Alan Rice
Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar Award - University of Michigan
Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at UCLan, Preston. He has been working on the interdisciplinary study of Transatlantic Black Cultures for forty years. For his Fulbright Fellowship, to be held at one of the oldest African American Studies programmes at the University of Michigan, Rice will undertake new research in military archives and present his long-running project on the Battle of Bamber Bridge (1943) where in a small Lancashire town the imposition of Jim Crow segregation led to pushback both from local residents and the Black GIs. The tensions culminated in oppression by the American military police and a violent stand-off that led to the death of one of the Black soldiers and expressions of solidarity against racism from many of the locals. My project will, for the first time, investigate the incident through the voices of the working class civilians and the perspective of the troops themselves rather than the partial testimonies from court martial records. Apart from University audiences, Rice will engage with Veterans and local community groups to disseminate knowledge about these little known European events which were a contributing factor to the development of the American Civil Rights Movement.