Graduate video profile: Glenesha Berryman
Words have power, and East Carolina University senior Glenesha Berryman, an English major with a minor in great books, is working to use them for good.
Berryman, an EC Scholar and member of the Honors College, is one of 32 ECU students to win an Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity award this spring, her final semester at ECU.
The URCA awards, which provide support for faculty-mentored research and creative projects led by undergraduates in various disciplines, include financial prizes of between $1,500 and $2,000 to help the winners fund their research.
Berryman’s project, “Coming of Rage,” is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that lean on various forms and styles of writing to explore national social issues, like the 2017 white-supremacist rally and counter-protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, from the perspective of a younger person.
Images from the Charlottesville protests speak to a certain type of fear Berryman said she thinks is inherent in people of color. “It seemed like something we were supposed to have outgrown in the ’60s and ’70s, and I think that for a lot of us, as students, it was a reality check that history doesn’t go away.”
Berryman, who graduates May 3, has used the URCA award money to work with a photographer and illustrator to design the essay collection and self-publish.
“I think at the heart of that project and all my projects is just to help people have better relationships with each other and themselves,” she said, “because if we want any sort of change to happen, it has to be demonstrated in our interpersonal relationships.”
During her time as a student, she studied abroad in Cuba, conducted summer research through the Columbia University Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative at its Institute for African American Research, started her own radio show on ECU’s WZMB called “A Seat in the Booth” and founded a Black History Month lecture series.
Last month, ECU’s chapter of distinguished academic honor society Phi Kappa Phi awarded Berryman the 2019 Eldean Pierce Graduate Fellowship.
She will enter the doctoral program in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan this fall.
Berryman was featured in a 2017 Pirate Profile about her achievements at ECU. (Photo by Cliff Hollis)