Yasmeen Chism
Performance Studies Ph.D. Candidate Yasmeen Chism has been awarded a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Yasmeen is one of two NYU students to receive the award this year, which supports exceptional doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with a year of funding to facilitate the completion of projects that will form the foundations of their scholarly careers.
Yasmeen's dissertation, “Tracing Black Movements: Chor[e]ographing Displacements in North Carolina’s Piedmont,” begins with the assumption that Black movements are essential to the nature and making of a place. Using the term chor[e]ograph, a theoretical framework developed by combining chorography - description of a region- and choreography - understanding how certain bodies are able to move, this project makes contentions about North Carolina’s Piedmont. In order to trace these 19th and 20th century Black movements, this project draws on performance studies, Black studies, critical urban studies, historical sociology, and archival research. The regional mapping that this dissertation undertakes, however, is not just about shifts in populations but also the food-ways, folkways, and politics—the various modes of place-making—that inform the region. This dissertation elaborates on the relationship between black presence, black displacement and the making of place by Black people in the Piedmont.
This year’s 50 fellows represent the most diverse cohort in the program’s history, selected from a pool of over 800 applicants. More than 150 scholars from across the humanities and interpretive social sciences contributed to the evaluation of the applications through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process. Each fellow will receive an award to support the final year of dissertation research and writing.
Congratulations Yasmeen!