Caitlin McIntyre is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her dissertation, “Agrimodernism: Circum-Atlantic Aesthetics and the Plantation” pairs 20th century novelists from Ireland and the British Caribbean, tracing their literary responses to the environmental legacies of the colonial plantation. As a Public Humanities fellow, she will work with communities of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, on whose land Buffalo is situated, along with local conservationists and residents of the Buffalo-Niagara region, to build climate resiliency from the ground up, through a study of the horticultural practices that predate colonial settlement and industrial development in the […]

Benjamin E. Burgholzer is a Ph.D. candidate in Binghamton University’s English department with a creative writing focus. His project, “Writing for Recovery in the Southern Tier”, will offer creative writing workshops created specifically for addicts and people suffering from other mental illnesses currently in treatment with the intention of inspiring hope and recovery by helping them find their own voices, voices that have often been ignored or cast away by society. This program will not only to offer a much-needed creative outlet to these people, but also to help destigmatize addiction treatment, recovery, and mental illness by increasing awareness of […]

Ashley “Ash” Marinaccio is a theatre artist and scholar who is dedicated to documenting the socio-political issues that define our times by creating work that challenges the status quo and transforms the way we see the world. She is listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”. As a director, performer, and playwright, her work has been seen off-Broadway, at the White House, United Nations, TED conferences across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Ash is a Level II Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research interests include exploring theatre practices […]

Andrew Rimby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English department at Stony Brook University. He researches nineteenth-century American and Victorian literature from a queer trans-Atlantic perspective. He is the 2019 inaugural recipient of the Guiliano Global Fellowship which will allow him to go to the British Library, in July, to look at the Lady Eccles Oscar Wilde collection. He is a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences. Recently, he was on the organizing committee for International Whitman Week (IWW) which was held at NYU, in May 2019. […]

Alexandra Prince is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Their dissertation research examines the intersections of the history of American religions and the history of madness. Their previous work on the Oneida Community’s pioneering eugenics experiment has been published in Zygon:Journal of Religion and Science. Prince’s public humanities project is entitled History+Gender and is focused on engaging the public in addressing the gender bias on Wikipedia through application of the tools of historical research.

Alanna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University. As an historical bioarchaeologist, she draws upon skeletal, archival, and material traces to understand lived experiences in the past. Her dissertation explores the intersections of health, labor, and citizenship through the embodied experiences of Irish immigrants living and dying in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her work as a Public Humanities Fellow will culminate in an interactive digital exhibit that maps the life histories of these immigrants on the historical urban landscape of New York City. This map will allow the viewer […]

Akua Banful is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, “The Hostile Tropics: Towards a Postcolonial Discourse of Climate,” explores the interaction between imperialism and the representations of tropical nature and life in tropical climates in examples from anglophone, francophone, and lusophone literatures. Her Public Humanities project, “Climate Arts: Reading, Recycling, Making,” will create a mixed curriculum of climate-oriented fiction and recycled and otherwise environmentally engaged art that she will work through with public high school students. Through reading and discussing literature, contemplating recycled art, and completing a project of their own, this project […]