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Graduate Student

Email: mnfoster@email.unc.edu

 

 

 

Education

Megan Foster earned a B.A. in Communication from Coastal Carolina University and a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Research Interests

Megan Foster is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill.  Her interdisciplinary work centers on performance, cultural, and critical race studies. Foster’s larger work explores how power is utilized through techniques of terror deployed by the state against people of the Black diaspora and how these techniques manifest in the carceral state, public welfare programs, and the child welfare system. Her dissertation examines how motherhood and reproductive rights are transformed through criminality, imprisonment, and the lawful relinquishing of rights over the Black incarcerated body and that of her child. 

In 2024 she was named the McColl Dissertation Fellow through the Center for the Study of the American South. She is a recipient of the NC Excellence Award, was a member of the 2023-2024 Townsend Fellows cohort and the 2024 Critical Ethnic Studies Fellows program. She has served as a research assistant for the University Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward and a participant in the WGST Certificate program at UNC. She is an instructor for the Correctional Education Program through the Digital and Lifelong Learning program at the Friday Center.