The first Mellon Diversity Fellows initiating a new pre- and postdoctoral fellowship program in the College of Arts and Sciences have arrived on campus. The program, established with $2 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is designed to improve the career chances of humanities scholars from communities underrepresented in the academy or who face such challenges as economic hardship or being a first-generation college graduate. The two- to three-year fellowships are also open to non-minority candidates who work on topics related to underrepresented minorities.

The program is part of the College of Arts and Sciences' strategy to encourage and attract a diverse faculty at Cornell. As with the college's undergraduate Mellon-Mays program, the four new Mellon Diversity Fellows will attend weekly multidisciplinary seminars.

"Thanks to the weekly seminar, my department's immensely helpful and rigorous atmosphere, and the support of the other three fellows, I am confident that I have the intellectual environment, resources, and colleagues to accomplish what I need to this year," says fellow Murad Idris.

Naminata Diabate, another fellow, concurs, noting, "The seminar allows me to be part of a sustained and vibrant intellectual community, thereby alleviating the sense of isolation that comes with relocation."

In addition to the seminars, an annual conference will be held, providing a platform for fellows to work with senior scholars and present their work to a larger audience.

Idris, who earned his Ph.D. in political science in 2012 from the University of Pennsylvania, is a political theorist specializing in comparative political theory and the history of political thought. He is studying peace as a cultural and political artifact implicated in polemics, effacements and exclusions. He will track how this concept has been disseminated as a moral ideal in Euro-American and Arabo-Islamic texts and discourses, comparing within and across these histories of political thought.

Diabate received her Ph.D. in comparative literature in 2011 from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also completed interdisciplinary portfolios in African diaspora studies and women's and gender studies. While at Cornell, she will study the little-discussed literary and cinematic texts from Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, focusing on questions of power, sexuality and resistance.

Fellow Rafael Santana, who received a Ph.D. in sociology in 2012 from the University of Chicago, focuses on immigration, organizations and emotion. His current research looks at the role that community leaders play in the emergence and disbandment of local immigrant-led organizations. He will explore the intersection of culture and organizations among Mexican immigrants and how gender influences leadership dynamics within immigrant hometown associations.

Christopher Pexa is a dissertation-year Mellon Diversity Fellow visiting from Vanderbilt University who becomes a Mellon fellow in fall 2013. His research addresses the intersections of Native American literature and federal Indian law and policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His research at Cornell looks at the complex ways in which Dakota (Sioux) people have responded creatively to the pressures of modernity and colonization to create cultural continuity and ways of belonging across the violent ruptures embodied by the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, its subsequent confinements and exile.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.