Fellows

Ileana Nachescu (she/ea) is a scholar of intersectional and transnational feminism. She co-founded the first Women’s Studies Center at her alma mater, the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. Her monograph titled The National Alliance of Black Feminists: A History has recently been published by the University of Illinois Press.

An award-winning educator, Ileana Nachescu received two Humanities Plus grants (in 2019 and 2024) to integrate zines and podcasts into feminist pedagogy, and has...

My research interests include public perception of science and science communication in film, media and museums. I have an A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College; and an M.S. in Zoology and a Ph.D. in Media Studies, both from Rutgers University. My doctoral research focused on the role of visual format, rhetoric and culture in science communication. Prior to my tenure at Rutgers, I worked at Enzon Inc., serving in a variety of positions from immunologist to Associate Director of...

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is an Instructor in the History Department at Rutgers University, where she directs the Public History Program. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Leicester and an MA in Modern History from Queens University Belfast, and researches poverty, labor, mobility, crime and punishment in the early American northeast, as well as public historical and commemorative representations of these subjects. Kristin is the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and...

Professor Scanlon is the author of Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (1994). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, 1100-1500 (2009), and co-editor of John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (with James Simpson, 2005). He has published numerous essays on Middle English, Old French, Medieval Latin texts and traditions. He has also published on medievalism, and American and African-American Literature....

Francisco is a Ph.D. student in the Literature and Culture program. He holds a M.A. of Arts in Hispanic Studies (Auburn University), a M.A. in Hispanic Studies (Universidad de Cádiz), a B.A. in Spanish Linguistics and Literature (Universidad de Cádiz) and a B.A. in English Linguistics and Literature (Universidad de Cádiz). Since 2019, he directs ÍMPETU (www.revistaimpetu.org), a digital literary magazine in which worldwide researchers and artists participate.

Ankita Chandranath is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology program. 

Jennie Jiang (she/her) joined the Ph.D. program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University in Fall 2021. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University, where her undergraduate thesis focused on interrogating the epistemological roots of biomedical models of mental illness in scientific and popular imagination. Her current research interests include taking a feminist science studies approach to understanding endocrine-disrupting chemicals, a...

Ayelet Marron is a doctoral candidate in history, specializing in American foreign relations. Her dissertation, “Occupation Economics in WWII”, examines the first large-scale occupation the US undertook in WWII – French North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia). American occupation administrators constructed occupation as liberation while reinforcing French colonial rule – and their economic policies became blueprints for postwar military interventions and foreign aid programs that preserved...

Zainab Najeeb is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her research explores the intersections of gender, displacement, and digital and urban infrastructures in postcolonial South Asia. Over the past year, she has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Peshawar, Pakistan, focusing on how internally displaced Pashtun women navigate conditions of protracted crisis, cultural expectations, and scarcity.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Zainab was a Teaching Fellow at the...

Alice is an historian working on agricultural expansion in the British Empire, with a particular emphasis on settler states. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation project titled Earth Hunger: Agriculture, Settler Colonialism, and the Global Grain Trade, 1846-1914. Her work explores the interconnectedness between dispossession, industrial development, and scientific change on the agrarian frontier.

Alisha Mays (she/her) has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Kentucky. Her research explores hunger, poverty, and charitable food economies. Alisha's work bridges ethnographic research and advocacy, illuminating the broader structures of inequality. 

Derek Baron received their PhD in Historical Musicology in 2023 from the Department of Music at New York University's Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences. Their dissertation, "The Geopolitics of Voice: Sound, Music, and Language in Early American Settler Colonialism," explores the role that vocal and sonic imaginaries played in the construction of United States settler-colonial law, science, racial ideology, and institutional complexes from the colonial period to the turn of the twentieth...

George Kovalenko is a Visiting Scholar in the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. He works on problems in Marxist poetics, comparative modernisms, and philosophical aesthetics. His research has received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and he was most recently a Visiting Researcher at the New York Public Library’s Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities. A practicing poet and...