Waqia Abdul-Kareem is a second-year PhD student. They received their MFA in Performance and Performance Studies at Pratt Institute. Before pursuing a doctoral degree, Waqia worked as an Arts Facilitator at MoMA, as well as a food justice educator, arts educator, and multimedia artist in Baltimore City. They have performed and exhibited work at the Hirshhorn Museum, Abrons Art Center, Jack Theater, Movement Research, Dixon Place, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their research interests include Black geographies, Black speculative thought, Black and Indigenous feminisms, STS, and environmental humanities. They are interested in the connection between Black and environmental histories, geographies, and ethnographies in South Carolina's Lowcountry, in order to understand how the region became a zone of extraction and how Blackness is produced through this process.

Paolo Aiello is a fourth-year doctoral student in American Studies. He received B.A. Degrees in Spanish Literature and Central American Studies from California State University Northridge. During his undergraduate career, he served as an archival assistant for the Central American Studies Visual Archive and Library, a student assistant for CSUN EOP DREAM Center, a Supplemental Instructor for the CSUN Learning Resource Commons, and was selected as an HSI Pathways/Mellon Student Fellow. His research interests include testimonial literature, issues of migration and citizenship, postcolonialism, and subaltern theory. 

“Lee” Leandra P. B. Diaz (she/her) is a New York City-based writer, educator, and academic. She is currently a Henry M. MacCracken Fellow at New York University, where her dissertation is an ethnography of sanctuary focusing on immigration policy and financial services in New York City. Lee’s research builds upon work in economic anthropology, histories of capitalism, carceral geography, urban studies, and critical border studies. Her previous research focused on immigration enforcement, carceral bedspace capacity, and private prisons detaining immigrants in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Her interdisciplinary scholarship has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program and Undergraduate Fellowship, and the Tinker Field Research Grant. Originally from rural south Texas, she received an A.B. in Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies from Dartmouth College.

Itzél Delgado-Gonzalez is a third-year PhD student in American Studies from El Barrio and Harlem in NYC. She is interested in futuristic and speculative Indigenous cultural production, urban studies, and Indigenous Latinidad. Itzél was previously a legal aid paralegal in Philadelphia and NYC protecting farmworker and tenants’ rights. She earned her B.A. from Haverford College in 2016 with Honors in Comparative Literature and Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies. She is a proud descendant of Mixtec Indians. 

Adam Fertig is a first-year PhD student in American Studies. They are broadly interested in public infrastructure projects as sites of extraction, contestation and possibility. Adam holds a BA in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University and a BFA in Furniture from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Cynthia Yuan Gao is a sixth-year PhD student. Her dissertation research tracks the influence of communism and revolution in Asia on radical movements in the United States - socialist feminism, Hawaiian sovereignty, and Third World Marxist-Leninism. She is a member of the Women and Performance editorial collective. She received her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University. 

Tamar Ghabin is a fourth year doctoral candidate in American Studies. Her work focuses on racialization, the history of internationalism in the U.S. and Palestine, and the development of counterinsurgency policies. Prior to this, she received her MA in Cultural Studies at SOAS, University of London and her BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University. 

Ayami Hatanaka seeks to center the expertise, voices, and knowledge of those who have directly experienced the violence of the family policing/regulation system in her research. She has collaborated with sex worker communities in past research, and her current interests include carceral feminism, responses to harm, kinship and families, abolition, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, queer theory, and Asian American history. Prior to pursuing a PhD, she worked as an out-of-court advocate at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem in the Family Defense Practice, defending and advocating for parents facing allegations of neglect and/or abuse. Ayami received a BA in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Political Science from Williams College in 2018. 

Anisa Jackson is a fourth year American Studies PhD student. They are interested in Black geographies, architecture, and urban studies. Anisa received their B.A. in Geography from the University of Washington in 2015. 

