AAADS awards first doctorate

As a young girl raised near Grenada and the West Indies, recent alumna Maria Eliza Hamilton Abegunde was exposed to a high degree of African influences.

“It was the culture, history and art of black people all over the world in my upbringing,” Abegunde said. “My family is Caribbean, and we always went to the theater. My father is also an artist.”

Last Friday, Abegunde became the first person to receive a Ph.D degree from the IU Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies since the program was established in 2009.

“The Ariran’s Last Life,” the dissertation Abegunde successfully passed with distinction, recounts the effects of the African slave trade upon their descendants, in which she uses memory work from ancestors that survived the Middle Passage.

A retired IU professor and chair of Abegunde’s research committee, John McCluskey described Abegunde as a hardworker and a pleasure to work with.

“She was well ahead of me in terms of working on assignments,” McCluskey said in an email. “My thing was to simply guide her and focus her energies. She has a great amount of energy. She was never prodded to write certain things and re-write certain things.”

To earn the Ph.D., Abegunde had to be engaged in the department for five years. Valerie Grim, chair of the AAADS department and mentor to Abegunde, acknowledged Abegunde’s extensive commitment to her studies. 

“The process required focus, clarity and a determination that she was not going to quit,” Grim said in an email. “Abegunde spent long hours writing the dissertation, while also teaching.”

Grim said she believes in the necessity of studying the experience of black people in and out of the U.S.A. 

“Awarding the first Ph.D means a lot to the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies,” Grim said. “It means this department and IU join an elite group of universities, 13 of them, that offer a Ph.D. in some form of Africana/Black Studies.”

Abegunde pursued her bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and her master’s degree at DePaul University. Abegunde said she chose IU because the department allowed her to write a creative dissertation.

“I’m a fiction writer and poet by training and practice,” Abegunde said.
The department gave Abegunde the opportunity to utilize her training in writing to craft her dissertation.

“It allowed me to write a world beyond, to creative forms to pursue the work I wanted to do that’s combined with research.” 

Abegunde said she believes her doctoral degree means a lot of responsibility to her community.

“In speaking to other people, I’ve become very conscious of the responsibilities of opening the door for my colleagues and other places who are working on the creative processes, as well as traditional research,” Abegunde said. “I’m a community-based person, so I have a responsibility to my community. It’s an opportunity to do good with what I’ve earned.”

While at IU, Abegunde said one of the most rewarding things was introducing students to African American studies and watching as they created processes to engage in the world. She often allowed students to be creative in their final projects and encouraged them to turn theories they learned in class into reality.

“Black studies is part of the focus and engagement of the community,” Abegunde said. “How is your research connected? Teaching builds the research. Students have great ideas about what’s important, and in order to stay relevant, we have to listen to our students.”

Abegunde said she hopes to continue teaching and writing, as well as serving as a doula, a person who assists a woman both physically and emotionally during pregnancy.

“It’s connected to the next phase of work I want to do in terms of studying black motherhood and black motherhood in literature,” Abegunde said. “The doula work is empowering, whether the mom-to-be or the students in my class, them to have a voice in their own lives.”

McCluskey said he believes Abegunde’s accomplishment is important to the department because her good work will set a bar for the three to four students in the department still working on their doctoral degree. But because of staffing issues, the college has suspended admissions for the program.

“We hope Abegunde’s work will reopen the application process,” McCluskey said. “People are very proud and supportive of her, and they made their presence known during commencement when they called her name. People are really excited to get the work going and do well.”