Future Imperfect: Fictions and Logics of Security in the Middle East

Neoliberal economic and political reforms in the Middle East in the 1990s were accompanied by radical transformations in logics and technologies of security and defense. Cultural production from this period reflects and challenges the new relations between the state, the individual, and their projected futures. Future Imperfect examines how changing regional practices of security and finance have shaped creative production between 1990-2013. Compiling an archive of novels, films, and mixed- media artworks from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the Gulf, the book explores how changing models of time and population management affected the emergence of new aesthetic models. I apply to work on the fifth chapter, “Hybrid Fictions of the Petro-Economy,” which focuses on multimedia works by artists from the Gulf, all of whom combine archival research, visual media, and literature to imagine the history and the futures of the Gulf oil economy. In their focus on speculative temporalities and excessive, surfeit aesthetics, these projects exploit and lay bare the risky logics of the financial tools of the Petro-economy: speculation, credit, and inflation.

Unselfing: What We Can Ask of the Arts

How do music, dance, theater, poetry, and visual art enable audiences, performers, and artists to experience a temporary sense of connection, belonging, even transcendence? My project tackles this question by bringing ideas about aesthetic experience from literature, philosophy, art, music, and dance into conversation with concepts from psychology, sociology, anthropology, media theory, and performance studies. While scholars routinely consider historical and cultural contexts when interpreting the messages that artworks contain, I ask how much our aesthetic emotions and judgments depend on the immediate situational contexts in which we encounter the arts, and which artists and performers work to create. Recognizing the unique conditions that artworks create enables us to account for how they produce powerful experiences of intimacy and solidarity unavailable to us in everyday life. Yet doing so also compels us to grapple with the fragility of these temporary states. How can we continue to feel, judge, and act on behalf of others even when the situational and relational contexts that facilitate empathy are absent, when concerns about our own interests intrude upon our attention?

Confluences of History: Enacting Community History with the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians

How can historians transform our practices to produce scholarship that both serves communities and moves academic research in new directions? Historians and others have long built their careers by working on Native communities, but we must prioritize working with them. This project emerges from an exceptional opportunity to work closely with one tribe, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. The tribe and I are collaborating to research and present their history in ways that are meaningful to them. Three core themes have emerged: gender and kinship structured their response to colonialism and their own migration; reworking traditions allowed them to sustain tribal cohesion under colonialism; and lived relations to homelands have remained central to their identity. At the IAS, I will work remotely with the tribe to produce a history and a collection of historical documents for tribal members. We will then pivot to writing a history for academic audiences. The project will produce new knowledge, model collaborative research, and speak to crucial issues for scholars across disciplines. Conversations with other Fellows about issues of process and ethics would enrich this work and foster creative thinking among all of us.

In Scattered Formation: German-Speaking Jewry in Displacement

In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Jews were displaced by the violence of Nazi persecution in Central Europe. This study traces the emergence of a global diaspora out of that wave of forced migration. It captures the contours of life in the aftermath of displacement; the strategies of reorientation adopted by the displaced; their efforts to preserve a cultural identity threatened by extinction; and the tensions that emerged over time as a result of these developments. Following the near-total dispersion of this population, this study travels across five continents, using a comparative lens to analyze the process of diasporamaking. Approaching displacement as a dynamic condition that permeates across life spheres, this work focuses closely on everyday scenes and experiences – from negotiating prices at pawn shops, through sharing insider jokes, to singing at choir practice. From these intimate, prosaic moments, In Scattered Formation recovers the ways in which a displaced population has reconstituted itself as a diaspora.

Take-A-Knee Nation: Athlete Activism, Mainstream America, and the New Cultural Politics of Sport

“Take-a-Knee Nation” is a book project intended to synthesize research and a series of articles I have recently produced on the last decade of race-based athletic activism in the United States. Most of the research and writing focuses on national individuals, issues, and events but the project also incorporates local, Minnesota-based angles including the early BLM activism of the WNBA Lynx and the role that athlete activists played in the massive uprising that emerged after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 as well as material from a complementary, community-based oral history/documentary project using basketball as a lens onto the politics of Black culture, racism, and resistance in Minneapolis. One of the more distinctive aspects of the study (and its intended scholarly contributions) is to document and analyze the wide range of responses to sport-based resistance including media coverage and framing, public opinion, establishment reforms, political opposition, and backlash itself. Here, sport is revealed as a public platform and contested terrain that reveals the larger dynamics of race/racism, politics, and social change in a polarized nation. The book will culminate with a discussion of the broad social significance and political import of sport in contemporary culture.

