Samuel Boateng
Music
Samuel Boateng is a Ph.D. candidate in Music and a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships awardee. He earned an MA in Ethnomusicology from Kent State University. His interdisciplinary work focuses on transnational and representational issues in the field of jazz studies with an emphasis on the sociocultural meanings of jazz in Africa. His dissertation draws on ethnographic and archival research to investigate how the practice of jazz as Black Atlantic culture intersects with the articulation of modern identities, decolonial epistemologies, diasporic solidarities, and cultural sustainability politics among Ghanaian musicians in West Africa, Britain, and United States. Samuel has presented his research at several academic conferences including that of the Society for American Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology conference, where he was awarded the 2020 African Libraries Student Paper Prize for the “most distinguished student paper delivered on the topic of African and African diasporic music.” Samuel is a recipient of the inaugural Immersive Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) through the Andrew Mellon Humanities Engage Program at Pitt, as well as the curator of the Adepa Jazz Collection based at the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives – Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. As an ASCAP award winning composer and pianist, his music has been performed by the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Kent State Orchestra, and Afro Yaqui Music Collective.
Rebecca Giordano
History of Art and Architecture
Rebecca Giordano is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture and the 2021-2022 Patricia and Philip Frost Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A curator, researcher, and writer, she studies emergent constructions of race and culture, transnational exchange, and the role of the visual in politics in the 20th century Americas. Her dissertation project "Muralism, Racial Discourse, and Cultural Anthropology in US Black Art, 1936–1955" explores how US Black muralists adapted cultural anthropology to articulate particular racial identities in and beyond the nation-state during the late Jim Crow era. This project considers the mural practices of artists Charles White, Hale Woodruff, and Thelma Johnson Streat to draw out the impact of anthropology’s research practices and lively academic debates about racial and cultural identity on US Black muralism of the 1940s.
Sean Nonnenmacher
Linguistics
Sean Nonnenmacher (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics. His dissertation broadly investigates social identity at the intersection of language, gender/sexuality, and childhood in contemporary American English. Through a digital and linguistic ethnographic methodology, he is producing an account of children’s speech practices that centers queer and transgender youth speakers and explores constructed speech (direct or quoted and indirect or reported speech) and dialect variation in personal narratives of everyday experience. His analysis draws from a digital storytelling archive (or “StoryBank”) he is building with the national nonprofit organization GLSEN, whose mission is to ensure K-12 students can learn in safe and affirming school environments. Sean is a two-time recipient of the Title VIII Fellowship to study Eastern Armenian, a former Mellon Fellow, and recipient of the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship.