Rustin Zarkar is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at NYU. His research focuses on regimes of mobility and cultural history in and around the Caspian Sea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the co-founder and editor of the Ajam Media Collective, an online space dedicated to culture and politics in Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South Asia. His project utilizes digital mapping, oral histories, and 360 and conventional documentary footage to explore the housing exchange that occurred between Armenian and Azerbaijani refugees in Baku and Yerevan during the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict.

Rohma Khan is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on the experiences of working-class South Asian immigrants as they settled in New York City in the late twentieth century.  Her project, “Rochester’s Immigrant Tales: Voices of a Local Pakistani Community,” is a collaborative oral history project that prompts community members in Rochester, New York to engage in heritage-based work to spotlight the lives and contributions of Pakistani Americans. The project will shed light on how they play an active role in shaping local politics, social activities, and supporting larger community causes in Rochester.

Patrick Sullivan is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Visual and Cultural Studies.  Currently, he is completing a dissertation titled TV Sound in the Network Era, 1952-1984. This dissertation attunes and recalibrates theories of sound to the social and material particularities of television in network era and, in the process, details the sonic history of network TV and the social history of televisual sound.  As a Fellow, he will organize a course bringing Rochester City High School student to the University of Rochester’s campus to learn media literacy and media production.

Myriam Lacroix is a writer and writing instructor pursuing her MFA in fiction at Syracuse University, where she is editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Litro, Vancouver Magazine, and was nominated for a Best of the Net Award. Her public humanities project, Out-Front, is a Syracuse-based writing group for queer youth that aims to foster community through collaboration, experimentation, and self-publishing.

Molly MacVeagh is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Cornell University. She researches the way cultural representations of bioengineering are shifting understandings of humans and our environments. She’s particularly interested in the way narratives of food and farming serve to articulate the relations between domesticity, ecological thought, and biotechnology. For her project, she plans to partner with the Groton Public Library and the Tompkins County History Center to develop a community writing class focused on food and climate change.

Meghan Buckley is a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Stony Brook University.  Her research interests include 20th and 21st century American literature with a focus on ecocriticism, trauma theory, and war literature. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which examines the function of landscape in contemporary literature of the Iraq War. Her public humanities project, titled “Combat Silence,” is dedicated to finding and spreading the stories of female veterans, in partnership with the Herstory Writers Workshop of Long Island.

Meadhbh McHugh is an Irish playwright and PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her plays include Helen and I (Druid Theatre Company), nominated for the Stewart Parker Award 2016, and the stage adaptation of Louise O’Neill’s novel Asking for It for Landmark Productions with the Everyman Theatre and Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Asking for It won the Audience Choice Award at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2018. Meadhbh’s dissertation focuses on trauma and lyricism in contemporary Irish drama, and she has taught university writing for the past three years. As part of the NY Public Humanities Fellowship, Meadhbh will develop and teach a playwriting workshop with incarcerated students […]

Kristi Riley is a second year PhD student in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her studies focus on critical criminology, feminist theory, and popular culture, and she hopes to explore participatory action research. She holds B.A.s in psychology and community studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Master’s of Science in conflict resolution from the University of Oregon Law School. Prior to becoming a Fellow, Kristi spent the past decade working in justice reform, most recently on issues related to reducing the use of jail incarceration at the local level. A New Risk Principle challenges the […]

Elaigwu Ameh is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. His doctoral research explores the lived realities of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria. As a Public Humanities Fellow, he will employ the visceral medium of documentary theater to explore the polygonal predicament of farmworkers in Upstate New York with a view to raising awareness on farmworkers’ unique prerequisites, plights and perspectives, while also galvanizing support for the betterment of their lives. Inspired by his work with underrepresented populations such as prisoners, displaced persons, leprosy patients and immigrant farmworkers, Elaigwu now aspires to […]

Debarati Roy is a second-year Ph.D. student at SUNY Binghamton’s English program where she focuses on South Asian cinema and literature, minority narratives, and diaspora studies. Her Public Humanities project, titled “Untold Stories and Diasporic Voices,” engages with and records the migrant experiences of the diasporic Sikh community in the New York area who were present in India during the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre. As a Fellow, she will be organizing two roundtable conversation sessions and an exhibit pertaining to this event.