Carol Gray

Congratulations to UCHI’s 2021–2022 Graduate Research Scholars

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UCHI wishes to extend congratulations to this year’s graduate research scholars—Erik Freeman, Carol Gray, Drew Johnson, and Anna Ziering. All four of the 2021–2022 graduate fellows are headed off to postdoctoral fellowships or tenure-track jobs this fall.

Erik Freeman (History) will be assistant professor of American History at Snow College in Ephraim, UT. He will be defending his dissertation, “The Mormon International: Transnational Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1830-1890,” this summmer. His committee members are Christopher Clark (advisor), Manisha Sinha, and Sylvia Schafer (Nina Dayton and Segio Luzzato are readers).

Carol Gray (Political Science) was awarded the Mary Miles Bibb Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship at Framingham State University (FSU) in Framingham, Massachusetts. The two-year fellowship, at the rank of Assistant Professor, begins in Fall 2022, and focuses on courses in American Politics and Pre-Law. The Fellowship is named for Mary Miles Bibb who was the first Black woman graduate of FSU in 1843 who went on to teach in Boston and Philadelphia. Gray will be defending her dissertation, “Law as a Site of Struggle for Human Rights,” a case study about Egypt and human rights NGOs, in June. Her committee members are Jeremy Pressman (advisor), Cyrus Zirakzadeh, Thomas Hayes (Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Bruce Rutherford are readers.)

Drew Johnson (Philosophy) will be starting a two-year research postdoc in August, associated with the ERC-funded GoodAttention project at the University of Oslo. He will be working on Subproject 1 of the Descriptive Strand of the project, on identifying natural norms for attention. Drew recently defended his dissertation, “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse.” His committee members are Dorit Bar-On (advisor), Michael Lynch, Paul Bloomfield, and William Lycan.

Anna Ziering (English) has accepted a position as assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies (affiliated with African American Studies) at Oglethorpe University. She recently defended her dissertation, “Dirty Forms: Masochism, Race, and World-Making in U.S. Literature and Culture,” and her committee members are Chris Vials (advisor), Greg Pierrot, and fellow 2021–22 UCHI fellow Micki McElya.

Please join us in congratulating Erik, Carol, Drew, and Anna!!

Fellow’s Talk: Fiona Vernal on Race and Identity in Hartford

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Hartford Bound: How African Became and African American and Caribbean City. Associates Professor of History and Africana Studies Fiona Vernal, with a response by Carol Gray. April 27, 2022, 4:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room.

Hartford Bound: How Hartford became an African American and Caribbean City

Fiona Vernal (Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, UConn)

with a response by Carol Gray

Wednesday, April 27, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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This talk explores Fiona Vernal’s current book and digital humanities project, Housing Hartford: Mobility, Race, and Identity in Post-World War II Hartford, which examines the convergence of three great migrations of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians in the Greater Hartford region. The book project integrates oral history, archival research, and GIS methodologies to reframe the history of how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city. This narrative of community formation told through the lens of housing, migration, and mobility, offers counter narratives to hardened scripts of slum clearance, white suburban flight, redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification. By exploring the intersections of space, place, mobility, and identity, Hartford Bound offers new visual and spatial histories of race, ethnic belonging, and community succession.

Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. The project she will present today is part of a suite public humanities projects recently awarded the University of Connecticut’s Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship, a UConn Humanities Institute fellowship, and the Sustainable Global Cities Initiative (SCGI) Faculty Research Grant.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Carol Gray on Law as a Site of Struggle

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2021-22 UCHI fellow's Talk. Law as a site of struggle: From Tahrir Square to Egypt's Judiciary. PhD Candidate, Political Science Carol Gray. With a response by Fiona Vernal. October 20, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library 4-209

Law as a Site of Struggle: From Tahrir Square to Egypt’s Judiciary

Carol Gray (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Fiona Vernal (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Egypt has weaponized the Rule of Law against civil society, using legal statutes such as the Protest Law, Cyber Law, Terrorist Law, and NGO Registration Law to control and shut down hundreds of human rights organizations and incarcerate many thousands of political prisoners, by latest counts, approximately 60,000 people. Meanwhile, law-based NGOs have brought human rights reform to Egypt’s historically independent judiciary since the late 1990s by litigating human rights violations, often using strategic litigation aimed at striking down repressive unconstitutional laws.

This presentation, divided into three parts, will first offer examples of successful human rights litigation during the first two decades of Egypt’s human rights movement based on interviews conducted in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. These successes hinged on the existence of an independent judiciary. Part two explores how the advocacy of civil society and judges themselves has strengthened the judiciary while, at the same time, certain actions of Egypt’s Executive Branch have severely undermined, and at times punished, the autonomy of judges. Finally, by examining particular cases decided by Egyptian courts post-Arab Spring, part three analyzes how judicial independence and the rule of law in Egypt are not binary concepts. Despite notable court rulings that violated fundamental human rights, there are still glimmers of courage and independence in the judiciary which remains one of the few avenues of possible reform.

Currently a Dissertation Fellow with the UConn Humanities Institute, Carol Gray is a doctoral student in Political Science and a former public defender. She was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in Egypt from 2010 to February 2011 and a Fulbright Scholar in Montreal from 2013–2014 with Concordia University’s Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability. Attorney Gray holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a JD from Northeastern University School of Law, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a diploma in International Human Rights Law from American University in Cairo. Her dissertation is based on an oral history she conducted in Egypt after Arab Spring of one of Egypt’s leading human rights organizations. Her research is both interdisciplinary—incorporating law, politics, and human rights—and intersectional—using critical theory to examine issues of race, class, ethnicity and gender. Her most recent publication exploring racial binaries and post-colonial national consciousness based on a play written by Frantz Fanon will be published in December in the CLR James Journal, A Review of Caribbean Ideas.

Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. With extensive teaching and research interests in African, Caribbean, and Diaspora history, her interdisciplinary work explores a wide range of themes from slavery, gender, and the law to the history of housing policies. She holds a BA from Princeton and an MA and PhD from Yale University. She consults on and curates a number of public-facing projects, including the production of a series of radio plays exploring the lives of the people and cultures in the Greater Hartford region, in partnership with Hartford Stage and Connecticut Public Broadcasting. In 2019, she curated the panoramic exhibit showcasing how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city: “From Civil Rights to Human Rights: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Housing Struggles in Hartford County, Connecticut, 1940-2019.”

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.