Past Graduate Fellows

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 interested in what moral justifications can be given for recognizing property rights (individual or communal) over personal digital data and what implications our answer to this question might have for devising morally optimal antitrust policy.

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 erotic marronage. Practiced by women and femmes, erotic marronage consists of political actions where pleasure is central. This term adopts Yarimar Bonilla's understanding of marronage as strategic entanglement with systems of power or as "crafting and enacting autonomy within a system from which one is unable to fully disentangle." Isabel extends Bonilla's understanding of marronage to include an erotic and queer practice where women and femmes of color thrive, even as they strategically entangle with hegemonic, colonial, misogynoir structures. In other words, these writers and artists depict women and femme maroons who forge safe havens while deriving pleasure from complex engagements with oppressive structures. 

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 commoning practices to build better and more sustainable futures for Arabic-speaking refugee communities. Fulya defines commoning as the opposite of bordering, in that contrary to isolating, excluding, immobilizing, and illegalizing refugees, commoning eases mobility and access to information through collective processes. Moving beyond the victimization vs. resilience dichotomy and the paradigm of “futureless” refugees, she analyzes the alternative rationalities of refugees against multiple capitalist and authoritarian enclosures in the contemporary world, focusing on how they invent communal ways of care.

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.

Christiane Fischer is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department at Rutgers University. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Between Skin and Surface: The Cinematic Cut in German Film and Literature 1989-2018”, which centers on global image economies and investigates various intersections of image production, distribution, and consumption in contemporary German film, literature and media art. More specifically, her project focuses on the transition from analog to digital media technologies, thereby examining the limits of representation and the possibility of an “authentic” image. Before joining Rutgers in 2016 Christiane completed her B.A. in comparative literature at the University of Vienna and the University of St. Andrews.

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 2015), Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge Press 2014) as well as online publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Frieze.  

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: Journey into the Unknown (2021). He has also contributed to publications including The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Photography (2013) and the exhibition catalog A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age (2016).

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 abstraction of the labor market become problems of form for avant-garde writers

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 to make cinema possible, the project probes at the material interdependence of entertainment and industrial capitalism.

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 a Bachelors in American Studies with a double minor in History and Political Science, a Master’s of Science in Business from the College of Saint Elizabeth, and a Master of Philosophy in Education from Rutgers University. For her Business master’s thesis “The Urban Underclass,” she explored how college students from the Educational Opportunity Fund pipeline program navigated higher education utilizing college resources in the 21st century. As an emerging scholar with a passion for historical analysis, she conducted archival research, written and presented on the history of the 19th-century Colored school of Newark, New Jersey. She is also published as a contributing author in two chapters of the forthcoming book Scarlet and Black volume II, the continuation of Rutgers reconciliation project which grapples with minoritized populations affected by the university’s colonial lineage. 

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 circuits, only some of which recognize the free speech rights of public university faculty. Her research seeks to map and theorize this landscape while offering practical recommendations for faculty, faculty organizers, and university leaders.

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, they protested racism against “hillbillies” and “oppressed white people,” and claimed solidarity with other oppressed people of color around the world. Remarkably, the Illinois Black Panther Party saw the Patriots as an ally and recruited them to join their Rainbow Coalition in 1969. The Patriots’ heterodox “white revolutionary” discourse, Ben contends, complicates how we think about “whiteness” and how white anti-racism should and could happen. Rather than treating “whiteness” as an attitude or idea to be rejected, and inadvertently reaffirming its legitimacy as race category, the Patriots “produce” a race discourse where the essentialism of white/ nonwhite binary discourse is weakened, and thereby drained of some of its normative power. Through organizing free medical clinics, food pantries, and other “serve the people” programs, the Patriots link poor southern whites’ poverty and oppression to structural anti-“hillbilly” racism in Chicago. In doing so, the Patriots sought solidarity...

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 of imperialism and post-war social consensus, takes up the popular theater in order to provide alternatives to cosmopolitan and democratic forms of inclusion in an age characterized by sociopolitical division.

