A Florida State University faculty member has been selected for a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in support of her next book project.
Associate Professor of English and Honors Teaching Scholar Tarez Samra Graban will use the fellowship to write “Rhetorika Afrika: Finding (and Losing) Feminist Discourses in the Transnational Archive,” which argues for the ways in which archival memory and power interact to shape or obscure feminist legacies in certain parts of Africa and world regions.
“I am honored to receive recognition from the NEH for this project, although I acknowledge that there are many such worthy projects being generated by my colleagues in English,” Graban said. “Much of what we do centers on limning or deconstructing stories of change.”
“Rhetorika Afrika” offers one such deconstruction by investigating the rhetorical practices and troubles inherent to how women academics, activists and elected leaders in select African regions are presented and perceived in archives, especially as information becomes more democratized.
“The NEH Fellowship will enable me to treat a corpus of materials that is archivally vast, argumentatively complex and transnational in scope with the necessary care and caution it requires,” said Graban, who also serves as director of the Rhetoric and Composition graduate program.
NEH fellowships support advanced research in the humanities by college and university teachers and independent scholars and they are among the top national awards available to humanities faculty at American research universities. For her project, which shares a title with the book, Graban will receive a six-month sabbatical stipend of $30,000.
In “Rhetorika Afrika,” Graban interrogates how the transnational consumption of archival documents reinforces certain beliefs about how African women lead on the global stage. This consumption is as much tied to practicality as it is to memory, as many documents reflecting how African women have participated in the emergence of democratic rule no longer reside on the continent. In some cases, entire sets of materials have been expatriated to — or digitized and co-opted by — institutions in Europe and the U.S.
“Arguably, more African countries have elected women into particular leadership roles than most other regions of the world,” Graban said. “But their legacies are less well documented, sometimes because they do not have control over their own legacies, or because they lack a stable archive. Or, their materials fall under the curatorial stewardship of nations with contrasting ideas about how best to reflect those leaders’ political agendas.”
By focusing attention first on the archives, Graban addresses the contentiousness of women as leaders on the African continent before then considering the challenges of archiving these leaders’ legacies for historical use.
“The longer-term concern is that the more those materials are consumed under other national narratives, the harder it becomes to recognize the material and immaterial challenges facing women leaders, as well as to conceive what it could mean to theorize a model of feminist leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Graban said. “For me, this project bears as much on studies of cultural heritage and memory as it does on global rhetorical practices.”
Graban earned a doctorate from Purdue University in 2006 and joined FSU’s faculty in 2012, where she teaches primarily in the Editing, Writing and Media undergraduate major and in the Rhetoric and Composition graduate program. This fellowship is her second NEH award; Graban received a Summer Stipend award in 2024, which she used to travel to Ghana and South Africa to complete archival research for “Rhetorika Afrika.”
“It’s terrific to see Dr. Graban’s work on global and feminist rhetorics receive this high distinction and recognition,” said Andrew Epstein, English department chair and Caldwell Professor of English. “This award confirms Dr. Graban’s stature as a leader in her field, and it is yet another sign that the FSU English Department continues to produce influential research of the highest caliber.”
For more information about the FSU Department of English and its research, visit english.fsu.edu.