Hooks Fellows

Hooks Faculty Fellows Program

As with visiting scholars, faculty members at the University of Memphis (UofM) often seek opportunities to work for uninterrupted periods on manuscripts and other projects. The two basic needs of faculty members involved in scholarly research are funding and time. Faculty members seeking funding may use grant funds to pay for graduate assistants, equipment, or other expenses related to their research. The Hooks Fellows program can also facilitate faculty "opting-out" of teaching for a semester (which would require payment to departments to replace faculty on sabbatical).

2013-2014

Carla Peacher-Ryan is a shareholder in the Memphis law office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, & Berkowitz. As the Hooks Institute Corporate Fellow, Peacher-Ryan worked with the staff to build program infrastructure and to better connect the Institute to non-profit, business, and legal communities.

Peacher-Ryan has practiced law for 29 years in the areas of commercial finance and real estate transactions. She has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America^® in real estate law, securitization and structured finance law, and banking and commercial finance law since 2007. She was named the 2013 Best Lawyer - Memphis Securitization and Structured Finance Law and 2012 Memphis Real Estate Law "Lawyer of the Year."

A 2010 graduate of Leadership Memphis, Peacher-Ryan is committed to community engagement. She was the chair of the Hooks Institute's Local Advisory Board. She also is on the board of directors of the Memphis Center City Revenue Finance Corp. and serves as legal counsel to the Rise Foundation, Community L.I.F.T., and River City Capital Corp.

2005-2006

Beverly Bond, Ph.D., is the director of African and African American Studies and an associate professor in the History Department at the UofM. Her work focused on African American women in the nineteenth-century urban south. While in residence, Bond authored an article on Julia Britton Hooks, grandmother of Benjamin L. Hooks, and a talented musician and teacher. Mrs. Hooks championed social and political rights of African Americans in post-Reconstruction Memphis.

Fall 2004

Earnestine Jenkins, Ph.D., then assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UofM, was a fall 2004 scholar in residence. Jenkins prepared her dissertation manuscript, "A Kingly Craft: Manuscripts, Society, and Ideology in 19th-century Ethiopia," for publication. In 2008, Jenkins, now an associate professor, published her dissertation under the title "A Kingly Craft: Art and Leadership in Ethiopia: A Social History of Art and Visual Culture in Pre-Modern Africa." (University Press of America,^® Inc.)