Twenty-six of the University of Mississippi professors selected as the 2024-26 and 2025-27 Isom Fellows presented their research on topics ranging from snails to Mayan civilization during a poster showcase at the Inn at Ole Miss on Wednesday, Oct. 8.
Created in 2017, the Sarah Isom Center provides a two-year fellowship that awards $4,500 per year to chosen researchers.
Director of the Sarah Isom Center Jaime Harker expressed her excitement about the current cohorts.
“I’m just really thrilled to be able to help out a bunch of really smart scholars,” Harker said. “The idea is that this early seed money will help develop ideas, and they can grow into all kinds of research in other projects. We try to build networks between scholars. We like to have this poster session because you walk around, see other people’s work, and you start to notice their connections.”
Professor of Anthropology Carolyn Freiwald is interested in food, specifically the way Mayan society prepared and ate snail dishes that resemble current recipes enjoyed today.
“I think every archaeologist who’s working in the Mayan region has some obsession with these snails because it almost looks like the most abundant artifact that relates to food that you will find,” Freiwald said. “Many of the snails are little, but some of these big boys are five or six inches long and probably live in different rivers. But biologists don’t even know exactly what species are there.”
Freiwald recalled her experiences searching for these snails and added tidbits about her own memories looking in the rivers and amongst locals.
“If you’re lucky, and you go to parts of Guatemala, Belize or Honduras, you might get invited to go to somebody’s house and have a really spicy snail soup,” Freiwald said. “I got to eat it twice, and then the third time they told me they had to try and cook it myself — and that didn’t turn out so well.”
Closer to home, Erica Avent is an assistant professor of elementary education whose research focuses on the upward mobility of female, African-American superintendents in Mississippi K-12 schools. Avent taught in Mississippi schools for 18 years and is invested in the potential of the state’s leaders of education.
“I think (these superintendents’) lived experiences give us a look into what it takes to really have fortified grit and determination and drive to make it, especially in a state like Mississippi, where you don’t see a lot of African-American educators,” Avent said.
Dating back to the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, Avent critiques the aftermath of the win as a result of the mass firing of African-American teachers and administrators that, to this day, has not restored itself. While the state has 137 superintendents, currently less than 25 fit into this demographic.
“For the bulk of these educators, they started out as classroom teachers, they became administrators, and now they have ascended to the highest positions in K-12 education, which are that of a superintendent or assistant superintendent,” Avent said.
With changing policies on loan payback and educator grant programs, Avent predicts a decline in the already scant number of African-American administrators and aims to prove that diversity is a virtue worthy of protection.
“I think that one way for the students of Mississippi to be successful, especially African-American students, is they need to be able to see representation of what success looks like in their own demographics,” Avent said.
Carmen Sanchis-Sinisterra, instructional associate professor of modern language, focuses the daily free labor that women perform for their families. She studied the work of artist Raquel Friera in Barcelona to complete her research.
“(Friera’s) project consisted of giving a group of twelve housewives a machine with punch parts, so that every time they made a task in the house, they would punch the cart and take a self portrait,” Sanchia-Sinisterra said.“The idea was to try to make visible what is usually invisible, which is domestic work.”
Sanchia-Sinisterra names the issue of work as a movement in the making, not fully exercising its grievances. She names the capitalistic basis for the western world as the primary reason for this.
“The situation, I would say, is the same in the world western world because we are all capitalist societies,” Sanchia-Sinisterra said. “So the place and the relevance of domestic work doesn’t depend on the country. It depends on the economic system that rules our lives. So feminist economics would say that it is very difficult to find a solution under capitalism.”
The other presenters were: Katharine Brown, Jade A. Craig, Kesicia Dickinson, Stephen Fafulas, Cong Feng, Kariann Fuqua, Tamar Goulet, Angela Green, Amber King, Almas Khan, Frances Kneupper, Stephanie Lusk, Abigail Novak, Anne Quinney, Courtney Roper, Amy Schumacher-Rutherford, Ala Simonchyk, Teresa Simone, Marquita Smith, Eric Solomon, Kaleena Stasiak, Kristen Swain, Elodie Tantet, Ana Velitchkova, Elizabeth Williams and Andrew Yockey.
