The Atlanta University Center (AUC) Woodruff Library is pleased to announce the recipients of 2025 – 2026 Research Travel Award – Chloe Landen and Dr. Chanelle Rose.

The annual AUC Research Travel Award is granted to educators, graduate students, and independent researchers who seek to explore and utilize the invaluable historical resources housed in the AUC Woodruff Library’s Archives Research Center and RADAR (the Repository of AUC Digital Collections, Archives, and Research). Each recipient received a $1,500 award to help offset travel costs, allowing them to explore the rich and varied resources of the Archives Research Center in person.

This year’s award recipients represent a dynamic range of research interests and academic backgrounds. Each awardee was selected for the depth, originality, and relevance of their proposed project. Their work promises to bring new insight to underrepresented stories and critical conversations in archival research.

This summer, the award recipients will present their research findings to the public on the dates listed below. These events aim to foster greater awareness and accessibility of the library’s extensive collections and archival materials, offering our campus and local communities valuable opportunities to engage with the scholars’ work and the collections that informed their research.

2025-2026 Travel Award Recipient: Dr. Chanelle Rose

“Beyond Boundaries: Black Grassroots Conservatism and the Post-WWII Urban Crisis”

Thursday, June 26, 2025

11:00 A.M.

AUC Woodruff Library Room 208

2025-2026 Travel Award Recipient: Chloe Landen

“Race, Religion, and the Rise of Privatized Execution: A Look at the Legacy of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching”

Thursday, July 17, 2025

11:00 A.M.

AUC Woodruff Library Room 208

Biography- Dr. Chanelle Rose

Dr. Chanelle N. Rose is an associate professor in U.S. history at Rowan University. She specializes in Modern American history with particular emphasis on African American history, post-WWII America, Civil Rights-Black Power, tourism, conservatism, and urban history.  She received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Florida International University and her Ph.D. at the University of Miami. Her first book, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2015. The book examines the long struggle for civil rights in one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. It complicates the black/white binary and offers a new way of understanding the complexity of racial traditions and white supremacy in southern metropolises like Miami.

Aside from her book projects, Professor Rose has published in her field’s top journals, including the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Urban History. Her current book project, tentatively titled Beyond Boundaries: Black Conservatisms and Grassroots Organizing During the Post-WWII Urban Crisis (1960s-1990s), examines how the urban crisis provides a case study for understanding the emergence of grassroots conservatism in urban Black communities.

Biography-  Chloe Landen

Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the University of Texas’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work focuses on U.S. Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in the Social Gospel movement and narratives of national belonging. Her current project examines the intersection of religion, anti-lynching activism, and the privatization of execution by chronicling the activism of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL)—an understudied organization composed entirely of white southern women. Chloe’s research investigates how narratives of domesticity and white womanhood intertwined with the ASWPL’s social gospel religious worldview, influencing their campaign to regulate and purify the public sphere from the ‘visible sin’ of spectacle lynching. Her work reveals how their campaign shaped the broader societal shift from public to private, behind-closed-door penal executions and contributed to greater national reconciliation in the years preceding World War II.

Chloe earned her BA in Rhetoric & Writing and Religious Studies from UT Austin in 2021. She completed a Master of Theological Studies at Harvard University in 2023, where she studied how Protestantism and the Social Gospel movement shaped national identity and narratives of chosenness. A Texas native, Chloe returned to UT Austin with an interest in exploring the often-overlooked southern social gospel.