Duke Alums Win OI-NEH Postdoc Fellowship

Andrew Walker (B.A. '11) and Farren Yero (Ph.D. '20)  have been awarded a six-month Omohundro Institute-NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2021-2022.

“Content taken from 2021 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellows announcement email”

Andrew Walker is a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in Latin America and the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan, and from 2018 to 2020 he was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies (Latin American Studies Program) at Wesleyan University. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of History at Kenyon College, where he teaches courses in early and modern Latin America.   Dr. Walker will use the OI-NEH postdoctoral fellowship to revise his book manuscript in progress, entitled Strains of Unity: From Emancipation to Separation in Haitian Santo Domingo. This book explores the 1822-1844 unification of Hispaniola, during which the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo was governed by post-revolutionary Haiti. The unification cemented emancipation across the island and transformed the oldest slaveholding territory in the Americas into the newest departments of the most radical antislavery state in the world. The book argues that the unification itself was built on existing power structures in Santo Domingo, rather than representing an external force. Santo Domingo's Afro-descended majority mobilized in favor of Haitian rule and secured immediate abolition and universal citizenship. Yet national Haitian leaders governed largely through compromises with eastern powerbrokers, especially entrenched white landowners who had been enslavers under previous regimes. In the end, Dr. Walker argues, the unification that had begun as a radical act of Black self-liberation produced a dominant ideology of national "unity" that hindered future challenges to racial inequality in the Dominican Republic.    Farren Yero is currently a postdoctoral associate in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is a scholar of Latin America and the Caribbean, specializing in gender studies and the history of race, health, and medicine. Her writing has appeared in The Recipes Project, The Panorama, and Age of Revolutions, and her research has been supported by the ACLS, Fulbright-Hays, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Newberry Library.    Dr. Yero also will use the OI-NEH postdoctoral fellowship to revise a book manuscript in progress. Her project is titled Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine. It traces the circulation of the first smallpox vaccine through the Atlantic World and argues that we cannot understand the history of vaccination without addressing the role of race and reproductive politics in its creation and maintenance. In the book, Dr. Yero foregrounds the enslaved and free mothers who (willingly or not) provided access to their children, whom doctors relied upon to incubate and conserve the vaccine across imperial lines. In turn, she analyzes how vaccination became embedded in struggles over abolition, individual rights, and the very meaning of consent, highlighting the gender and racial politics of vaccine development and its contested relationship to slavery, freedom, and motherhood in the nineteenth century.    The Omohundro Institute will reopen applications to the OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship in summer 2021. Applications will be due November 1.