Photo credit: Shannon Drawe
By Amanda McKeen Simpson
Texas Woman’s University
DENTON — Reanae McNeal of Davenport, Iowa, a Texas Woman’s University doctoral candidate in women’s studies and a master’s student in English, recently was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She is one of only 14 scholars chosen nation wide for NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellowship, 2014-2016 cohort.
According to NCTE, “the Cultivating New Voices program is designed to provide two years of support, mentoring and networking opportunities for early career scholars of color.” The program aims to work with selected doctoral candidates and early career post-secondary faculty to cultivate the ability to draw from their own cultural and linguistic perspectives as they conceptualize, plan, conduct, write and disseminate findings from their research. Fellows interact within the research community and with established scholars whose own work can be enriched by their engagement with new ideas and perspectives.
Ms. McNeal received her master of arts degree in women’s studies from TWU. Her research interests include white settler colonialism; global/U.S. women of colors; womanist/feminist/
Indigenous theorizing; liberationist epistemologies; African-Native studies; African-American and Indigenous liberation movements; multicultural transformative pedagogies; women of colors and violence; womanist theology; Indigenous/tribal theology; racial genocide; black womanist/feminist/Indigenous global thought; and the international council of thirteen Indigenous grandmothers.
“I am deeply honored and thankful to have received this fellowship and to have the opportunity to cultivate my research skills in creating scholarly work that underscores my cultural and linguistic perspectives,” Ms. McNeal said. “Moreover, I appreciate having Dr. Victor Villanueva, a senior scholar in the field of English, as my mentor during the fellowship. I look forward to growing and learning as an activist-research-scholar.”
More than 80 Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars Fellows have been selected since the program’s inception in 2000. According to NCTE, “fellows have successfully defended dissertations, have accepted tenure-track professorial positions and community organizing roles, have presented at numerous national and international conferences, and among other things, have received research, teaching, and service wards.” For more information, visit http://www.ncte.org/research-
