Past Graduate Fellows

Peter Christian is a graduate student in music at Mason Gross.

I hold an MA in Anthropology from the American University in Cairo AUC. My masters thesis “Ultras Ahlawy and the Spectacle: Subjects, Resistance and the Organized Football Fandom in Egypt” won Magda al-Nouwahi award in gender studies for best writing thesis in 2016. I am interested in anthropology of sports, leisure and pop culture.

For ten years, I worked as a human rights practitioner at The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). I am the author of the report “The Trap: Punishing...

Vianna Iorio is a graduate student in the English Department.

Calvin Walds is a graduate student in the Department of Geography.

Anqi Wang is a graduate student in music at Mason Gross.

Emmanuel Aprilakis is a PhD candidate in Classics at Rutgers University. His dissertation, “The Figure of the Koryphaios in Ancient Drama,” explores all aspects of the chorus leader on the ancient stage, including their selection, appearance, role, function, and performance. He is interested in the soundscapes of ancient plays and particularly the ability of the choral voice to break the fourth wall and to give agency to typically marginalized groups. In addition to close reading of dramatic texts,...

Krysta Herrera is a PhD candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Prior to Rutgers, she also holds a MM from the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied bassoon performance. Her dissertation, “Contrapuntos nacionales: Sound and Alternative National Imaginaries of the River Plate Region,” explores the role of music and sound in performances that reject unifying hegemonic identity discourses in the River Plate region (Argentina and Uruguay). In particular, she is interested in...

Milan Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is researching magnetic tape’s influence on music, literature, and social movements in the latter half of the twentieth century, attending to the ways it is both used and imagined. Drawing together sources from Italian, Spanish, and English language contexts, he traces the shifting materiality of sound and symbolic investments in listening. His dissertation explores how the mediations between tape and...

Sara Sanchez-Zweig is a doctoral candidate in the English department working on theater and performance studies. Her dissertation, "Magic Acts: How Stage Magic Performs the Self," argues that stage magic and performance ritual model spectatorial relationships that disavow the porosity of representational knowledge: how we know the self and the other. Her interest in the voice is rooted in her research on Spiritualist trance-lectures and notions of presence and mediation.

My research examines early modern English poetry and drama in the context of post-Reformation church history. I have working projects on religious nationalism and discrimination in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Othello, John Milton's indebtedness in Paradise Lost to Paul's writings on religious mystery as a key way to realize religious "truth" in a faith community, and Edmund Spenser's ambivalence towards religious iconoclasm. I also work on the influence that music theory and media...

Julian Wong-Nelson is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Art History programme. Their research interests include Asian-diasporic performance and video, queer & trans* theory, and cinema studies.

Paulina Maria Barrios is a graduate student at the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She holds an M.A. in Asian and African studies, special subject Africa, from El Colegio de México, and has experience working in translation and feminist resource mobilization. For her PhD she currently aims to analyze the use of literature by grassroots feminist and queer organizations in Latin America and Africa.

Che Gossett is a Women's and Gender Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University whose work is at the nexus of critical black studies, queer theory and trans studies. They are currently a 2019-2020 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program.  Their writing has been published in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press 2018) Death and Other Penalties: Continental Philosophers on Prisons and Capital Punishment (Fordham UP...

Aaron Martin is in his fourth year in the Rutgers Ph.D. program. He uses a variety of methods to study catastrophic risk and the role of predictive tools and practices in risk governance. Martin’s research examines how organizations and institutions assess uncertainty related to extreme risk and the implications of these assessments for risk policy and decision-making.

He is currently a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers and has previously held Fellowships at the Global...

Carolina Sanchez is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is a Fulbright scholar, M.A. in Literary Criticism and B.A. in Philosophy from the National University of Colombia. She worked for four years as Editorial Assistant of the Philosophy Journal Ideas y Valores and co-founded the Colombian independent publishing house: El lobo está en el bosque libros. She works on political transitions in Contemporary Latin America, representations of spaces and belonging in...

Leo Valdes is a PhD candidate in the Department of History specializing in US-based social movements and the carceral state. Valdes’ dissertation explores the political cultures of Black and Latinx trans/nonbinary communities in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. Valdes is an oral historian and community researcher who collaborates with grassroots groups including the Rikers Public Memory Project and Movimiento Cosecha.

