Meet CREST

Dissertation Fellows 2006-2007

Christina Violeta Jones — Christina Violeta Jones is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Howard University. In 1995, she graduated from George Mason University with a double major in History and Anthropology. In 2002, she received her Masters from Howard University where she wrote on race and gender in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo period. Prior to her CREST Fellowship at The College of Saint Rose, she was a Research Associate for The National Security Archives located in Washington D.C. where she worked under the Cuban Documentation Project.

Christina Jones is currently in the process of researching and writing her dissertation, entitled "Revolution and Reaction: Santo Domingo during the Haitian Revolution and Beyond, 1791-1844," which looks at the impact the Haitian Revolution and Unification period had in the Dominican Republic. Christina is an active member of various organizations such as: the Dominican-American Roundtable, the Latin American Studies Association, the American Historical Association, and the Association of Caribbean Historians. She has also published book reviews and encyclopedias entries; along with feature articles in several magazines that cater to the Latino community such as: Latingirl, Urban Latino, Dominican Times, and LatinaStyle. She is a 2006-2007 recipient of the following fellowships: the University of Florida Latin America Collections Travel Grant, Hawthorne Dissertation Fund, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the John Carter Brown Short-term Fellowship, and the David Nicholls Society of Caribbean Studies.

Wandia M. Njoya —
Wandia Njoya arrives at the College of Saint Rose from The Pennsylvania State University where she studies in the Department of French and Francophone Studies and teaches courses on French and Swahili. She earned a B.Ed. and M.A., from Kenyatta University, Kenya. Njoya has also taught English at the Université de Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France. She has received numerous fellowships to support her dissertation research, including a grant to finance research in France from the Africana Research Center and the Department of French and Francophone Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Njoya has several articles in press or under review, including "Decolonizing the Heart: The Politics of Love and African Feminist Criticism." Njoya is a promising scholar whose exciting work should help to influence a variety of academic fields, including literary criticism, French studies, and international politics.

During her stay at the College of Saint Rose, Njoya will complete her dissertation, entitled "In Search of Eldorado? The Experience of Migration to France in Contemporary African Novels." Njoya's work examines how relatively unknown contemporary African novels portray African migration to France and the debates about citizenship, gender, and identity that result. Her concern with the interaction of gender and race with French educational, legal, and political institutions, as well as her examination of immigration policies, should place Njoya's work at the forefront of CREST's mission to examine issues of citizenship, race, and ethnicity from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Residential Fellows 2006-2007

May Caroline Chan, Ph.D. — (send an email)
Assistant Professor, English Department

I am a native of Connecticut who has lived on the West Coast, the Upper Midwest, the West Midlands of England, and have now landed in Albany. After receiving a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), and working for a major investment banking firm, I went on to study English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English.

My graduate studies focused on British Victorian literature, which is the focus of many of the courses I teach at The College of Saint Rose. However, my teaching interests mix in readings and authors from my other scholarly interests: Romantic poets, travel narratives, photography, Asian-American literature, contemporary American and contemporary British literature. When I read in these areas, and select material for courses, I am often interested in the feminist expression of experience through verbal or visual means. At the same time, this tendency, combined with my own experience of Asian-Americanness, also brings my interest to bear on the more marginalized voices in these areas of study.
From my graduate study in British Victorian literature and its large body of work, combined with an interest in nineteenth-century photography I found myself reading numerous British Victorian travel narratives written about China. This work, which eventually became my Ph.D. dissertation, is the focus of my CREST Fellowship, as I expect to use it as the foundation for a book manuscript. The four travel narratives examined in this project come from a large, relatively unexamined body of travel narratives written by British travelers to East Asia. The manuscript project, tentatively titled "Victorian British Travel Narratives on Late Qing China: The Business of Imperial Desire and Repulsion," will reflect the thinking I have recently done with regard to the occupational motivations that partly drive the four travel narratives examined in the manuscript.

