When I started this website, I imagined it being a place where I would primarily write about my grad program, my experiences as a doctoral student, and the texts I was reading (& also, a place to professionally flex). Some of those ideas went out of the window once the pandemic started, because having a semi-public outlet felt really good. That trend only deepened as the emotional stress of the pandemic was compounded by other things going on in my personal life.

But! If I can momentarily return to the old aims of this space, I have a little milestone to share: this past December, I was awarded my Master of Arts in African & African Diaspora Studies from thee University of Texas at Austin. Though I’d received an email from the graduate school saying I’d completed the requirements, it didn’t feel real until this week when my degree arrived in the mail.

When I saw the big envelope from UT in the mail, I laughed a little and realized that this meant more to me than I previously believed. When I started the program, I was dead-set against getting an MA. Like, what am I doing: collecting degrees? But about a year ago, the department decided they wanted me to complete the MA requirements and asked that I complete my thesis over summer 2021. At the time, agreeing to receive my MA felt a lot like checking a box. Okay, cool, fine, whatever you say.

But, honestly: summer 2021 was so hard for me. It wasn’t the summer I had planned at all. Actually, I can see now—in a way that wasn’t obvious (or even recognizable) to me then—just how much of an unhinged wreck I was up until like…November. During that time, there were days when the only thing I felt tethered to was the person I want to be—and that person had her MA. So in the midst of everything else, I sat down and plugged away at this. Seeing my degree in the mail, this feeling washed over me of how cool it is to have something tangible to show for that time.

My MA thesis is wildly flawed! For something that only recently exists in the world, I already see so much of it that I would like to change and places where I already disagree with myself. It’s in that spirit that I’ve made it downloadable on my digital archive tab. I’m really excited to see the beautiful toads these early thought tadpoles might develop into as I look toward my dissertation project in 2024.

Should you choose to go take a gander, you’ll notice the file is named something like “dumb fucking MA template dot jpeg” or whatever. There’s a story behind that! When I first submitted my MA thesis and the documents in support of my degree, the graduate school told me that though I met the requirements, I had to resubmit my report in the proper template. The user manual for the template was not intuitive at all!

Fortunately, Colby was with me while I attempted to figure it out. Which brings me to another thing: Colby, the new guy. On our first couple of dates, I was still in the window of being a crazy mess and somehow, Colby kept showing up. I was so much of a mess that on our first date, there’s a full 90 minutes of the evening missing from my memory, including how I lost the mask I was wearing that night. Having failed to chase him off with my antics, the day I was resubmitting my thesis, I’d decided it was finally time for us to have a sober date and invited him to co-work at my favorite coffee spot. Recognizing my frustration with the template and generally being so much better at tech and computers and whatever, he helped me work the template and was there when I hit “send” on my submission at last.

As I downloaded the completed file, I named it “dumb fucking MA template,” partially to make Colby laugh as he watched me over my shoulder. Though he’s not on my acknowledgments page (written long before I knew him), I would say there’s an implied but invisible, “& thank you to Colby W., without whom this submission literally wouldn’t be possible.”

Anyway, template frustrations aside, my MA thesis now exists out in the world. It’s largely about the visual resonances between the figure of the mammy in the plantation south and the religious figure of La Madama in Puerto Rican espiritismo. In essence, this thesis attempts to locate whether there are spiritual dimensions of the mammy.

Here’s a wild pivot: there’s an app called WOMBO that uses artificial intelligence to make an artistic rendering of the user’s keywords. I took the keywords from my thesis and these are the images it sent back. I hate giving AI too much praise, but I really do love these images.

So, if you’re so moved, go say hi to my thesis. If you want to make fun of me (and there’s plenty to make fun of), go ahead and download it!