Rashad Arman Timmons Awarded UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Rashad Arman Timmons on receiving a coveted UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship!
The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program was established in 1984 to encourage outstanding women and minority Ph.D. recipients to pursue academic careers at the University of California. The current program offers postdoctoral research fellowships, professional development and faculty mentoring to outstanding scholars in all fields whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity at UC.
Rashad Arman Timmons is graduating with a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies and a Designated Emphasis in New Media. For the 2024-2025 AY, he was awarded the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Professor Jaime Alves in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His dissertation “Haunted Traffic: Blackness, Geography, and Performances of Infrastructural Violence in Ferguson” situates the tragic 2014 murder of Michael Brown, Jr. in a broader spatial history of antiblackness by theorizing infrastructures as conduits of racial subjection and Black spatial possibility in (sub)urban environments across time. It examines railway, roadway, and media infrastructures as historical mediators of racialized vulnerability, confinement, and death in Ferguson’s Black communities while also showing how Black subjects resist these processes through quotidian performances of infrastructural appropriation and disruption. During his tenure at UC Berkeley, Rashad earned the Oustanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, participated actively in the Color of New Media Working Group, served as a graduate student mentor to underrepresented undergraduate students in the Vèvè Clark Institute for Engaged Scholars, and cultivated campus-community partnerships with families impacted by fatal police violence. In 2023, Rashad was awarded the Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in New Media. His work was also supported by the Black Studies Collaboratory, the UC Berkeley Graduate Division, and the Ford Foundation. Rashad is excited to continue developing collaborative research, pedagogy, and art that advance justice and freedom in the everyday spaces we inhabit.