Families at End of Life – JoAn Stanek, Assistant Professor at School of Nursing
• Mindful Self-Compassion for Transgender or Gender Expansive Teens – Melissa Clepper-Faith, Pediatrician and MPH student at Gillings
• Transnational Approaches to Transgender Studies – Rachel Warner, Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Fellow in English and Comparative Literature
• Wayne Loves Baby: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture – Antonia Randolph, Assistant Professor in American Studies
• Lesbian Connections: Critical Social Network Mapping and Queer Archival Methods – Katelyn Campbell, Ph.D. student in American Studies
• Dear Mom: A Quick Look into Cryptids, Growing Up, and Gender – Kaidyn Radford, activist, artist, and Undergraduate student in Communication Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies
• blue-light-being – Sergio Jiminez, Undergraduate student in Studio Art and Anthropology
• Just Mates? The Reality of Pirate Relations in the ‘Golden Age’ – Nikalus Ward, Undergraduate student at Carolina
• Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer, People of Color in Mental Health Services and Substances Abuse Services: A Systematic Review – Hayden Dawes, LCSW, LCAS, Ph.D. student at School of Social Work
• Flipping the Script: Situating the Pink Triangle in Gay History – Dani Puccio, Undergraduate student in Communication Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies
• Best Friends Forever: Young Girls’ Media and a Sapphic Sensibility – A Cook, Undergraduate student in Communication Studies
• Bad Feelings – Hugo Ljungbäck, MFA candidate in Studio Art
• Queering Punk: Queercore 101 – Ashton Thorne, Undergraduate student in Psychology and Philosophy
• Disentangling the Differential Impacts of Stress on Risk-taking Behavior in Sexual and Gender Minority Youth – Curtis Smith, Undergraduate student and researcher in Psychology
• The Heterosexual Matrix – Elliot Kimball, Assistant Director of Intercultural Engagement, LGBTQ+ Outreach and Advocacy at UNC Greensboro
• Space Husbands: What I’ve Learned from Kirk/Spock Fanfic – April Callis, Assistant Director of LGBTQ Center at UNC-Chapel Hill

“Postcolonial Film and the Archive: History, Theory, Practice,” a free, online symposium next Friday, October 16 (10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern / 7 pm Central European)

Bringing together scholars to examine media from across the globe, this event will explore the historical, cultural, and political value and use of colonial and ethnographic films in connection to cultural heritage, preservation, and appropriation. From reexamining the ways in which archives and their materials are mobilized to tell certain narratives and not others, and the complexity of preserving and researching these materials in varying contexts, to interrogating the ontological and indexical status of film as memory artifacts, this symposium will raise questions about cultural heritage, ownership, historiography, and gaps and exclusions in classical film history approaches to the study of “postcolonial” film.

Register here to receive the Zoom link: https://forms.gle/rfexHCAjb526pm3x6

More information: https://uwm.edu/c21/event/postcolonial-film-archives-symposium/

Participants: Jennifer Blaylock (Oberlin), Nadine Chan (Claremont), Alison Griffiths (Baruch), Brian Hochman (Georgetown), Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel), Hugo Ljungbäck (Chapel Hill), Rochona Majumdar (Chicago), Nadi Tofighian (Stockholm), Anna Westerståhl Stenport (Georgia Tech)

MFA student Minoo Emami is the latest featured “Global Grad” on the UNC Graduate School’s website. Check out the interview here: https://graddiversity.unc.edu/2020/08/global-grads-featured-scholar-minoo-emami/