My objective is to deepen the theoretical framework for the project's interpretation of the travel narratives, to offer scholars a way of reading travel narratives that differs from the reading of fiction or poetry. To accomplish this goal, I intend to continue my readings in different areas: narrative theory, with a view towards travel narratives; and postcolonial theory, for deepening perspectives on this area of the imperial consciousness. One of the reasons for the need to conceptualize an interpretative strategy for reading travel narratives is because of their ability to move fluidly between genres, disciplines, and national identities. This fluidity shows readers how we desire categorization and nomenclature, which are Victorian intellectual legacies, as well as desiring familiar plots, which simultaneously must show inventiveness or novelty.

Angela D. Ledford, Ph.D. (send an email)
Assistant Professor, Department of History
and Political Science

Angela D. Ledford received her Ph.D. in 2006 in political science from the University of South Carolina. Professor Ledford's areas of expertise are in political theory and American politics. More specifically, her teaching and research interests center on feminist theory, social movements, and electoral politics. Her dissertation, The Razor's Edge: Group Representation, Feminist Theory, and the Promise of Justice, seeks alternative electoral and participatory arrangements to increase the representation of women and minorities in formal legislative bodies. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Northeastern Political Science Association, and The Caucus for a New Political Science. When not teaching and writing, Professor Ledford enjoys hiking and college football.

I am currently working on a manuscript-length project based on my recently completed dissertation, The Razor's Edge, Group Representation, Feminist Theory, and the Promise of Justice. My objective is to expand the project, which primarily concentrates on increasing political participation and representation of the historically marginalized based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, to address more specifically the ways in which social class and cultural difference manifest themselves and what meanings they have for political representation. There has been much important work done in the past two decades on issues of underrepresentation in the American context based on social difference (Barry 2001; Benhabib 2006, 1996; Christiano 1996; Disch 2002; Gutman 1992; James 2004; Kymlicka 1995; Williams 1998). The relevant social differences include race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and sometimes age. While this work has been particularly helpful in elucidating how women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities suffer disproportionately on measures of full citizenship, social class and culture receive relatively little. More often than not, social class and cultural difference are swept in under the primary concerns of gender, race, and ethnicity. To a large degree, this weighting is understandable and justified based on clear and continued gender inequality as well as the legacy of slavery and centrality of race in America.

But it strikes me that social class and cultural difference are neglected in American scholarship on political representation-something that cannot be said about the treatment of citizenship by scholars doing work on Latin America, France, Britain, and Canada, for example. Furthermore, I find the claim that social class and cultural difference are two areas that affect American political life relatively less than in these other countries both wrong and dangerous.

While these are important yet neglected dimensions of American social and political life, like Pierre Bourdieu, I believe that there are important links between social class and culture. I seek to examine the nature of those links. In particular, is cultural difference always marked by class distinction and, if so, how? Is class defined and maintained primarily by assigning social and cultural meaning to it? If so, what are the possibilities for mobilization and fair representation where social class is concerned? The answers to these questions are particularly important for what they reveal more broadly about the exercise of power in American politics; more specifically, insight into these relationships can provide valuable information about how to disrupt the cycle of systemic inequality. It is to these questions that I wish to turn in order to expand the scope of the project and increase the contribution that this work will make to the existing political science literature.

Bernadette P. Njoku — (send an email)
Assistant Professor, School of Business

Bernadette P. Njoku joined the College of Saint Rose in 2003. She teaches marketing at the School of Business and is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Marketing, Nance College of Business Administration, Cleveland State University, Ohio. She received her M.B.A. in marketing from Pace University, New York and B.A. in chemistry from University of Dallas, Texas. Her major areas of interest in teaching and research include international marketing, consumer behavior, and consumer relationship marketing. Her dissertation is entitled, An Integrative Model of Service Loyalty: A Socio-Psychological View. It focuses on service employees’ behavioral roles in developing relationships with consumers and applies principles of social psychology and social relationships to explain behavioral inputs and expected relationship exchange outcomes in business contexts. For the past 10 years, relationship marketing has created a shift in the focus of marketing – a trend that is expected to continue for many years. Bernadette thus takes many opportunities to incorporate the knowledge she has gained from her studies to her students and to marketing practitioners.