Man Kaplan is a PhD candidate interested in the values, stakes, and symptoms of dominant and dissident modes of knowledge production. These interests inform Man's everyday life, activism, pedagogy, and dissertation research, which concerns the trope of discovering, coloniality, whiteness, and possibilities for academic reparations and decolonization. Man is currently a participant in the PreDoctoral Leadership Development Academy, and holds an MA in Sociology (Rutgers), an MA in Humanities and Social Thought (NYU), a BA in Sociology and Mathematics (Vassar), and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies (Rutgers). If seemingly preoccupied, Man is most likely dreaming of transdisciplinary education, social transformation, cheese, or really big dogs.

Danielle Allor is a PhD Candidate in the English department at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on vegetal life and late medieval literature, arguing that late medieval authors imported knowledge-organizing and classifying strategies from natural philosophy to bolster claims to religious authenticity and literary authority. Her dissertation, “Trees of Thought: Arboreal Matter and Metaphor in Late Medieval England,” examines trees as material and figural classification systems in the work of William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and John Skelton.  

Virginia L. Conn is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature program at Rutgers University, whose work occurs at the intersection of comparative languages and literatures (Sinophone, Anglophone, Francophone, Germanophone, and Russophone literatures) and science and technology studies, particularly those aspects of STS that investigate circulations of knowledge and biopolitics. Her research interests include the intersection of science fiction and ideology, socialist teleologies, the ethics of progress, and nationalist technologies of embodiment. Her dissertation examines socialist modernities by questioning how science fiction conscientiously harnessed utopian ideals of technological advancement as rational blueprints to shape the country’s citizens. Virginia has published peer-reviewed articles in science fiction studies, cultural studies, visual studies, and computer science journals. In addition to her academic research, she works for the international division of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  

Aghil Daghagheleh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is currently a graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University (CCA) and recently finished a project on social movements and electoral politics in Iran. In his current research project, Refusal: Resistance, Subjectivity, and Construction of Arabness in Iran, Aghil explores the geography of social marginalization in contemporary Iran, a topic which brings together research on the politics of marginalized communities, social movements, race and ethnic relations, nationalism, political economy, religion, and resistance. Through an ethnographic study of the everyday experiences and politics of Arab minority, Aghil shows how ethnicity becomes a significant facet of subaltern politics and explores modalities of resistance, subversion, negotiation, and refusal that marginalized communities deploy to cope with the effects of ethnoreligious nationalism and to unsettle ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship, as major products of state classification. He problematizes the notions of citizenship and belonging in the Islamic Republic by highlighting the work of classification in perpetuating structures of power and forms of everyday domination and resistance. Aghil is also participating in a comparative research project, The Rise of The Peripheral, that explores the conflicts about the extraction of natural resources that are increasingly expressed in indigenous,...

Alex Leslie is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Rutgers University. His research primarily focuses on the intersection of print circulation and cultural geography in the long nineteenth century. His dissertation “Reading Regionally: Cultural Geography and American Literature, 1865-1915” argues that region was not simply a framework for representing cultural difference but a structuring principle of the postbellum cultural field: it explores how literary texts were read differently in different regions of the country and how this fact shaped editorial policy and authorial production. Alex is also currently the Rutgers Libraries Graduate Digital Humanities Specialist.  

Irina Nicorici is an advanced PhD student in Sociology at Rutgers. Her dissertation focuses on the Soviet migration policies and the bureaucratic processing of applications for entry into or exit from the USSR. Empirically, she investigates how the Soviet Union and its heirs collected data about their inhabitants and visitors between 1960 and 2000, how the state machineries accounted for and controlled who belonged, and how the publics responded to such evaluative metrics. In addition to the sociology of citizenship, she is also interested in the gendered logics of stratification, migration control, state organization and economic governance, as well as race and ethnic relations.   

Mónica P. Hernández Ospina is a doctoral candidate in the Geography Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research interests have been focused on the formation of territories and contested spaces in contexts of conflict over land ownership, as it traditionally occurs in Colombia. In her current research, she analyzes collective land property conflicts and how collective titling processes are used by state governments as instruments to protect ethnic communities. Using fieldwork and archival research, she studies processes through which Afro Colombians obtained collective titles of ownership for the territories they have occupied traditionally. Working on different scales, her goal is to examine the tensions between state and rural/ethnic communities, using land property as a relationship where those tensions are constantly deployed.