Faculty Fellows

  • Junior Research Fellow, 2022-2024 "Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions" Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions examines legal texts alongside literary works by queer Chicano writers of the late 20th and early...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2020-2022 "Blind Cinema: Visually Impaired Cinema and the Somatic Sensorium"  My book-length project on the subject of blind and visually impaired filmmakers and their development of a particular filmic style I am calling the “blind gaze” engages with...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2020-2022 "The Black Pacific: The African Diaspora in South East Asia"  The Black Pacific: The African Diaspora in South East Asia makes a theoretical and conceptual shift from the Black Atlantic, which is used to reconstruct, describe, and...
  • Junior Research Fellows, 2020-2022 " 'Who, We?' Pronominal Politics, Citizenship, and the Rights of the Other in Hashtag-Era France" ‘Who, We?’ explores the tensions between horizontal forms of political expression facilitated by social networks and vertical structures...
  • Junior Research Fellows, 2020-2022 "Peacebuilding and Placemaking: Collective Actions in Postconflict Colombia" “Peacebuilding and Placemaking: Collective Actions in Postconflict Colombia” investigates the collective transformations of the built environment found in the...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2016-2018 Changing Epistemologies in Contemporary Cuba: Towards a Collaborative Ethnography This study analyzes Cuban scholars' search for new modes of inquiry as they interpret increasing political, economic, and sociocultural change in their country. I...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2018-2020 Olive Olive is a book about 21st century settler-colonialism. Specifically, it connects displacement, land conquest, and memory with the politics of everyday survival for Palestinians located in Palestine and the West, through the optic...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2019-2021 "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" My book-length project on the topic of US and global special visual effects and digital moving images is historically grounded in archival research and engages with...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2019-2021 "Medina by the Bay: An Islamic Ethics of Difference and Survival in the Bay Area Islam is often discussed as something that arrives in (and threatens) the United States from a historic and geographic elsewhere. This project examines Muslim...
  • Junior Research Fellows, 2019-2021 "A Body Exposed: The Aesthetics of Sex, Death, and Mexicanness" A Body Exposed: The Aesthetics of Sex, Death, and Mexicanness contends that the representation of violence against sexual minorities is central to the construction and...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2018-2020 Toward a Refined Racial Economy Perspective: Gentrification and Political Resistance in Chicago’s South Side Blues Clubs As Chicago’s poor, largely African American South Side residents negotiate the rise of something unexpected, gentrification,...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2018-2020 Hindutva and Advertised Modernization The works of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, have returned to the center-stage in recent decades due to a crisis of the secular, erosion of liberal institutions and democratic cultures world-wide, and the...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2018-2020 Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography Other Natures investigates the relational environmental discourse of Greek ethnographies, descriptions of non-Greek lands and peoples, and its enduring presence in museums of...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2017-2019 Habits of the Heart: Affective Attachments in the Public Sphere The deconstruction of the reason/passion dichotomy undertaken by emotion and affect studies has already lead to an important critical reconsideration of the emotional dimensions of...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2017-2019 Civic Technoscience and Inclusive Innovation Practice: Co-Design for Care Emerging spaces of civic technoscience have increasingly drawn scholarly attention for cultivating novel practices of interdisciplinary design and community-driven knowledge...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2017-2019 Digitize and Punish: Digital Cartographies of Policing and Racialized Space Economy While critical attention has recently turned to racialized police violence in US cities, another quiet development in urban policing is taking place. Police...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2017-2019 The Making of al-Andalus: Uses of the Past in Contemporary Mediterranean Culture The Invention of al-Andalus explores the political uses of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia) in contemporary culture from several different geographic...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2016-2018 Mediterranean Laziness: The Invention of a Vice The modern concept of laziness has played and continues to play a crucial role in the criminalization of poverty. My project reconstructs the invention of laziness as a dispositif that allowed...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2016-2018 Ricanness: Staging Time in Anticolonial Performance Ricanness examines how acts of bodily endurance performed by both Puerto Rican artists and revolutionaries serve as aesthetic and political interventions under colonial temporality. To...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2016-2018 "Making Ourselves from Scratch": Literacy and Social Change through Black Queer Activist Organizations Making Ourselves from Scratch: Literacy and Social Change through Black Queer Activist Organizations, 1974-1989 employs women of color...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2015-2017 Ugly Beasts, Talking Monkeys: Education and Contagion in Pre-Modern Europe The inception of the plague pandemic in 1348 triggered an unprecedented interest in framing the distinction between human and nonhuman. Ugly Beasts, Talking Monkeys is a...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2015-2017 Fugitive Life: On the Abandonment of the Contemporary "Fugitive Life: On the Abandonment of the Contemporary" draws on ethnographic research and media analysis to analyze multiple recent moments of state violence in Mexico and the United States....
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2015-2017 Reimagining a "Beautiful but Baneful Object": Black Theories of Citizenship in the Early United States Black Theories examines how conceptions of citizenship developed through and with black print culture in the United States between 1787 and 1861...
  • Junior Research Fellow, 2015-2017 Voices of Drought: Forró Soundscapes in Northeastern Brazil This project explores the musical and lyrical evocation of the landscape of northeastern Brazil and examines the interplay among the representation, knowledge, and experience of "nature"...
  • Senior Research Fellow, 2014-2016 Educating for Freedom: Enlightenment Narratives of Autonomy, Gender, and Social Influence  Straddling the fields of eighteenth-century literature and culture, political theory, and the philosophy of education, Educating for Freedom:...