Congratulations to Ph.D. Candidate Katherine Cosby!

UCI History student Katherine Cosby has been named a 2018 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellow for her work researching abroad in Sao Paulo, Brazil for her dissertation "Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt".

UCI History Ph.D. candidate Katherine Cosby has been named a 2018 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellow for work researching abroad in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The research has been done for her dissertation, "Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt" (Proposed Title). This dissertation addresses how the treatment of black women in the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930), under the guise of whitening ideologies, contributed to the formations of Sao Paulo regional identity and examines residential racial segregation in Sao Paulo. Though conventional narratives of racial discrimination point to segregation in terms of employment, in distinction to notorious urban segregation in the United States, Cosby demonstrates that racial segregation occurred both in labor practices and in urban space in Brazil. With the academic support of faculty at the University of Sao Paulo, Cosby relies on medicolegal municipal incident reports held at the Arquivo do Estado de Sao Paulo to chart the circulation of black women from two neighborhoods in Sao Paulo.

Katherine Cosby previously received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Summer Fellowship in 2016. Her advisors are Dr. Alex Borucki (Professor of History and Chair of Latin American Studies) and Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (Associate Professor of African-American Studies).