Dr. Trimiko Melancon, an assistant professor of English and faculty in African and African American Studies, has been awarded a prestigious 2012 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Providing a year-long sabbatical, financial support, mentoring, and a fall retreat of fellows, the award is designed to “aid the scholarly growth of fellows, thereby improving their success in attaining tenure.” Twenty fellowships are awarded in a nationwide competition annually to talented, promising junior faculty “committed to eradicating racial disparities in core fields in the arts and sciences.”

During the fellowship period, Professor Melancon will complete the final revisions of her book Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and the Politics of Representation for publication. It is an examination, through the trope of sexuality, of post-civil rights representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination. The award will also enable Melancon to make continued progress on her second project, which examines race, representations, and the global politics of exclusion in literature and cultural production.