Nihad Farooq, assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, has received the prestigious William S. Vaughn Visiting Research Fellowship from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. 

Farooq will join a group of Vanderbilt interdisciplinary scholars participating in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar.  The 2012-2013 seminar coincides with the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and explores the theme, "The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World."   

Farooq will be working on her book project, tentatively entitled "Virtual Emancipation: Slavery and Social Networks in the New World."  Her research ties contemporary understandings of networks and network theory to historical acts of political resistance and community formation, especially in the era of Atlantic slavery. The project asks readers to examine the links between slave networks and slave resistance movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contemporary acts of networked resistance, such as democratization movements in Tunisia and Cairo (aka, the 'Twitter Revolution').