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.
JESSICA CARBONE is a writer, editor, and historian of American foodways. She has a BA from Kenyon College in English and Sociology, and her knowledge of food calls upon her years as a developmental editor of cookbooks and recipes at Alfred A. Knopf and Clarkson Potter, and as a food history researcher and public programming developer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Her dissertation focuses on the reframing of cooking knowledge as genuine knowledge in the American cultural landscape in the 19th and 20th century, and her work in general uses food as a lens to explore complex expressions of race, ethnicity, sexuality and class in consumer culture and material culture.
YARELI CASTRO SEVILLA is a PhD Candidate in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies and a certificate in Latin American Studies. My dissertation, Genealogías Chino Mexicanas/Chinese Mexican Genealogies: Digital Community, Self-Archives, and Transpacific Memories, ethnographically details the practices and strategies deployed by descendants to configure, negotiate, and visualize their Chinese Mexican roots and lived experiences in Mexico and across the Americas. Using a hemispheric Asia-Latin America studies framework alongside Latinx feminist criticism, I combine transpacific Asian, Latinx, and Latin American cultural and social histories with original research to map genealogies of Chinese Mexican migration, community and family, diasporic identity, and autoethnography that date back to the early twentieth century, before anti-Chinese violence, roughly from 1900 to 1960, disrupted their towering prospects. I argue that founding the digital community “Inmigraciones Chinas a México” in 2012 has renewed and expanded Chinese Mexican networks of solidarity, enabling the community to garner global visibility and contest legacies of anti-Asian racism. I contend that using autohistoria/self-history and internet-based communities among Chinese Mexicans is a necessity and strategy due to their omission from Mexican and Chinese official histories, national archives, and school curricula. Ultimately, I want to provide a sociocultural perspective of a diasporic community presently linked and organized by shared pasts.
As a formerly undocumented immigrant and a descendant of Sinaloense Chinese Mexicans, immigration is an integral part of her story and a guiding factor for her approaches to research and teaching. Having come from a lineage of migrants, she is passionate about storytelling and a truly interdisciplinary approach to studying diaspora and migration.
Yareli earned an A.M. in History from Harvard University, and graduated from the University of California, Irvine with majors in History and Political Science. She is finishing her last year of the Ph.D. in residence as a graduate fellow at UC San Diego.
yareli_castrosevilla@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.
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.
MICHAEL ORTIZ is a Ph.D student in the American Studies program and pursuing an AM in the Department of History of Science. His research focuses on the history of science, capitalism, and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries and critical social theory. His current project focuses on histories and legacies of medical experimentation in the Global South throughout the post-war era.
JEWEL PEREYRA is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s American Studies program and holds a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Sound Cultures and Dance Performances, 1918-1978,examines the understudied poetic, theatrical and musical performances that emerged from transnational contacts between Filipina and Black women performers. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and various internal grants. At Harvard, she has co-coordinated the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Working Group and the Theater and Performance Colloquium. Outside of Harvard, she has interned at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) and worked as co-director for ASPIRE’s (Asian Sisters Participating in Reaching Excellence) Youth Leadership Program. In her free time, she enjoys painting with water colors to Toro y Moi, hiking in the woods, lyrical dancing, amateur birding, and traveling.
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 an MMUF fellow. His research investigates how the LGBTQ+ acronym is used, transformed, and challenged in transnational contexts as a framework for interpreting gender and sexuality. More broadly, he looks at identity formation for gender and sexual minorities, radical activism in these communities, the colonial history of racialized gender and sexual categories, and how this history shapes contemporary queer politics and identity. Within his work, he pulls from Queer of Color Critique, Decoloniality, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Ethnic Studies. 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.