Research Fellows Scholarship Awarded

Amber N. Wiley is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the American Studies Department at George Washington University. Her GWU dissertation chair is Dr. Richard Longstreth. Her specializations are twentieth-century architectural and urban history and African American cultural studies, and her research interests combine architectural theory and history with cultural issues of race, class, preservation, and urban policy. Wiley received her B.A. in Architecture from Yale University and her M.A. in Architectural History and Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia. She has interned with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, helping document and organize their easement collection. She also worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, providing support work for the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship program.

Wiley’s proposal is entitled Concrete Solutions: Race, Class, and Architecture of Urban High Schools from 1950–1980. Her dissertation will document the relationship between urban policy issues, community values, and high school design at four predominantly black high schools in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. Wiley hopes to “show how collective memory, local and federal politics, race, class, urban policy, and aesthetic symbolism all come together to inform not just how, but where schools are built, and the influence these schools are presumed to have over their communities.” She also hopes that her research will establish a framework for future preservation efforts. Wiley’s research will build on a set of existing nomination forms to the National Register of Historic Places, historic contexts, and feasibility studies pertaining to the selected schools and cities. Her public products will include the creation of public history posters and pamphlets describing the architectural and social importance of the schools. In addition, she will contribute her archival data and the results of her dissertation research to public repositories and historic preservation offices in the appropriate cities and states.

Kojun “Jun” Ueno Sunseri is a doctoral candidate and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Santa Cruz. His UCSC dissertation chair is Dr. Judith Habicht-Mauche. His interests include the development and maintenance of social identities, cross-cultural contacts, the mechanisms that transform and mitigate social and ethnic boundaries, and the processes that alter cultural landscapes. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sunseri’s proposal is entitled Defending Hearth and Homescape: Multi-scalar Identity Practices of an Indo-Hispanic Buffer Settlement in Spanish Colonial Northern New Mexico. His dissertation will explore the nature of a pluralistic community in a frontier settlement and how ethnicity was expressed in both foodways and the construction of cultural landscapes during the protohistoric and Colonial periods. Specifically, he wants to explore how subtle and often hidden dimensions of multiculturalism were expressed in the material vestiges of everyday practice. Sunseri’s dissertation draws on data gathered during previous archaeological investigations in the Rito Colorado Valley and the El Rito District of the Carson National Forest, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, as well as his own field work and interviews. His methods include (1) analysis of archaeological ceramic and faunal assemblages related to domestic foodways and (2) GIS analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to discern patterning in the tactical, engineered, and ritual landscapes of the study area. His goal is to “seek more robust explanations [than have been offered previously] of the ways that frontier communities expressed various aspects of their identities in different contexts and scales of social performance.” The project is being conducted with local community members in El Rito and agencies within Rio Arriba County. His public products will include the creation of multidimensional learning modules with interactive computer components for use in the consolidated school district that serves the El Rito community.