Marc Ridgell Wins Fellowship at Penn and gets Published in the National Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal

Cropped Headshot of Marc Ridgell

Marc Ridgell, a first-year PhD student, has won the Price Lab's Andrew W. Mellon Summer Research Fellowship. This summer, they will be working with the Price Lab to jumpstart the creation of a digital exhibition that depicts historic and contemporary Black LGBTQ+ organizing in Philadelphia. The research process will include them visiting regional archives to excavate and subsequently digitize archives on Black queer Philly, conduct oral histories with current Black queer organizers, and apply GIS methods to map recent Black LGBTQ+ events. Not only will this help springboard research for their dissertation, but it will also help them start doing public-facing work simultaneously. Find out more about Price Lab here.

Also, Marc's recent article got published by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal in March 2024. Their published article, "Resisting Violence in Chicago's Antiblack Homotopia: Black LGBTQ+ Space-Making, Challenging the Digital Archive, and Employing the Ordinary" was created through writing their senior thesis as an undergraduate at Washington University. It is under the 2023 MMUF Journal link at this website. In January, Marc was selected as a PhD recipient for the Point Foundation BIPOC Scholar, a one-time scholarship that supports LGBTQ+ students of color at U.S. universities. Marc was a flagship scholar for Point in undergrad, and they remark that it was lovely to continue their relationship with Point now as an alum and BIPOC PhD scholar.