Graduate Fellows 2021-2022
- Ian Gavigan
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.
- James Goodrich
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
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.
- Michael Opal
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
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
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.
