The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently announced the 2017-2019 Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity Fellows (CPPFD).
The fellows receive paid two-year postdoctoral positions in their selected departments, additional funds for research, professional development and networking opportunities, and a unique opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor in their respective discipline.
UNC-Chapel Hill launched the program in 1983 as part of a continuing commitment to building a culturally diverse intellectual community and advancing scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in higher education.
For more information about CPPFD, please visit the CPPFD website. The fellows are:
CPPFD Fellows from left to right: Erika Serrato, Katrina Ellis, Kathryn Desplanque and Brian Hsu
Kathryn Desplanque, Ph.D.: Host Department: Art
Desplanque received her Ph.D. in art history from Duke University. She specializes in 18th- and early 19th-century French social caricature, visual culture, and the printed image. She is currently preparing a book manuscript that builds upon her dissertation that studied satirical images of artistic life in Paris between 1750 and 1850. Her research engages the digital humanities by finding new strategies for organizing and analyzing imagery using qualitative data analysis software, in particular NVivo. She is a research advisory board member at NVivo’s parent company, QSR International.
Katrina Ellis, Ph.D.: Host Department: Health Behavior
Ellis is a family health researcher who received her Ph.D. in health behavior & health education from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her research and intervention interests take a community and family-based approach to improving cancer survivorship and chronic disease prevention and management, particularly among African American families. Ellis is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Cancer Health Disparities Training Program in the health behavior department in the Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Center for Health Equity Research in the department of social medicine in the UNC School of Medicine. The overarching goal of her research is to elucidate factors that influence health behaviors, disease-management and quality of life of African American families facing cancer and other co-existing illnesses in order to improve their health outcomes through community and clinic-based interventions. Ellis earned a bachelor’s degree from Dillard University in New Orleans, a master’s of public health and a master’s of social work from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and completed her Ph.D. in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. She was a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Evaluation Fellowship Program and served for two years in the Peace Corps as a health promotion officer with the Ministry of Health in Fiji.
Brian Hsu, PhD: Host Department: Linguistics
Brian Hsu received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2016 from the University of Southern California. His research aims to develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between modules of the language faculty, focusing on the sources of word order variation and the effects of prosodic and morpho-syntactic contexts on phonological rules. His recent work, published in Glossa, examines a range of verb-second patterns as a window on the origin of cross-linguistic syntactic variation in the realization of functional categories. As a postdoctoral scholar, he is applying this methodology to the analysis of co-occurrence restrictions on indexical elements within nominal phrases. He is also completing a collaborative project on the typology of loanword adaptations and its implications for the organization of phonological constraint systems.
Erika Serrato, PhD: Host Department: Romance Studies
Serrato received her Ph.D. in French from Emory University. She is currently a Carolina postdoctoral fellow in the romance studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on intellectual and aesthetic exchanges between voices, texts, and figures from the Francophone, Hispanic, and Anglophone Caribbean. Her main questions concern what Édouard Glissant calls “l’Autre Amérique,” indigeneity, language, aesthetics, “l’entour,” and intersectional subjectivities. Her most recent publication, “Lamentos haitianos: Jacques Roumain, Haiti, and the Familiar in Jesús Cos Causse’s poetry,” can be found in SX Salon. She has an article forthcoming in Women in French as well as a chapter on an edited volume consecrated to Haiti in the Latin American literary imaginary.
Published Sept. 9, 2017