English faculty member earns two prestigious Fellowships
Assistant Professor Crystal S. Donkor has been selected as a Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School for the 2020-22 term.
In earning this distinguished fellowship, Donkor joins a community of scholars working to advance the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects. The Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography is a collective of researchers who study material texts in cultural contexts around the globe, crossing geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Donkor has also been named a Career Enhancement Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. This award supports underrepresented faculty members in the arts and humanities by creating career development opportunities and funding promising research projects.
The two fellowships demonstrate the extraordinary promise of Donkor’s work as a scholar and educator. She joined New Paltz’s Department of English in 2017 as a specialist in multicultural literature, with particular research interests in 19th and early-20th century Black women’s literature, post-emancipation fiction, African American print culture, queer theory, Black feminist theory and the digital humanities.
Her current book project, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy: The Pursuit of Pleasure in Black Women’s Literature, 1859-1910,” studies pleasure at the intersection of African American women’s literature and African American print culture.
Donkor holds a Ph.D. from the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography is a project of Rare Book School, an independent, non-profit institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects, housed at the University of Virginia since 1992.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation identifies and develops the nation’s best minds to meet its most critical challenges. The Foundation supports its fellows as the next generation of leaders shaping American society.