Student Profiles

Paul Kay is a doctoral student from Baltimore, MD. His research interests encompass environmental humanities, settler colonial studies, and right-wing politics, with a focus on far-right environmental ideology in the context of the US settler state. He previously received a BA in American Studies from the University of Virginia.

Rui Liu is a first year PhD student in American Studies. She is interested in how concepts like race, indigeneity, and gender, and structures like settler colonialism, circulate across the Pacific. Rui received her BA and MA from the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Prior to pursuing a PhD, Rui worked as a research coordinator for Refugee States, a community-led project that creates refugee counter-archives, and as a research assistant at the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research.

Austin Lukondi is a Brooklyn-based researcher and first-year PhD student in American Studies. His research interests lie at the intersection of urban geography, the carceral state, housing/homelessness, and critical data studies. He has worked as a researcher for a variety of organizations, including school districts, nonprofits focused on alternatives to prosecution and harm reduction, and a prison watchdog organization that monitors NY state prisons and advocates for incarcerated people. He holds a BA in Sociology and Education from Colorado College and a MS in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from The Graduate Center (CUNY).

Lily Weeks is a first-year PhD student in American Studies. They focus on 20th and 21st-century American literature and are primarily interested in queer studies, affect studies, and physical and digital archives. Lily's most recent project analyzed the role of minor butch lesbian characters and their "stone" emotionality in 1950s and 1960s pulp fiction novels, and they currently have ambitions to follow the thread of minor characters/minor feelings through more contemporary queer texts. Lily holds a BA in English and Visual and Dramatic Arts from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Adam Fertig is a second-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.

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. 

Rosalie Uggla is a second-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.

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. 

Waqia Abdul-Kareem is a third-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.

Orlando Ochoa, Jr. is a third-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.

Itzél Delgado-Gonzalez is a fourth-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. 

Oscar Oliver-Didier is an urban designer and researcher that was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in the South Bronx. His current research studies the role of fiscal incentives for urban development—and the nonprofit financial institutions that broker them—in fostering police-community developer partnerships. Before arriving at NYU, he served as the Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning. In this role he was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design, a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the public sector. He is a founding board member of the Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI)—an initiative that seeks to bring together organizers, activists, thinkers, cultural workers, and artists to develop new theories and practices of urban life under a 15-month peer-to-peership program. Oscar is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Paolo Aiello is a fifth-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. 

Tamar Ghabin is a fifth 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. 

Anisa Jackson is a fifth 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. 

Linda Luu is a fifth-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.

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.

Mariko Whitenack is a fifth 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.

Aman Williams is a sixth-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. 

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. 

“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.

Cynthia (Cindy) Yuan Gao is a PhD candidate at New York University in American Studies. Her research program reevaluates 20th and 21st century US social movements, identity politics, and Asian American Studies in terms of the waxing and waning of revolutionary movements in Asia, especially Maoism. Her dissertation, "On Contradiction: Revolutionary Asia and the United States Left, 1967-1990," argues that in the long American 1960s, Revolutionary Asia became a stand-in for US debates over the relationship of subjectivity and difference to broader societal change, providing the foundations for the development of identity politics. Through case studies of three social movement organizations - the socialist feminist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the Third Worldist League of Revolutionary Struggle, and the Hawaiian land rights group Kokua Hawai’i - her work examines how the idea of Revolutionary Asia symbolized the problem of social difference, as well as how US political activists utilized ideas from Asia to develop Left praxes which originated from the particularity of oppression and experience.

She is the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Positions: Politics on Global Maoism, which will include her article, “Don’t Wave It, Use It! Criticism and Self-Criticism in the US New Left.” Her writing has also been published in International Working Class and Labor History and The Scholar and Feminist, and is forthcoming in Theory and Event. She is currently Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and an Honorary Fellow at the NYU Center for the Humanities. She received a B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University in 2012.

Michelle Jones is a seventh-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.

Paolina Lu is a seventh-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.

Faith McGlothlin is a seventh 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.

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.

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.