Frances E. Thompson Digital Library for Family Research

The Frances E. Thompson Digital Library for Family Research was established for a specific need to create digital earmarks (video, audio, print, art etc.) for the preservation of Minneapolis & Saint Paul's African American family/community experiences, circa 1945 to present day. The goal of this library is aimed at humanizing broader narratives of black life rarely documented in traditional institutional research. 

Evolving landscapes of digital technology leaves African American thought & experiences at risk for full representation in various uses of online research. The digital contribution of materials within this library will reinforce the power of self narrative within current strategies of Black Community engagement and shared histories. The IAS/Liberal Arts Engagement Hub fellowship is assisting in the further development of a needed digital archive dedicated to this aspect of Black centered history & culture.

Spring 2023. This fellowship is made possible by Minnesota Transform, an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.

“Cultural Ecologies of Memory and Symbolic Reparation in Transitional Colombia: A Book and Digital Public Humanities Project”

Relying on multi-sited ethnographies and archival research, the book proposes a transdisciplinary analysis of a range of cultural manifestations and activism practices promoting memory construction, reconciliation and justice that have proliferated in Colombia since 2005, the year the first transitional justice mechanisms were implemented. I propose the term “Cultural Ecologies” to stress the interconnected nature and complexity of practices that include: documentaries and photography exhibitions produced by state institutions to restore the dignity of victims and promote national reconciliation; interventions of monuments with fabrics by victims’ organizations to make visible their symbolic claims for justice in public space; cultural activism practices among youth collectives working with displaced Afro-descendant and refugee populations, among others. By creating spaces for interlocution between state institutions and civil society, I argue, ‘cultural ecologies’ serve as interfaces through which rural black communities and other disenfranchised groups, victims and human rights organizations are able to articulate their demands for historical redress, while making visible current claims for justice and present conditions of marginalization and exclusion. The Digital Platform www.culturalecologies.com was designed to make available for online consultation more than one hundred hours of interviews and participant observation videos, photographs, and different documents that form the book’s empirical base. It combines digital storytelling with archival techniques to make its content accessible and engaging to readers beyond academic circles. 

“Mapping the Future: Constructing Risk and Bias in the Algorithmic Environments of Crime Forecasting Software”

The past 15 years have seen the spread across U.S. police departments of algorithmic software that produce forecasting maps of potential ‘criminal risk’ informing the deployment locations of police officers. In response to public pressure around the racialized outcomes of predictive policing, a shift is currently underway from simpler models using crime time, place and type to forms of crime forecasting that include risk terrain modeling (RTM), an approach that metabolizes a range of public data not specific to crime such as the locations of bars, bus stops, pawn shops and mental health facilities. This practice has such weight, I suggest, because the shift of criminological focus away from individuals, the historic nexus of criminal ‘disposition’ and race, moves improved policing into a conversation more palatable to the mainstream left that revolves around the effects of environments on human behavior. Scholarly accounts of algorithmically informed policing tend to narrate its development as the result of pragmatic alliances contained within techno-corporate and bureaucratic spheres, but this approach is inadequate to understanding how technological advancements happen in dynamic relation to the resignification of politically weighted terms. Understanding the crystallization of perspectives on what a crime forecasting algorithm can or cannot do requires a longer and broader historic view of how terms, concepts, formal and informal practices, and official positions have slid across political registers and been deployed and re-deployed to different ends by different actors, a view that cracks open contestations over data and urban space to chart the shifting landscape of theoretical, policy-oriented and activist-led antagonisms and alliances that have revolved around the question of how human behavior and agency relate to their environments in the ‘post-civil rights’ era. My project maps this landscape across a diverse range of academic, public, and tech industry conversations in order to answer: How has algorithmic crime forecasting, despite its myriad flaws and unknowns, come to occupy the position of a solution to racialized policing across both liberal and conservative perspectives? 

