First Appointed Mellon Dissertation Fellow

The Department of Philosophy would like to congratulate our first appointed Mellon Dissertation Fellow, Kimberly Ann Harris, a fifth year, Ph.D. Candidate!

Title: The Hegelian Dialectic in Africana Philosophy: Du Bois, Fanon, and James

Committee: Robert Bernasconi (Chair), Brady Bowman, Kathryn Gines, and Aldon Nielsen

The crucial role that Hegel’s conception of the dialectic has played in some of the most prominent Black thinkers has received little attention. In this dissertation, Kimberly Ann Harris fills this lacuna in Africana Philosophy by providing an examination of C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics and The Black Jacobins, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races,” and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. She shows that in each of these cases Hegel’s dialectical approach to history (dialectical thinking) was essential to their own attempts to understand the possibility of a positive transformation of the pervasively racist world they inhabited.

To read more about the Mellon Foundation Grant, please click here.