Tuskegee student to study at Ralph Bunche center at UCLA
Submitted by Tuskegee University
TUSKEGEE, AL — Amanda Powell, a senior English major from Montgomery, Ala has been selected for an internship with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies Summer Humanities Institute (SHI) at the University of California, Los Angeles.
According to its website, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies was “founded in 1969 as the Center for Afro-American Studies (CAAS), was renamed after Nobel Prize winner, scholar, activist, and UCLA alumnus Ralph J. Bunche in 2003, in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. The Bunche Center is the result of the struggle by Black students at UCLA to have their history and culture recognized and studied.”
This eight-week preparatory program is designed to enhance the competencies of students who plan to pursue an MA or Ph.D. in the humanities or humanistic social sciences. This year, students will be assigned to a faculty mentor and will choose a topic related to their assigned mentor’s research focus. Stu-dents will write a research paper and present a conference paper.
For SHI, Powell was selected from a pool of many candidates who met the October 31, 2012 early admission deadline. Selection for SHI was based a proposal with a relevant research topic that relates to the community as well as the institute.
Powell, who is already a published author, will be researching the image of Black women and how they are depicted in the community throughout film and literature. She wrote a collection of poems entitled, “The Voice Within” published by Vantage Press in New York in 2006.
At Tuskegee, Powell is the co-founder and vice president of Sound Minds, a mentoring program targeted toward fresh-men girls whose numerous activities include forums and community service.
She is also a member of Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Society and will be soon inducted into the Lambda Iota Tau Honor Society. Membership in both of these national organizations is extended to high-achieving English majors.
Upon graduation from Tuskegee, Powell plans to attend graduate school and her future plans are to become a journalist, news reporter or enter a profession in a communications related field.
For more information about the institute program, go to: http://www.bunche.ucla.edu/