“After the Conversion: Anti-Caste Buddhism in 20^th-Century Maharashtra (1956-2002)”

In less than half a century after the conversion of half a million Dalits or ‘untouchables’ to Buddhism (1956) and the intellectual experiments in making it the foundation of Anti-caste politics, Buddhism began to lose its centrality to anti-caste politics. Simultaneously, many among the lower castes shifted their allegiances towards the rising right-wing majoritarian politics of Hindutva. Departing from scholars who have diagnosed this transformation only through socio-economic analysis, I argue that an intellectual history of Anti-caste Buddhism is crucial to understand this transformation in Maharashtra’s political landscape. I trace the intellectual history of Anti-caste Buddhism in Maharashtra to diagnose its waning and analyze the structures of Dalit thought—its constitutive gendered contradictions, limitations, and possibilities. I also pay particular attention to the debates, conversations, and intellectual constellations that took place between Anti-caste Buddhism and Marxism.

“Wrestling with Precarity: The Hustle, The Flow, and The Black Pro Wrestler”

Pro wrestling is a multibillion-dollar international industry that is underwritten by melodrama, action, and the spectacular. As Roland Barthes remarks “it is the spectacle of excess.” Despite this excess, it has the most labor precarity of any professional sport in the U.S. Pro wrestlers operate in a non-unionized industry as independent contractors signed to exclusive contracts with non-compete clauses. My dissertation examines labor precarity in pro wrestling centering the experiences of Black pro wrestlers using the concepts of work, play, and performance to understand how race and power operate in a sport where winners and losers are predetermined.

“Emotional authenticity in human-artificial companion relationships”

Recent developments in language–focused areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the popularity of AI applications on mobile platforms, have led to the development of apps designed to engage with artificial companions on an emotional level. As people interact with technology in less utilitarian and more affective ways, the concept of authenticity becomes relevant due to the subjective nature of the interactions, and the ontological differences between user and artificial companion. This study aims to identify, from a user-centric perspective, what aspects of the experience contribute to a sense of authenticity, combining perspectives from Design, Human–Computer Interaction and Philosophy.

“Ridiculous Contraptions: American Art, Humor, and Machine Technology to Effect Social Change, 1954-1975"

As high-technology institutions and innovations—including global telecommunications, the military-industrial complex, Big Science, and computer systems—emerged simultaneously with urgent political movements during the mid-twentieth century, U.S.-based artists used machines often dubbed “contraptions” in art criticism and the news media. Contraptions rely on simple mechanical components, involve multiple and unnecessary steps, and produce supposedly pointless outcomes. The artists I center in this project—Noah Purifoy, Yoko Ono, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, and Carolee Schneemann—used absurd mechanical devices in sculptures, films, and performances to critique social inequalities and to enact change. Drawing upon affect theories, social histories, and feminist and critical race studies, I examine the interactions between artists, audiences, and institutions prompted by these devices and the role of humor in the intersections between art, technology, and activism.

“Plastic Futures: Transnational Engagements with Waste, Recycling, and Toxicity in the Americas”

Plastic—the quintessential modern material—has come to symbolize the destructive dimensions of human innovation. As an opening to social and environmental problems, plastic has inspired valuable research across the sciences, arts, and humanities. This interdisciplinary critical disabilities studies project based in Haiti examines how marginalized people’s mundane engagements with plastic complicate or challenge the ideas of scientists, analysts, and other environmental experts, offering greater understanding of global environmental inequalities and creative solutions to contending with toxicity.

“Community-based intervention effects on older adults' physical activity and falls”

