Past Faculty Fellows

Kehinde Alonge is a first-generation Nigerian-American currently in the 2nd year of his English Ph.D. program at Rutgers University. His interest lies in the intersection between experimental poetics and experimental music (I.e., Free Jazz and the rise of the Black Arts Movement). Additionally, Kehinde writes poetry and is interested in exploring the stakes involved in archiving Black Art, specifically West African Oral Poetics and the Free Jazz tradition. He is specifically the grappling with...

Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Comparative Literature

Presidential Postdoctoral Associate in French and English

Associate professor in music.

Rachel Mundy is an Associate Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture, & Media program at Rutgers University in Newark. She specializes in twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies. Her work shows how music has been used to navigate changing boundaries between race, species, and culture during a century of social and ecological crisis.

Rachel’s work has been cited as initiating an “animal...

Imani D. Owens is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her interests include African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and...

I've been a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers since 2012. From 1982-2012 I taught English and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. My research concerns the history and practices of literary theory, especially post-war theory in France and its world-wide dissemination. My most recent book is The Theorist’s Mother, which attends to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical theorists from Marx and Freud to Lacan and Derrida. I was the editor and...

John Warren is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program at Rutgers. 

Alanna Beroiza is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program at Rutgers. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Rice University. Her work draws on film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis to examine how visual and aural media construct models for gender and sex in twentieth- and twenty-first century medical and popular discourses. Her publications include, “How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures: Gender as a Scopic System in Annie Leibovitz’s Photographs...

Daniel da Silva is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, with a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey's Ironbound neighborhood, Silva's work centers queer performance and subjectivities in Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures. He has published “Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis” (Journal of Lusophone Studies 2018), and “Black Mothers and Black Boats: Queer, Indigenous and...

Stacy S. Klein is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on early English literature, poetry, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and is currently completing a monograph entitled The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Early English Literature, ca. 700-1100 AD. Klein has published numerous articles on Old English...

Timothy Power is an associate professor of Classics at Rutgers University. His research has focused largely on matters relating to the lyric poetry and drama of early Greece, in particular their music, performance, and social and religious contexts. His 2010 book, The Culture of Kitharôidia (Center for Hellenic Studies/HUP), is a study of the popular Greco-Roman musical genre of lyre-singing from the age of Homer through the reign of the emperor Nero. In more recent work, he has also examined the...

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is a music theorist and historian specializing in the analysis of American ultra-modernist musical works, the transpacific history of American music, and contemporary composers of East Asian heritage. Previously, she taught at Oberlin College and has held visiting professorships at the Curtis Institute of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, and Bard...

Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

Shockley's...

Sal Ayala Camarillo is a graduate student in the Department of English.

I am an interdisciplinary geographer interested in the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified and enacted. My research uses the contemporary politics of urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning, and political rule. I taught for two years at the London School of Economics before joining Rutgers in 2012. I am the current Graduate Program Director in Geography and served as the Director of the South...

Dr Rico is a Senior Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London and currently serving in the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

Dr Rico's areas of research in critical heritage studies include risk, Islamic materiality, ethnography and the vernacularization of heritage discourses and expertise and heritage ethics. Her current research projects focus on the mobilization of Islamic values in the Arabian Peninsula and the study of...

Mary Rizzo earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching centers on 20th century American cultural and urban history; public history theory, methods and practice; and, digital humanities. She is the author of two books. The most recent, Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) examines how Baltimore has been represented in popular culture since the 1950s. Including both well-known...

Samah Selim received her BA in English Literature from Barnard College in 1986 and her PhD from the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 1997.  She has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Aix-en-Provence and the American University in Cairo, and she is co-director of the literature module of the Berlin-based postdoctoral research program, Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in Europe.

Her research focuses...

I teach the literature and culture of the British Restoration and eighteenth century. Related interests include complex systems, the history of science, the origins of the museum, cognitive studies, and the history of ideas and craft practices. I am the author of The Mind Is a Collection, which traces the history of our most prevalent mental models. The book is the exhibit catalogue of a virtual museum, www.mindisacollection.org, which I hope you will visit. I am now working on a cultural...

Diane Wong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark. She is also an affiliate faculty of Global Urban Studies, American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Politics and M.A. in Comparative Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration from the Department of Government at Cornell University. Currently, she is a...

I am an historian of maritime environments, food, and island geographies in the late medieval and early modern Atlantic world. My main research has been on the sixteenth-century fisheries at Newfoundland, but I am more broadly interested in the earliest years of European expansion into the Atlantic basin during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I received my PhD from the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. In addition, I hold an M.A. in history from McGill...

Kristin Grogan is an Assistant Professor in English at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, labor history and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is finishing her first book, an account of the dynamic relationship between poetry and labor of various kinds—artisanal, mechanical, clerical, and reproductive work—with chapters on Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. She is beginning a new project on...

David Kurnick is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus on the history of the novel, narrative theory, sociology and literature, and sexuality and gender. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). The book examines the theatrical ambitions of major novelists (William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin) better known for their...

 Dr. Ramenzoni is an environmental anthropologist specializing in human behavioral ecology, coastal communities, and marine and coastal policies. She is an Assistant Professor in Marine Policy at the Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University. Through a mixed methods approach, she studies how socio-ecological factors shape human adaptation, the historical ecology of fishing societies, the impact of environmental uncertainty on decisions about resource use, and household nutrition in...

Meredith Bak (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Assistant Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research and teaching interests focus on children’s film, media, visual, and material cultures from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020), which explores the role of pre-cinematic visual media from optical toys to early pop-up books in...

Brittany Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Program in Criminal Justice and the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University.  She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and researches race and prison order, penal policy, and the intersections between institutions and monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system.  Her first book, Born in Blood: Death Work, White Power, and the Rise of the Black Guerilla Family (forthcoming,...

Miranda Lichtenstein is an artist who works in photography and video.  Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions including, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Stadhaus Ulm, Germany and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at venues such as the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris,...

Colin Williamson (PhD, University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He also serves on the Executive Committee of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, and as a Reviews Editor for animation: an interdisciplinary journal (ANM). His research focuses on early film history, media archaeology, animation, and science and the cinema. Colin is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of...

Mark Aakhus investigates the relationship between communication and design, especially the uses of technological and organizational design, to augment human interaction and reasoning for decision-making and conflict-management. He uses multiple methods from discourse analysis and computational social science to examine language, argumentation, and social interaction in professional practice, organizational processes, and information infrastructures. The aim in these streams of research is to...

Dr. Nichole Margarita Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. As a Chicana/Puerto Rican her research focuses on the intersections race, feminism, and Latinx/a/o communities in higher education She is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon dissertation fellowship which she completed a comparative study on Chicana/o and Puerto Rican college-educated families to advance narratives of intergenerational achievement...