Graduate Fellows 2023-2024

Aprilakis, Emmanuel

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,

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Herrera, Krysta

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

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Reynolds, Milan

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

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Sanchez-Zweig, Sara

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.

Selmer, Aidan

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

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Wong-Nelson, Julian

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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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Graduate Fellows 2020-2021

Christiane Fischer

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

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Che Gossett

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

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William Green

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:

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Dan Malinowski

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

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Emmet von Stackelberg

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

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Graduate Fellows 2019-2020

Shari M. Cunningham

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

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Nora Devlin

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

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Benjamin Foley

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,

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Scott Harris

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

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Man Kaplan

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

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Graduate Fellows 2018-2019

Danielle Allor

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

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Virginia Conn

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

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Aghil Daghagheleh

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

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Alex Leslie

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

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Irina Nicorici

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

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Mónica Hernández Ospina

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

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