During my IAS fellowship, I will focus on analyzing data and disseminating results from the study Community-Based Intervention Effects on Older Adults' Physical Activity and Falls (Ready Steady 3.0). This study addresses two interrelated public health problems of falls and low physical activity levels by investigating a gap in evidence related to motivation for sustaining fall-reducing physical activities. Falls are considered an epidemic in older people because they occur more often and cause more devastating injuries and deaths in those over 70 compared to younger populations. As the leading cause of accidental deaths among older people, the problem of falls has motivated the development of many evidence-based prevention interventions over the last several decades. The type of fall prevention intervention helpful for most people includes relatively easy physical activities, particularly balance-challenging and leg strengthening exercises. However, there is a lack of evidence about how clinicians, families, community leaders, and policymakers might help people stay motivated and integrate these easy exercises into their everyday life. Thus, in Ready Steady 3.0, we are assessing the distinct effects and interactions of two sets of psychosocial strategies that have the potential to elicit motivation and, ultimately, behavior change: interpersonal (e.g., social support) and intrapersonal (e.g., personal goal setting). During my IAS fellowship, I will lead the writing of two manuscripts. The first will report on the unique and interactive effects of these sets of strategies, combined with the evidence-based exercises, on the quantity of participants' physical activity. The second manuscript will report on the outcomes of falls and quality of life. My active participation in the IAS fellowship program will help deepen my understanding of Ready Steady 3.0 results, generate additional questions, and inform the next steps in this research program, particularly the next grant proposal.

“When No Politics Are Local: How the nationalization of news consumption changed politics for Americans”

The last several decades have seen the collapse of local news and the nationalization of news consumption. How has this nationalization changed our collective understanding of what “politics” is? Is politics about policy disputes or partisan gamesmanship? Bargaining and compromise or standing on principle? Seeking consensus or seeking majority rule? And, at a fundamental level, what does it mean to participate in politics—to be a good citizen? Through a content analysis of national and local newspapers over the last several decades, I explore how these fundamental questions are answered differently in local and national news. These different answers, combined with the shift from local to national news, have changed Americans’ understanding of what “politics” is about, contributing to today’s contentious political environment.

“Chinese Migration and the Making of Modern Costa Rica, 1855-1943”

My project examines the experience and impact of Chinese immigrants in nineteenth and twentieth-century Costa Rica. Chinese began migrating to Costa Rica in 1855. As their presence increased, so did Sinophobia. From 1897 to 1943, Costa Rica banned all Chinese immigration. Nevertheless, Chinese still arrived during this ban. My project explores why Chinese migrated to Costa Rica, how their presence shaped Costa Rica’s economic, political, and social formation, why Sinophobia became so powerful, and how the Chinese responded to this challenge. I argue the Chinese, despite facing hostility, succeeded in carving out a space in the Costa Rican nation as Chinese-Costa Ricans through transnational subcommunity formation and integration into Costa Rican society. In the process, however, they became the crucial “other” that allowed Costa Ricans to construct the enduring myth of a white Costa Rican nation. Ultimately, I challenge traditional narratives in Latin American history that deny the importance of Asians to the region’s development and force scholars of the Chinese diaspora to acknowledge Costa Rica as an important node within larger transnational Chinese networks.

“Layers of Contagion: Understanding Social and Ecological Precarity in a Waste Treatment Plant”

This project explores the impact of waste management facilities on community health and biodiversity during the Covid-19 pandemic in the state of Goa, India. As the situation continues to remain uncertain with Covid-19 and its new variants in India, this transnational project examines the intersection of waste management technology, ecology and infectious disease with the racialization of caste and religious identities in India. The objective is to focus on reciprocity and intersectionality in public health and environmental advocacy by creating an interdisciplinary model of collaborative research, capacity building, and participatory learning. This project will foster long-term mutual partnerships with academic institutions and local communities in Goa by incorporating longitudinal research, visual storytelling, and a bidirectional learning model.

“The Performing Dead: Public Culture at the Borders of the Human”

The Performing Dead will be the first comparative, critical study of the presentation of human remains in contemporary Euro-American museums of anatomy, pathology, and medical history. I argue that these museums choreograph affective and embodied encounters between the living and the dead, inciting powerful reactions of shock, curiosity, or compassion as they stage medicine’s mastery of the body. Facing ethical scrutiny, most have doubled down on their claim to represent the (unapologetically universalized) “human condition.” But the dead seldom stick to script. Even as they are scientifically animated, ideologically invested, and pedagogically enlisted, human remains act back. They lay claims, remind, affect, resist, and most crucially, remain, provoking us to consider their rights, our responsibilities, and the part they play in our political and social collectives. The museum dead, my research suggests, insistently gesture to the abridged rights, normative exclusions, and unlivable lives of humanisms past and present.

