April 22, 2025
Yunina Barbour-Payne (Ph.D. 2024) has been awarded the Michael H. Granof Outstanding Dissertation Award in Humanities and Fine Arts for her dissertation: Redbones, Blackbones and Other Bones to Pick: Formations of Affrilachian Aesthetics. Her supervisors on the dissertation were faculty members Lisa B. Thompson and Rebecca Rossen.
In Rossen's words, "Dr. Barbour-Payne makes a key intervention in the patriarchal lineages of Affrilachian studies to center the critical work of Black women cultural producers, including storyteller Lyn Ford, singer Martha Redbone, and writer Crystal Wilkinson. Through her dissertation, as well as her own creative work, Dr. Barbour-Payne shows how female artists collectively expand and redefine the national and regional impact of Affrilachian cultural expression through performance."
The Michael H. Granof Awards are given to doctoral students with exceptional dissertations, both in methodological approach and significant, groundbreaking substance. One winner is selected annually in each of three categories: Humanities and Fine Arts; Mathematics, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Biological Life Sciences and Social Sciences, Business and Education.
A unique component of Barbour-Payne's research for her award-winning dissertation involved adapting stories from Crystal Wilkinson's book Blackberries, Blackberries into the play More Blackberries, Please which she brought to life as part of the 2023 Cohen New Works Festival. According to Rossen, Barbour-Payne's dissertation serves in part as a "dramaturgical handbook for future artist/scholars seeking to create Affrilachian performance through a Black feminist methodology."
Barbour Payne is continuing her groundbreaking work in her position as a Rising Fellow Scholar and Lecturer at The University of Virginia, where she is expanding Redbones, Blackbones and Other Bones to Pick: Formations of Affrilachian Aesthetics into a manuscript.
Learn more about the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award recipients.