We are delighted to announce the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows joining the Institute for Advanced Study for 2024–2025.
Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows spend a year in residence at the IAS. Together with our Faculty Fellows and other scholars in residence, they constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas.
We look forward to welcoming each of these scholars to our community!
Tyler Akeem Anderson
American Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
“Jazz as Disability: Tracing the inseparable bond of race and eugenics through the history of medicine and U.S. law”
In the 1920s, to discuss jazz became synonymous with discussing black social life in the U.S. Eugenicists criminalized jazz as a disabling artform and argued that those who participated in jazz culture should be subject to the violence of eugenics. I argue that to understand the continuities of antiblack racial violence requires excavating and analyzing the racism that structured medico-legal relations in the Progressive era, as well as the dynamics between these professionals and the people they purported to treat. Furthermore, understanding these continuities between the archival record and contemporary black life is essential to understanding and supporting black health.
Richard Lim
American Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
“Complicated Coalitions: The Relationship Between Hate Violence, Policing, and Solidarity”
My dissertation ties together the fields of Critical Legal Studies and American Studies by examining why, from the 1970s to the 1990s, legal and grassroots Asian American and Latinx activism centered on how hate violence led to increased policing. Specifically, I’m interested in how cross-racial activists’ shared commitment to curbing hate crimes without contributing to mass incarceration unintentionally did so. Through archival sources and oral histories, this project historicizes why and how Asian American and Latinx activists’ aspirations to link violence prevention, legal reforms, and increased political representation strengthened policing and simultaneously foreclosed possibilities for future coalition building with overpoliced, African-American communities.