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2022

• Tracey Deutsch: History, CLA, Twin Cities: “The Julia Child Project”
• Gabriela Spears-Rico: Chicano & Latino Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: “Mestizo Melancholia and the Legacy of Conquest in Michoacan”
• Fayola Jacobs: Urban Planning, HHH, Twin Cities: “Colonizing Climates: The Intersections of Anti-Blackness, Climate Change, and Urban Planning”
• Michelle Phelps: Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: “Policing the Progressive City: Race, Violence, and the Future of Public Safety in Minneapolis”
• Shaden Tageldin: Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, Twin Cities: “The Place of Africa, in Theory: Of Continents and Their Discontents”

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2021

• Benjamin Bigelow: German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, CLA, Twin Cities: “Scandinavian Racial Ecologies”
• Ann DuHamel: Music, Humanities Division, Morris: “Prayers for a Feverish Planet: A Musical Exploration of Climate Change”
• Zozan Pehlivan: History, CLA, Twin Cities: “The Political Ecology of Forced Sedentarization: Herd Dependent Peoples, Climate Change, and the Encroaching State (1850-1950)”
• Scott St. George: Geography, Environment and Society, CLA, Twin Cities: “Staring Down the Bottom of a Dry Well: Global Society and the Coming Age of Megadrought”
• Shannon Drysdale Walsh: History, Political Science & International Studies, CLA, Duluth: “Women Confronting Terror: Violence against Women and the State in Central America”

INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL FELLOWS 2021–2022

• Harsha Anantharaman: Geography, Environment, & Society, CLA, Twin Cities: “The Paradox of Inclusion: The Politics of Caste, Recognition, & Infrastructure Reform in Urban India”
• Nina Medvedeva: Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: “Home in the Sharing Economy”

VISITING FELLOWS

• Cassius Adair: American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Visiting Fellow, 2021–2022: “The Transgender Internet”
• Alexandra Peck: Visiting Scholar of Indigenous Studies; Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative, 2021–2022: “Mapping Multivocality: Documenting Changes in the S’Klallam World through ’Ethnogeography‘”
• Ricardo Velasco: Minnesota Transform Postdoctoral Associate, 2021–ongoing: “Cultural Ecologies of Memory and Symbolic Reparation in Transitional Colombia: A Book and Digital Public Humanities Project”
• Sean Walsh: Scholar in Residence, Fall 2021: “Moral Psychology and the Ethics of Perpetrator Risk”

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2021

• Hassan Abdel Salam, Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: The Human Rights Fatwas: How Human Rights Influence Orthodox Jurists in their Adjudication of Islamic Law
• Tammy Berberi, French, Humanities Division, Morris: Fixing Meaning? Francophone Disability Studies and the Socio-Imaginative Power of Language
• Jason Kerwin, Applied Economics, CFANS, Twin Cities: Overcoming Procrastination and Other Behavioral Barriers in the HIV Epidemic
• Helen Kinsella, Political Science, CLA-Social Sciences, Twin Cities: War Fatigue: The Biopolitics of Sleep in War
• Jennifer Row, French and Italian, CLA, Twin Cities: The Body Perfect: the Aesthetics of Ableism in the Francophone Early Modern World
• Emily Winderman, Communication Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Back-Alley Abortion: A History of Sanitary Rhetoric and Reproductive Injustice
   

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2020

• Gail Dubrow, School of Architecture, College of Design, Twin Cities: Memoir as a Mode of Inquiry and Expression in Environmental Design and Planning for Social Justice
• Greta Friedemann-Sanchez, Global Policy, HHH, Twin Cities: From the Battlefield to the Home Front: Harmonizing Security Policies on Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Conflict Colombia
• Kristine Miller, Landscape Architecture, College of Design, Twin Cities: Memoir as a Mode of Inquiry and Expression in Environmental Design and Planning for Social Justice
• Richa Nagar, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Songs of Departure
• Rachel Hardeman, Health Policy & Management, SPA, Twin Cities: Double Jeopardy: An exploration of the relationship between anti-abortion policy and maternal mortality for Black Birthing People in the US
• Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: Race and deaths from infectious diseases in the United States, 1900-1950
   

INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL FELLOWS

• Julia Brokaw, Entomology, CFANS, Twin Cities: Uprooting Assumptions in Pollinator Conservation Policy
• Stephen Ellis, English, CLA, Twin Cities: Making the Case: Legal Curriculum, Literary Culture, and the Cold War
• SeungGyeong (Jade) Ji, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Rights and Redemption: Politics of Abortion in South Korea 1974-2019
• Emily Mitamura, Political Science, CLA, Twin Cities: Afterliving Mass Violence: Plot, Justice, and the Cambodian Genocide
• Florencia Pech-Cárdenas, Natural Resource Science and Management, CFANS, Twin Cities: Influences of Handicraft Production on Gender, Livelihoods, and Natural Resources Management in Maya Communities
   

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2020

• Fernando Burga, Urban and Regional Planning, HHH, Twin Cities: Mapping Transportation Accessibility for Culturally Relevant and Healthy Foods in Rural MN: Towards a Mixed-Methods Research Toolkit
• Adam Coon, Humanities, UM-Morris: The Serpent’s Feathers: Nahua Philosophies in Migration
• Kathryn Nuernberger, English, CLA, Twin Cities: The Doctrine of Signatures: Essays
• Carrie Oelberger, Leadership and Management, HHH, Twin Cities: Radical Re-Envisioning for a Just and Equitable Society: Interrogating and Theorizing Private Interests in Prosocial Work
• Jimmy Patiño, Chicano and Latino Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: “Our Oppressions are One, Our Dreams are One”: Black-Brown Solidarities in Movements for Self-Determination
• Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag, French and Italian, CLA, Twin Cities: Shards: Spectacular Fragmentation in Francophone Postcolonial Literature
• Elana Shever, Scholar in Residence, Anthropology, Colgate University: Finding Our Beasts: Encountering Dinosaurs and Science in the American West
• Kari Smalkoski, Community Engagement Fellow, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Minnesota Youth Story Squad

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2020

• June Carbone, Law School, Twin Cities: From Tiers to Ladders: A Feminist Theory of Power
• Cosette Creamer, Political Science, CLA, Twin Cities: In Courts We Trust: The Unseen Role of Legal Bureaucrats in Human Rights Courts
• V. V. Ganeshananthan, English, CLA, Twin Cities: Movement: A Novel
• Kate Lockwood Harris, Communications Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Communicating Violence in the Academy: A Case Study of the 2015 Anti-Racist Protests and Backlash at the University of Missouri
• Enid Logan, Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: American Indian Racialization and the Sociological Study of Race
• Jennifer Marshall, Art History, CLA, Twin Cities: William Edmondson: Life and Work
• Elana Shever, Scholar in Residence, Anthropology, Colgate University: Finding Our Beasts: People, Dinosaurs, and Science in the American West

INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL FELLOWS

• Ateeb Ahmed, Geography, Environment, and Society, CLA, Twin Cities: Between Speculation and Dispossession: Pakistan Military's Urban Coup d'Etat
• Deniz Coral, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities: The Humorous Reaction to Trepidation: Jokes on the Trading Floor
• Hana Maruyama, American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Alien Nation: The Role of Japanese Americans During WWII Incarceration in Native Dispossession
• Hannah Ramer, Natural Resources Science and Management, CFANS, Twin Cites: (Re)Imagining the City: Urban Agriculture, Policy, & Social Justice in Minneapolis

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2019

• Hakim Abderrezak, French and Italian, CLA, Twin Cities: Seametery: Migrants, Refugees, and the Mediterranean
• Malinda Lindquist, History, CLA, Twin Cities: The Politics of Youth: Education, Achievement Gaps, and the Construction of Black Childhood, 1940-1990
• Francis Shen, Law School, Twin Cities: Brain-Based Memory Detection and the Law
• Eun-Kyung Suh, Art and Design, School of Fine Arts, Duluth: Refugees’ Resettlement: Geographic Patterns in Sculpture
• Teresa Swartz, Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: Not Just Child’s Play: Race and the Reproduction of Inequality In and Through Youth Activities

