Meet our 2023-2024 Graduate Student Fellows!
Yasmine Anderson English
Yasmine Anderson is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric & Composition. She holds a MA from the University of Chicago’s Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities and a BA in English from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation investigates how twenty-first century popular culture in the United States makes use of Black women’s classic blues from the 1920s and 1930s to remix the sexual-economic politics developed by earlier blues women in the context of our contemporary landscape. This summer, she will be working on dissertation chapters that engage with blues-centric biopics of the last fifteen years and the work of contemporary Black blues artists respectively.
Marcelo José Cabarcas Ortega Hispanic Languages and Literatures
Marcelo José Cabarcas Ortega is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His interests are focused on Afro Latin American literary and cultural production, and Black Atlantic thinking and writing. He has participated in various conferences, being the most recent this spring's "Centers & Peripheries" conference, hosted by the Texas Tech University Medieval & Renaissance Studies Center, and the Conference on ‘Black Mobilities in the Atlantic World’, at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire, UK (january 2022). Marcelo is currently working in the chapter “The Visual Semantics of Trade, Empire and Resistance in the Depictions of Queen Nzinga of Ndongo” (sixteenth-century Angola), part of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production, edited by professor Dominique Polanco (Virginia Tech).
Sritama Chatterjee English
Sritama Chatterjee(she/her) is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World. Her dissertation “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writings” studies how Indian Ocean narratives articulate an aesthetic of the ordinary as part of an environmental imagination that is not crisis driven. She revises how literary histories of environmentalism have been told in the Indian Ocean archipelagos and illustrates how the spatial lens of the archipelagic challenges the supposed coherence of the postcolonial nation-state, rewriting postcoloniality in the tides, prisons, and plantations. Her writings on environmental justice and pedagogy have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian Review as well as public scholarship venues such as NICHE Canada, Edge Effects, and Environmental History Now.
As a Humanities Center summer fellow, she will draft a chapter on vernacular environmental periodicals from the last two decades published in Bangla from the tidal archipelago Sundarbans shared between India and Bangladesh. Building on her archival and translation work, she will interrogate how unexpected, quiet, and subtle forms of environmental justice with a different set of terms than “climate change” can emerge from these periodicals. This will enable us in re-evaluating the larger planetary histories of environmental change through the scale of local ecological shifts in the Sundarbans.
YuHao Chen Music
YuHao Chen is a PhD candidate (Ethnomusicology track) in the Department of Music. His doctoral work probes Sinophone speech notations through the lens of sound studies and disability histories, using materials from disability pedagogy, phonetic science, and the script reform movement to embody notated Chinese sounds from the turn of the twentieth century. During the fellowship, YuHao will be working with braille artifacts to explore semblance of spoken sounds along grainy archival spines.
Victoria LaFave Theatre Arts
Victoria LaFave (she/her) is a dramaturg, educator, and scholar from Little Rock, Arkansas. Victoria is completing her fourth year of the PhD program in Theatre and Performance Studies and is pursuing a graduate certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her research explores twentieth-century U.S. popular performance with a focus on queer studies, affect, and cultural memory.
With the support of the Humanities Center Fellowship, Victoria will begin researching and writing her dissertation, “Queering American(a): Embodiment, Affect, and Performing Archives,” which conceptualizes Americana as a queer aesthetic and national affect.
Miranda Bartira Tagliari Sousa Music
Miranda Bartira Tagliari Sousa is a Musicology PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, with a research focus on Brazilian music from the turn of the twentieth century, national identity, and modernism. She earned a MM in Ethnomusicology from Unesp (Brazil), and a MM from UTRGV. As a recipient of the 2023 Humanities Center Summer Research Fellowship, she is working on a project named Concert Music in the “Tropical Paris:” Decolonial Perspectives on Practices of Social Difference in Rio de Janeiro’s Belle Époque (1880-1920), which examines the relationships between music, race, gender and social exclusion in post-colonial Rio de Janeiro. Photo credits: Paulo Serau.
Alexander Tough Hispanic Languages and Literatures
Alexander Tough is a PhD candidate in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His dissertation examines how Pemón peoples in and around Canaima National Park in Venezuela use Internet and Communication Technologies for their social and political goals. It aims to increase understandings about the tribal and design issues at hand when adapting technology for collective “good living” (Buen vivir) practices in the midst of extraction. For his summer project, he will be performing community-based ethnographic fieldwork with this Pemón Indigenous group to co-construct a public-facing website of their Life Plan, a reflective manifesto on communal well-being in the extraction zone.
Briana Wipf English
A PhD candidate in the English department, Briana Wipf studies the literature of cultural contact produced during the medieval period. She is also pursuing a graduate certificate in digital studies and methods, focusing her work on digital textual analysis. As a Humanities Center summer research fellow, Wipf will engage with Arabic-language primary source texts written during the medieval period. These texts, most of which have no published English translation, are important components to her dissertation project, which undertakes comparative analysis of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish portrayals of the marvelous during the Middle Ages.