Cross-cultural marketing research has been a major part of Bernadette’s education. Previous studies include the examination of mutual dependence between consumers, firms, and employees across U.S. and Asian cultures. They have been presented at various AMA Frontiers in Services Conferences, the 2004 AMA Summer Educators’ Conference, and international marketing and business conferences in Montreal, Mexico, Australia, and Greece. While continuing work in this area, she is also engaged in a study that examines cultural differences of consumers in the U.S. and Brazil in the moderating effects of consumers’ perceptions about country-of-origin, i.e., where products are manufactured, on consumers’ self image and purchase. This study becomes more important as trends in globalization continue since it will help firms and managers to gain more awareness about the importance that consumers place on their self-image, which guides product preferences and product usage, over country-of-origin, which is also based one’s perceptions about image of a particular country.

Bernadette is a member of the national and NY Capital Region Chapters of the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science, and the PhD Project, Marketing Doctoral Student Association. She is a Sam Walton Fellow and faculty advisor of SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) at the College of Saint Rose. She also serves on the advisory board of the NYS Children and Family Trust Fund, and board of eba, Inc. Dance Theater and Black Dimensions in Art. When not teaching and studying, she enjoys taking salsa, tango, and other dance classes and beading jewelry.

Ryane McAuliffe Straus, Ph.D. (send an emai)
Assistant Professor, Department of History and Political Science

Ryane McAuliffe Straus joined the College of Saint Rose in 2005, after completing her dissertation in political science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include urban politics, race and ethnicity, and public policy, with a specialization in urban education policies. She is the author of "Reconstructing Los Angeles Magnet Schools: Representations in Newspapers," published in the Peabody Journal of Education. She has also presented papers at the meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association.

My primary research interests lie at the intersection of urban politics, racial and ethnic studies, and public policy. I am particularly interested in how policy narratives are used by various groups to support their own vision of a public policy, and how these narratives compete with each other until one becomes dominant. This struggle is especially visible in very important policies, such as how public education is provided to various racial and ethnic groups in our urban areas. My dissertation, "Reconstructing Magnet Schools: Social Construction and the Demise of Desegregation," found that members of the Black and White communities discussed the Los Angeles, CA, desegregation plans very differently. Over a period of several decades (from the early 1970s to 2000), the policy narratives supported by the White community became dominant, and those supported by the Black community lost power. This created a policy that was structured by those in power to provide additional resources to members of their own racial group. Latinos, by far the largest group in Los Angeles, were not a part of the original discussion, and as a result they are now largely left out of the beneficial policies that derived from the desegregation period.

Bridgett Williams-Searle, Ph.D. (send an email)
Assistant Professor, Department of History and Political Science

Dr. Bridgett Williams-Searle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Political Science. She earned her Ph.D. in U. S. History from the University of Iowa and teaches a variety of history courses that examine colonial America and the early republic, American Indians, the U. S. environment, and the American frontier. Williams-Searle also teaches graduate courses in U. S. Historiography, Topics in U. S. Women’s History to 1877, Colonial North America, and U. S. Early Republic. The title of her research project that she will pursue as a CREST Residential Fellow is “Intimate Empires: Sex, Race, and Law in the Old Northwest, 1760-1830.”

Any faculty member from any department at the College of Saint Rose with interests, as well as a research agenda that helps to further CREST's goals is welcome and encouraged to become a member of CREST. CREST members have access to a Blackboard site that will help to develop a focused scholarly community by posting working papers, member research interests and ongoing projects, upcoming events, and other news. In these foundational years of CREST, members will also be involved in helping to shape CREST's overall mission.