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2018

• Natalie Belsky, History, CLA, Duluth: Encounters in the East: Evacuees in the Soviet Hinterland during the Second World War
• Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities: Abortion Politics in Uruguay, Peru, and Nicaragua: Explaining Disparate Outcomes
• Siobhan Craig, English, CLA, Twin Cities: The Fourth Shore: Empire and Visuality in the Fascist-Era Italian Colonies
• Thomas Genova, Spanish, Humanities Division, Morris: Borders of Brazil: Euclides da Cunha and ‘Latin America’
• Mai Na Lee, History, CLA, Twin Cities: The Hmong Kingdom at Dragon Capital (Long Cheng): Vang Pao’s Alliance with the CIA, 1960-75
• Marek Oziewicz, Curriculum and Instruction, CEHD, Twin Cities: Bloodlands Fiction: Soviet Trauma in Young People’s Literature

INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL FELLOWS, 2018-2019

• Ketaki Jaywant, History, CLA, Twin Cities: Caste as a Site of Social Change: Mapping 19-th Century Anti-Caste Politics in Western India
• Maria Mendez Gutierrez, Political Science, CLA, Twin Cities: The Visual Economy of Violence: Transnational Gangs in the U.S.-Central American Security Imaginary
• Joseph Whitson, American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: #Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Social Media, and Assaults on Indigenous Sovereignty in the Contemporary United States

GRAND CHALLENGE RESEARCH FELLOWS, 2018-2019

Just and Equitable Communities 

• Bianet Castellanos, American Studies, CLA, TC
• Carl Flink, Theatre Arts & Dance, CLA, TC
• Sumanth Gopinath, Music, CLA, TC
• Susan Mason, Epidemiology & Community Health, School of Public Health, TC
• Richa Nagar, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, TC
• Ross VeLure Roholt, Social Work, CEHD, TC

Clean Water and Sustainable Ecosystems

• Oscar Garza, Pharmacy Care & Health Systems, AHC, TC
• Mary Hermes, Curriculum & Instruction, CEHD, TC
• Kimberly Hill-Malvick, Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering, CSE, TC
• Daniela Sandler, Architecture, CDES, TC
• Diane Willow, Art, CLA, TC

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2016

• Marc Bellemare, Applied Economics, CFANS, Twin Cities: The Political Economy of Food Price Stabilization
• Jennifer Gomez Menjivar, Foreign Languages and Literatures, CLA, Duluth: Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize 
• Annie Hill, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Sex Trafficking, Migration, and Law 
• Michael Lower, History, CLA, Twin Cities: Violence and Religious Difference in the Premodern Mediterranean
• William Salmon, Linguistics, CLA, Duluth: Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize 
• Roozbeh Shirazi, Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, CEHD, Twin Cities: There is Always Something to Prove: Transnational Youth, Sociopolitical Belonging, and Education in the Twin Cities'

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2015

• Michael Gallope, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, Twin Cities: New Ontologies of Sonic Writing (Fall 2015)
• Cindy Garcia, Theater Arts & Dance, CLA, Twin Cities: How To Make It to the Salsa Dance Floor (Fall 2015)
• Sarah Parkinson, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Twin Cities: Organizational Emergence in Crisis: Networks, Neuroscience, and Military Organizations in the Middle East (Fall 2015)
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, History, CLA, Twin Cities: The Graves of Dimbaza: Reconsidering the Resilience of Race in the Post-Apartheid Present (Fall 2016)
• Amit Yahav, English, CLA, Twin Cities: Moments: Qualitative Time in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Fall 2015)
• Kyungsoo Yoo, Soil, Water, & Climate, CFANS, Twin Cities: Agrarian Expansion, Immigration and the Emergence of Earthworm-Engineered Forests: 9,000 years of Human-Natural History in Glaciated Regions of N. Europe and N. America (Fall 2015)

COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS GRADUATE FELLOWS, SPRING 2016

• Kasey Keeler, American Studies, Twin Cities: Indigenous Suburbs: Settler-Colonialism, Housing Policy, and the Erasure of American Indians from Suburbia 
• Alicia Lazzarini, Geography, Environmetn, and Society: ‘Açúcar nem Sempre Doce’: Reinvestments, Land, and Gendered Labor in a ‘New’ Mozambique 

SAWYER SEMINAR POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS, 2015-2016