Michelle Jones is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American Studies program New York University.  She is interested in excavating the collateral consequences of criminal convictions for people and families directly impacted by mass incarceration, in addition to participating in a scholarly project challenging the narratives of the history of women’s prison with a group of incarcerated scholars. Even while incarcerated, Michelle published and presented her research findings to dispel notions of about the reach and intellectual capacity of justice-involved women.  Michelle’s advocacy extends beyond the classroom through collaborations and opportunities to speak truth to power. While incarcerated, she presented legislative testimony on a reentry alterative she created for long-term incarcerated people that was approved by the Indiana State Interim Committee on the Criminal Code and has joined the advisory boards of the Lumina Foundation and the Urban Institute.  

She is chairwoman of the board of Constructing Our Future, a reentry alterative for women created by incarcerated women in Indiana and a 2017-18 Beyond the Bars fellow, a 2017-18 Research Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and a 2018-19 Ford Foundation Bearing Witness Fellow with Art for Justice, 2019 SOZE Right of Return Fellow, 2019 Code for America Fellow and 2019-2020 Mural Arts Fellow.  Michelle is currently under contract with The New Press to publish the history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women with fellow incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars. As an artist, further, Michelle is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance and photography. Her original co-authored play, “The Duchess of Stringtown,” was produced in December 2017 in Indianapolis and New York City.

Chloe Truong-Jones is a PhD candidate in American Studies. She is interested in law, counterinsurgency and Marxism. She received a BA in Art History at Reed College. The bunnies in the picture are named Buzzcut and Roomy. 

Justin Abraham Linds researches political encounters around experimental knowledge, especially as they played out in the early-modern European colonization of the American Tropics. His work moves from post-colonial theory, queer theory, science studies, the history of empire, the history of slavery, literary/cultural studies, and animal studies/interspecies questions. His  dissertation is tentatively a genealogy of the biochemical process of fermentation that examines how fermentation has appeared in early-modern writing about disease, plantation commodity production, the lives of enslaved people, and natural history. Foregrounding fermentation, Justin’s work hypothesizes that conceptions of material change and chemical activity were social and political concerns undergirding the development of and resistance to eighteenth-century colonial modernity. In 2019, Justin published "Ferments and the AIDS virus: interspecies counter-conduct in the history of AIDS” — a product of his Master’s research. Justin is also interested in pedagogy and figuring out what might be called an American Studies pedagogy. Since the summer of 2017, he has annually taught “The Art of Academic Writing”, a two-week workshop for incoming graduate students at NYU who do not speak English as a first-language. Get in touch with him at jal909@nyu.edu 


 

Paolina Lu is a sixth-year PhD student. Her dissertation explores the future of food through taste and the development of “new forms of protein.” She received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2013, and prior to beginning doctoral studies worked for Alvin Ailey American Dance Foundation and at The Museum of Food and Drink. Paolina is the graduate research assistant for the Food and City Working Group at NYU’s Institute of Public Knowledge.

Linda Luu is a fourth-year PhD student in American Studies. Their dissertation focuses on how the Vietnam War and U.S. militarism shaped the development of psychological theories and technologies of trauma through the Cold War. Linda’s research interests span U.S. empire and militarism, biopolitics, affect, embodiment, critical refugee studies, and feminist science studies.

Kassandra Manriquez is is a seventh year PhD student studying public and private sector housing in New York City. For her dissertation project, she is piecing together tenant complaints held at public archives throughout New York City filed before, during, and after the 1975 fiscal crisis to better understand how people make sense of and respond to the declaration of an urban crisis. Her previous work includes community activism at the intersection of homelessness and transit justice in Southern Arizona. She received a BA in Gender and Women’s Studies from The University of Arizona in 2016.

Sam Markwell is a PhD Candidate with an MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. His dissertation research is focused on the Middle and Upper Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, tracing how contemporary challenges in the region, from Indigenous resurgence and urban sustainability to ecosystem restoration and species extinction, are shaped by the long colonial history of its inhabitants political and ethical negotiations of watershed governance and infrastructure development. His interdisciplinary methodology draws from the fields of history, anthropology, geography, and Critical Race and Indigenous studies. He is broadly interested in global histories of colonialism and decolonization; social, political and environmental movements; critical natural histories; and the politics and ethics of governance. His publications include essays in La Jicarita: An Online Magazine of Environmental Politics in New Mexico and an article “The Colonial Hydropolitics of Infrastructure in the Middle Rio Grande Valley”, in WIREs Water.

