Roundup of new research funding               

University of Richmond Now

Jillean McCommons, a history and Africana studies professor, was awarded a fellowship to support her scholarship on gender, race, and ethnicity in Appalachia. 

The Wilma Dykeman “Faces of Appalachia” Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, which honors the legacy of Tennessee writer Wilma Dykeman Stokely, includes funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Appalachian Studies Association. 

McCommons is writing a book on the history of the Black Appalachian Commission, a grassroots organization created in 1969 to advocate for the economic needs of Black people in the mountains, and will use the fellowship funding to visit archives and collect oral histories from former members of the BAC throughout Appalachia. She is particularly interested in the contributions of Black Appalachian women to the commission. 

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