• Laurie Moberg, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities: Fluid Landscapes: Materializing the Future after Natural Disasteres in Thailand (Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow, Fall 2015-Spring 2017)

SCHOLARS AND ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE, SPRING 2016

• Rachel Jendrzejewski, Playwright and Interdisciplinary Artist: Making Reality: Complication Popular Definitions of Story in Contemporary Performance 
• Beth Mercer-Taylor, Sustainability Education, Institute on the Environment: Change the System, Not the Climate 
• Guillermo Narváez, Humphrey School of Public Affairs: Boundaries at Work with American Indian Communities 

SCHOLARS AND ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE, FALL 2015

• Ursula Lang, Geography, University of Glasgow: Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature, and Time 
• Presley Martin, Sculpture and Installation Artist: Dye Buckthorn Dye 
• Jennifer Row, French, Boston University: Queer Velocities: Speeds of Sex on the Early Modern Stage 

VISITING SCHOLAR, FALL 2015

• Bill Moseley, Geography, Macalester College: Can Markets & Technology Solve the Scourge of Global Hunger? The New Green Revolution for Africa, Marginal Communities, and Rural Malnutrition 

FACULTY FELLOWS, SPRING 2015

• Matteo Convertino, Environmental Health Sciences, Public Health, Twin Cities: HumNat-Health: From People, To People. Theory, Computers, Art (Spring 2015)
• Katherine Hayes, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities: Bohemian Flats Public Memory Project: Archaeology, Public History, and Heritage (Spring 2015)
• Kathryn Milun, Sociology and Anthropology, CLA, Duluth: Creating Sustainable Infrastructure with Commons-Based Design: The Solar Commons Project and Beyond (Spring 2015)
• Leslie Morris, German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA, Twin Cities: She Did Not Speak (Spring 2015)
• Erik Redix, American Indian Studies, CLA, Duluth: Deluge and Bakweyawaa: American Colonialism in the Twentieth Century and the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe (Spring 2015)
• David Valentine, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities: Off the Rock: Human Futures in Outer Space (Spring 2015)

FACULTY FELLOWS, FALL 2014

• Elaine Auyoung, English, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities: The Suggestiveness of Realist Novels (Fall 2014)
• Mark Collier, Philosophy, Morris: Experimental Philosophy (Fall 2014)
• Katharine Gerbner, History, CLA, Twin Cities: Christian Slavery: Protestant Missions and Slave Conversions in the Atlantic World, 1660-1760 (Fall 2014)
• Njeri Githire, African American and African Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: (In)edible Ideologies: Food, Identity, and the (Post)Colonial Subject in African Literary and Cultural Expression (Fall 2014)
• Dominic Taylor, Theater Arts and Dance, CLA, Twin Cities: Ice Man - Black in White: Black Bodies on Stage in Classic White Roles (Fall 2014)

SAWYER SEMINAR POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS, 2014-2015

• Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, Art Historian and Curator: The Mississippi River in Antebellum Visual Culture
• Jane Mazack, Water Research Science Graduate Program, Twin Cities: Entomology and Stream Ecology in Southeast Minnesota
• Laurie Moberg, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities: Fluid Landscapes: Materializing the Future After Natural Disasters in Thailand

COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS GRADUATE FELLOWS, 2014-2015

• Jamal Adam, Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, Twin Cities: Identity Development of Somali College Students
• Jameson R. Sweet, History, CLA, Twin Cities: The Mixed-Blood Moment: Race, Land, and Law Among Dakota Mixed-Bloods in the Nineteeth Century
• Maiyia Yang, Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, Twin Cities: Educational Identities of Karen Refugee Women in the Twin Cities Metro Area

VISITING FELLOWS, 2014-2015

• Emily Johnson, Choreograper and Director, Catalyst Dances: SHORE
• Anaïs Nony, French and Italian, Moving Image Studies, CLA, Twin Cities: Technical Memory: Thierry Kuntzel's Video Art and the Early Web Experience in France
• Karin Vélez, History, Macalester College: Catholic Landings in Frontier Zones: Jesuits, Converts, and the Flying House of Loreto, 1290-1750

VISITING FELLOW, SPRING 2015

• Ryland Angel, Counter-tenor and Composer: The Call