Oscar Marquez is a tenth year Ph.D student in American studies. He received his B.A in Chicana/o Studies at Cal Poly Pomona and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interests are in comparative colonialisms, Chicana/o indigeneity, and Border Studies. His work investigates the role race plays in the dispossession of indigenous territory by non-indigenous mestizos in the Sierra Wixárika of Northwestern Mexico. 

Faith McGlothlin is a sixth year PhD. student from Chicago. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. Her research interests include US imperialism, Christian apocalyptic fiction, and Evangelical militarism.Faith McGlothlin is a first year PhD. student from Chicago. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. Her research interests include US imperialism, Christian apocalyptic fiction, and Evangelical militarism.

Chandani Nash is a doula, reproductive justice advocate, and writer from Brooklyn, New York. She recently graduated from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she concentrated in reproductive justice and political theory. As an undergraduate, Chandani served as a volunteer doula and as a Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps member. She continues to work with a national reproductive rights organization, where she focuses on population control, eugenics, and contemporary politics. She is deeply interested in race, reproduction, population, the environment, and the future. Her writing can be found on Zora Magazine, Left Voice, and Confluence. 

Orlando Ochoa, Jr. is a second-year PhD student in the Department of American Studies at New York University. They received their bachelor's degree in African & African Diaspora Studies and Women's & Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Orlando is broadly interested in borderland ecologies and relations, racialized sexuality, surveillance, and anticolonial thought. They were born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, the traditional and ancestral land of the Esto'k Gna (Carrizo/Comecrudo) peoples.

Oscar Oliver-Didier is a Bronx based urban designer and researcher from Puerto Rico. His research interests include urban/racial phenomena and the role of memory in the formation of Latinx spatial imaginaries. He has published on public housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx, and the performative nature of urban protests. Oscar has recently served as the Senior Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning and as a member of the adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University. In 2019 he was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design; a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the public sector.

Daria Reaven is a criminal defense investigator, mitigation specialist, and researcher. She has been a defense investigator for over seven years, working on prison conditions cases as well as death penalty appellate cases. Her research focuses on a legal genealogy of innocence, and contemporary fascination with the figure of the exoneree. The project asks, what does it mean to decry a system that accidentally brutalizes more people than it means to? She received her MA from SOAS, and a BA from Whitman College.

Amrit Justin Trewn is from Detroit. His work engages black studies, settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. He keys into the role of reproduction to black and Native community formation: birthing and childrearing practices, spiritual and practical education, as well as geographic and ecological systems of knowledge. Through their dissertation, Amrit hopes to better understand concepts of kinship, political ecology, and freedom improvised by African diasporic and Native women enduring, combatting, and evading state-sanctioned assaults on their reproductive lives in nineteenth-century Michigan.

Rosalie Uggla is a first-year doctoral student from Duluth, Minnesota. Her research explores the pathologies of the American psyche that have allowed fringe, right-wing conspiracy narratives to persist and thrive within contemporary American ideological discourse— especially as they pertain to the manufactured intangibility of whiteness and the reaches of racial trauma.

Aman Williams is a fifth-year doctoral student and storyteller from Oakland. Their interests include black feminisms; traditional and diasporic African religion; histories of slavery; gender and cultural studies. At the nexus between freedom and commodification, Aman’s work considers the embodied West and West Central African consciousness of female captives to examine the transformation of lifeworlds throughout the African diaspora. Their scholarship asks questions about the significance of reproduction, ritual practice, and healing to intimate histories of slavery and kinship. 

Mariko Whitenack is a fourth year American Studies PhD student. Her research interests include connections between race, indigeneity, and environment, particularly the ways in which scientific discourse and practice interacts with settler colonial capitalist structures. She received her B.E. in Environmental Engineering from Dartmouth College in 2018.