2022-23 Public Humanities Doctoral Fellows

Narges Bayani is a PhD Candidate at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). Her dissertation presents an in-depth study of frontiers and borderlands in the Ancient World from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. She holds an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from NYU, and she is interested in curatorial practices potential to link academic archaeology with public perceptions of the ancient world. As a 2022-2023 Public Humanities Fellow, she works in the Smithsonian Institution. 

Saronik Bosu is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, New York University. He is writing his dissertation on literary rhetoric and economic thought in contexts of decolonization. He is interested in the collaborative roles that literary rhetoric and art play in the humanities and in the construction of its public goods. His work has been published in journals like Interventions and is forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory, leads workshops on humanities podcasting, and makes art whenever he gets time. As a 2022-2023 Public Humanities Fellow, he works in the Smithsonian Institution. 

Roman Chacon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at New York University, concentrating on the African diaspora, Latin America, and the Caribbean. His dissertation traces an influential group of Haitian and American folklorists, musicians, writers, and radicals who helped shape the meaning of black internationalism in the early twentieth century. He has presented his research at Howard University in Washington D.C. and at the Université Quisqueya in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He is also a musician and amateur recording engineer who enjoys performing folk songs from his research. As a 2022-2023 Public Humanities Fellow, he works in the  F.A.O. Schwarz Education Center at the Museum of the City of New York.

A.L. Hollmuller is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of French Studies and the Department of History at New York University. Her dissertation project centers on French museums and the debate over object restitution, analyzing the discourse surrounding shifts in French cultural policy and its implications in a postcolonial world. She has previously served as an intern at esteemed cultural organizations in New York, Paris, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., including the Musée Carnavalet, Evergreen Museum & Library, the American Museum of Natural History, and the National Park Service. This year, Hollmuller will be a Public Humanities Doctoral Fellow with the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, examining their collections and the potential for new transparency practices. 

Gabriel Quigley is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University working at the intersection of political theory, metaphysics, and comparative modernism. His dissertation examines a central concept of twentieth and twenty-first century continental philosophy – the event – by uncovering its entanglement in modernist paradigms of surprise, contingency, and wonder. His research has been supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a James Joyce Fellowship, and he is the recipient of the Dean’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award at NYU. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, French Studies Bulletin, Derrida Today, Critical Inquiry, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus, among other venues. He is also one of the editors of Beckett Ongoing: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. As a 2022-2023 Public Humanities Fellow, Gabriel will be supporting the editorial team of the academic journal French Politics, Culture & Society by drawing on his experience as the continuing Special Issues Supervisor for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Anneke Rautenbach is a writer, editor and doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. Her dissertation focuses on the role of the public intellectual in Southern Africa, at flashpoint moments in recent history when language played a particularly dynamic role — from anticolonial prophecy to nationalist sloganeering, to the metaphors of the HIV/AIDS crisis. She is the 2022 recipient of the Robert Holmes Award for African Scholarship and the 2020 recipient of the Alpine Fellowship for Cross-Disciplinary Scholarship of the Contemporary Age.

Her academic interests began with her work in journalism, and she holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. Her reporting, reviews, and essays have been published in New York Magazine, Guernica, the LA Review of Books, Africa Is a Country, and others, and she is a co-editor of Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation. As an NYU-Mellon Public Humanities Fellow, she is based at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where she is conducting research towards the development of future humanities programming that utilizes BAM's extensive media archives, making them accessible to a wider public.

Benjamin D. Schluter is a PhD candidate in the department of German at NYU. His dissertation, After Geo-Graphy: Oceanic Turns in German Thought and Culture Around 1800, explores radical sea imagery in philosophy, natural science, literature, and opera at the turn of the 19th century. Benjamin argues that the ocean, as a symbolic milieu, reorients terrestrially biased imaginations of inscription, conceptuality, and media, and inspires more “fluid” practices of writing, knowing, and creating. His research, which has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Goethe Society of North America, is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature, Goethe Yearbook, and Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts. As a Public Humanities Fellow at the Modern Language Association, Benjamin will be working on initiatives related to curricular innovation and professional development.

troizel is black + alive and the queerness of this fact means more than these words can express. a thinker + doer, she received her BA in Theater Studies and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies from Emory University and a Master of Art and a Master of Philosophy in Performance Studies from New York University, where they are finishing their PhD in Performance Studies. troizel is an alumnx of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics' Emerging Artists Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem's Museum Education Practicum. they currently serve as a Teaching Artist at New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, NY and Studio Resident at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. their art and writings have appeared in NPR, loose cornrows, Black Agenda Report, and Studio Magazine. currently, they serve as managing editor of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory. As a 2022-2023 Public Humanities Fellow, they work at Black Gotham Experience (BGX).