Ian Gavigan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers-New Brunswick. He is a historian of labor, politics, and social movements in the modern U.S. He is writing a history of the Socialist Party from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

Jimmy Goodrich is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Rutgers. His research focuses on the ethics of cost-imposition. In particular, he's interested in why it's sometimes fair to impose costs on others in order to promote the common good. His dissertation - Preventive Justice: A Consequentialist Approach - takes up questions about fair cost-imposition within the ethics of self-defense in particular. Jimmy also works on the philosophy, politics, and economics of big data. More specifically, he's...

Mike Opal is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers, working on the transformation of rhetorical figuration during the English transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Fulya Pinar is an Anthropology PhD candidate at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, studying how refugee women instantiate sharing economies in Istanbul, Turkey. The two dominant tropes that generally shape studies and approaches towards refugee women are that of victimization and over-emphasizing resilience, reducing refugee women’s experiences into certain moments from the past and present. Based on long-term and in-depth ethnographic research, Fulya examines how refugee women employ...

Kelly Roberts is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Rutgers, where she works on contemporary fiction and queer studies. She lives in Brooklyn.

Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program of Literatures in English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation explores how contemporary queer Caribbean literature deploys marronage as a tactic that challenges the archipelago’s state of indebtedness and non-sovereignty. The writers she studies consider maroon communities sites of creative inspiration and political interrogation. Here, maroon tactics inform bodily and erotic tactics, which Isabel calls...

Che Gossett is a Women's and Gender Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University whose work is at the nexus of critical black studies, queer theory and trans studies. They are currently a 2019-2020 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program.  Their writing has been published in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press 2018) Death and Other Penalties: Continental Philosophers on Prisons and Capital Punishment (Fordham UP...

William Green is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. He studies histories of photography with an emphasis on post-WWII American photography, photobooks, and the materiality of photographs. Prior to Rutgers, he was the curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. He has curated numerous exhibitions for the Eastman Museum, including Nandita Raman: Cinema Play House (2017) and the upcoming Carl Chiarenza:...

Dan Malinowski is PhD candidate in English at Rutgers. His dissertation, “Free Float: Finance, Form, and Late 20th Century American Literature,” examines the conjunction of experimental American literature, changing media forms, and the financialization of the US economy at the end of the 20th century. In the long works of writers such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nathanial Mackey, and John Ashbery, this project examines how both the digitization of formerly analog media and the ever-increasing...

Emmet von Stackelberg is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, studying the technologies of visual culture in the United States. His dissertation is a history of celluloid, the photochemical substance necessary to the making and showing of motion pictures until the middle of the 20th century. This biography of a substance braids together histories of experiment, extraction, capitalism, industry, and leisure. Reconstructing the physical, intellectual, and political work needed...

Shari M. Cunningham, M.S., is a Ph.D. candidate in the higher education program at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Before joining Rutgers doctoral program, Shari worked in Financial Aid for eight years in various positions including Data Coordinator/ Educational Opportunity Fund liaison, Financial Aid Counselor, and Assistant Director of Financial Aid. She currently serves as a student representative for the Dean’s Advisory Council at Rutgers School of Graduate Studies. Shari holds...

Nora Devlin is an advanced doctoral student in the PhD in Higher Education program at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Nora's research interests deal with justice and organizational/governance structures in universities, specifically in the realm of higher education law. Her dissertation examines faculty First Amendment cases brought against their (public) university employers. Nora researches the current caselaw on faculty free speech cases which reflects a split among the federal...

Benjamin Foley is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Rutgers University and an activist interested in how white organizers understand and navigate "whiteness" as they participate in interracial coalitions and politics. His dissertation is a historical sociological study of the Young Patriots Organization—a group of poor white migrants from Appalachia who formed in the impoverished neighborhood of “Uptown” Chicago in 1968. Paradoxically brandishing Confederate flags and Black Panther pins,...

Scott Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature and culture. His dissertation, “English Variety: Popular Theatrical Culture and Localist Form in the Post-Consensus Novel,” analyzes the sociopolitical function of popular theatrical forms as they appear in the work of Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, and Ian McEwan. It suggests that contemporary fiction, marked by the decline...