Introducing the 2011-2012 DiSC Graduate Fellows

My name is Franky Abbott, this year’s DiSC Woodruff Library Fellow. I am a PhD candidate in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts working on my dissertation, “Black Migration to Atlanta: Popular Representation and Metropolitan Space, 1990-2010”: a study of U.S. return south, Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan African migrations to the Atlanta metropolitan region and their relationships to suburbanization and popular culture. I was part of the Southern Spaces team in the library for five years, acting as managing editor for the last two. The Woodruff Fellowship offers me the opportunity to broaden my skills in and experience with digital scholarship, while working with a terrific team of people to build an important Emory program.

Hi all! My name is Moya Bailey and I am a graduate candidate in Women's Studies here at Emory. My dissertation, "Training to Treat: A Study of Representation of Black Women Patients at Emory University School of Medicine” examines how black female bodies are represented in the western medical texts students study during their training. My participation in THATCamp SE awakened a desire to develop my skills in building the infrastructure that supports the academic and activist projects I pursue. The DiSC Fellowship is exciting to me because it offers both the opportunity to develop technical proficiency and allows for the application of these acquired competencies to academic queries. I wish to engage with other scholars whose work exists at these intersections.

Brian Davis here. I’m a photographer who moonlights as a PhD student in Emory’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. My dissertation project is a photographic and historical document of Emory’s Briarcliff Campus, a compelling piece of land that has served many functions over the past century alone. I come to DiSC by way of ECIT, where I’ve been working for nearly four years. Splitting my work week between DiSC and ECIT affords me the opportunity to see the many exciting digital projects burgeoning on campus while contributing to the ongoing work of emerging and experimental forms of scholarship. DiSC has a superb group of scholars working to meet the needs of Emory’s scholarly community, so I consider it a real treat to be apart of the team. Just a few weeks in to the semester, I can already tell that Moya, Franky, and I are going to have a productive and fun year together, and that will be in no small part the result of their being fabulous colleagues.