Our Students
CAMARA BROWN is an interdisciplinary poet and scholar. She is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Harvard University, where she is also pursuing a secondary field in the studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Her research and writing sit at the intersection of Black studies; women, gender and sexuality studies; intellectual history; and Black feminist studies. Her dissertation examines how Black feminists theorized the intricacies of friendship in relation to their political organizing, cultural productions and survival in the 20th century. Her poetry has been published in numerous places including The Adroit Journal and The Golden Shovel Anthology Poems in a New Form Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks.
Dorian Cole (they/them) is a PhD student in American Studies who works in the history of popular culture with a focus on horror studies and macabre curiosities. They graduated with a master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, where they completed a thesis project on the history of the Ouija board. Their current research uses the methodologies of English, history, and material culture to explore the impact of Christian fear on the horror genre. Through a combination of 19th and 20th-century literature, film, and religious history, Dorian examines the relationship between American Christian religion, the politics of fear, and cultural perceptions of horror media.
doriancole@g.harvard.edu
MATTLYN CORDOVA studies brownness and affect in visual culture. Broadly her research interests include Latinx Studies, affect theory, queer theory, performance studies, film theory and history, and comparative ethnic studies. Her dissertation project currently focuses on popular Latinx visual productions and affect, especially the emotional transmission that occurs between image and spectator. Mattlyn completed her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and received a B.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
IMANI DAVIS is a queer Black writer from Brooklyn. A recipient of fellowships from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lambda Literary, StoryStudio Chicago, and the Stadler Center for Poetry, they hold a B.A. in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. They’re currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard, where they also earned their M.A. in English.
Imani’s poetry appears with Best New Poets, Best of the Net, PBS News Hour’s Brief But Spectacular Series, The Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Shade Literary Arts, The Offing, Brooklyn Poets, Poetry Daily, Frontier Poetry, Honey Literary, TEDx, ROOKIE Magazine, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Notably, they have performed at the Teen Vogue Activism Summit, the Apollo Theater, Brave New Voices, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kelly Writers House, and the Nuyorican Poets Café.
HANNAH EZER is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Her current research focuses on the complex intersections of race and gender for when looking at citizenship, personhood, political organization, and missing persons from a social theory and Black feminist perspective. Hannah received her A.B. in Social Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights from Harvard University. She received her MPhil in History from the University of Oxford. Her previous work focused on Black women’s anti police brutality and a historical precedent for missing white woman syndrome in Antebellum America.
ETHAN GOODNIGHT works at the intersection of racial, religious, and intellectual history in the 19th century Atlantic World. He is interested in how African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans have identified within and without of “mainstream” evangelical groups. Ethan published his first paper “William Apess, Pequot Pastor: A Native American Revisioning of Christian Nationalism in the Early Republic” with Religions in 2017. He holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy from Spring Arbor University and a Masters in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Ethan lives with his wife Maria, a high school Spanish teacher, in Watertown.
ANDREW GUERRERO is a first generation student from Los Angeles County. He holds a B.A. in International Development Studies from UCLA. At UCLA, he was a proud member of the Underground Scholars Initiative and the Million Dollar Hoods Project. His research interests include carceral studies, decolonial thought, settler colonialism, and the history of policing.
HAZIM HARDEMAN is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and the Black radical tradition. His research, more broadly, concerns the processes of differentiation constitutive of modernity and how they’ve facilitated capitalism’s perpetuation and predominance in various conjunctural moments. He completed his undergraduate study at the Community College of Philadelphia and Temple University before receiving an MPhil in US History from the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
JULIA GOLDA HARRIS is a PhD candidate in American Studies with a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation examines entanglements between lesbian and trans communities in the 1970s, with a focus on happenings in Boston and Philadelphia. Before coming to Harvard, she received a B.A. from Oberlin College with majors in Studio Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.
KAREN KRAMER is a curator of Indigenous art and culture whose projects underscore Indigenous agency, creativity, and dynamism, and invite and incite change in the perception of and engagement with Indigenous art, cultures, and histories. She is interested in building a more expansive, inclusive canon of American art and history. Her research will explore arts-based critiques of settler-colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Native art and activism, and approaches to decentering whiteness in the public sector. Karen studied anthropology at the University of Denver (B.A.) and George Washington University (M.A.). She works as a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum and also directs the internationally recognized, Andrew W. Mellon funded Native American Fellowship Program.
