Daisha Brabham, who graduated from Southern in 2017 with a degree in history, was awarded a prestigious U.S. Fulbright – U.K. Partnership Award for the 2019-2020 academic year that allowed her to complete a Master’s of Public History degree at Royal Holloway University of London. There is only one slot for the U.K. Partnership Award to Royal Holloway University, and it is highly competitive.
The U.K. Fulbright Commission recently posted a profile on its website about Brabham, “A Journey in Defining Blackness.” In the profile, Brabham discusses how her Fulbright project plans evolved with the onset of the global pandemic.
Brabham’s Fulbright project involved a play she wrote for an independent study in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program in her senior year. During her senior spring at Southern and the summer following, the play — Homegoing: A Herstory of the Black Woman — was performed on campus. Homegoing reflects the history of Black womanhood in America, beginning with the Yoruba tradition of West Africa and going on to travel with a number of different African American women, such as Venus Hottentot, Billie Holiday, and Mammie.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Brabham to return to the United States before her Fulbright year was over, her plans for her play changed, but she found new avenues for her creativity and thought.
As Brabham writes in the profile, “As a Fulbrighter, you act as a bridge. A way of connecting two countries. We live in a world in which so many voices are speaking, but few are speaking to each other. . . . As we move forward, it is important that we each create spaces in our own respective fields to be a bridge, to act as agents of accessibility, community and connectivity.”
Read “A Journey in Defining Blackness”