ADELAIDE MANDEVILLE is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Drawing from history, cultural studies, and political theory, her interdisciplinary work examines the conflicting ethics and epistemologies that have animated the U.S. from the twentieth century to today. She is particularly interested in discourses of secularism and modernity, and how certain ideas—of the human and nonhuman, of God and nature, of violence and reason, of knowledge and belief—have been used to define, expand, and challenge American power. Focusing on the rise and fall of weather control in the twentieth-century U.S., her dissertation explores how modern/secular ideas about controlling nature worked and, ultimately, how they failed. In addition to her research and writing, Adelaide has helped teach classes on social democracy, environmental history, and American history. She received her BA in Religious Studies from Brown University, where she graduated with honors in 2012.
DYLAN NELSON is a PhD candidate in American Studies from the suburbs of Chicago. He studies the religious and environmental history of the American Midwest with an emphasis on the course and legacies of Native removal, comparative landscapes and infrastructures, and the possibility of sacred geography. He is co-chair of the Native Cultures of the Americas seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center and a Public Humanities Fellow for the Newberry Library’s Indigenous Chicago project. He earned degrees in History and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and a minor in Native American Studies from the University of Michigan.
EVE O’CONNOR is a PhD Candidate in American Studies with a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research brings together cultural and economic histories, with wider interests in ecology, labor, and questions of kinship and family. Her dissertation is a history of cooperative economies in the twentieth-century United States.
CHRISTINE PIAZZA entered the program in 2024. Her research interests focus on the interplay between material culture and intellectual history in mid-19th-century New England. She holds a B.A. in American Studies and Philosophy from Columbia University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She has worked in a number of museums, including the Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming and Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She enjoys textile arts, Victorian novels, and bad puns.
E.T. STONE works in American legal theory and history. Her research explores how private law—law that governs conflicts between individuals, rather than conflicts between an individual and the state—plays a surprisingly powerful role in creating the conditions of possibility for injury, care, and freedom in the United States. Topics of perennial focus in her work include sexuality, property, environmental protection and degradation, race, violence, and political economy. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Chicago, a JD from Yale Law School, and an AM in History from Harvard.
ANDREW SUÁREZ received his B.A. in Ethnic Studies from Columbia University where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. He is currently a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University where he works across Latinx & Latin American Studies, queer theory, and social & cultural history. His dissertation investigates the comparative history of LGBTQ+ and feminist Mexican & Mexican-American activism and life from the late twentieth century to the present through the lens of print culture and ephemera. His lifelong dream is to raise honey bees.
ANTHONY TRUJILLO (OHKAY OWINGEH PUEBLO) works at the confluence of Native American and Indigenous studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and the arts. His research attunes to the bio/geo-graphic manifestations of Indigenous engagement with – and resistance to – colonial/imperial religious, political and economic systems largely in the 18th and 19th centuries North American context but also drawing connections with contemporary Native nations and descendent communities. From a political and geographic angle, he seeks to discern the competing sources and configurations of sovereignty. He is also keenly interested in how expressive forms including music, visual art, oratory and literature become vital avenues through which Indigenous peoples and people of color move beyond the constraints placed upon their bodies, form intimate relationships of exchange among diverse communities, and maintain spaces and practices of belonging. His own revitalizing practices include immersing himself in music, photography, writing, deserts, forests, bodies of water, the night sky and cooking. He received his MDiv from Yale University and his BA in Music Performance from Seattle Pacific University.
GAVIN ZEMPEL is a Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ Dakota scholar, historian, researcher, and author from the Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwestern Minnesota. His past research projects and interests have focused on general Native American and Indigenous Studies, historically on-going trauma in Indigenous communities, social psychology, Indigenous psychology, multicultural
psychology, Native American literature, the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in North America, Indigenous language and cultural revitalization, Indigenous research methodologies, familial and communal histories, oral histories, Očeti Šakowiŋ (7 Council Fires) history, the federal boarding
school system and other Indigenous child removal policies, Indigenous resistance to
colonization, and Dakota history, Dakota language, and Dakota culture. His dissertation is a
history of the Lower Sioux Indian Community and the Isáŋti Dakota, pre-contact to the present-day, which will utilize Indigenous research methodologies, relationality, intersectionality,
Dakota philosophies, and the Dakota language. This dissertation will also incorporate oral
history, archival history, written historic literature, cultural practices, community knowledge, and familial knowledge together. He was a NAUMF fellow for the Minnesota Historical Society’s
Native American Undergraduate Museum Fellowship Program in the summer of 2023. He earned his AA in Communication Studies from Haskell Indian Nations University. He received his BA in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Psychology with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota Morris.