Angela Veronica Wong is a Ph.D. candidate in English. Her dissertation focuses on the transnational politics of women’s cultural labor in the Caribbean, U.S., and U.K. from 1910-1970. She is the author of the full-length collection of poetry, elsa, and her chapbook Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter won the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship. Her fiction has been published in journals like Denver Quarterly, and her performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City. As a Public Humanities Fellow, she will look at representations of cross-racial solidarity in Buffalo’s black […]

Matt Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Syracuse University. His dissertation uses the career of the writer Wallace Stegner to examine the intellectual history of the American West in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the summer of 2017 he will be a scholar-facilitator for the Idaho Humanities Council’s Summer Teacher Institute, “Wallace Stegner and the Consciousness of Place.” His Humanities NY Fellowship project gathers leaders from various neighborhoods in Syracuse to lead discussions about the human and environmental history of beloved places in Syracuse.

Danielle B. Schwartz is a Ph.D. student in the English department at Binghamton University specializing in the intersections of transnational film studies, gender, race, and neoliberalism. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English, both from Michigan State University. Her research interests include hard-to-place cinema that transcends the boundaries of the local and the global, intersectionality and Black feminism, and decolonial methodologies. She also has a background in American, female-centric teen films spanning from the 1980s to the early 2000s. For her fellowship project, Danielle plans to create a public space for SUNY Binghamton cinema students, local residents, and […]

Elaine Chang Sandoval is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and a Magnet Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is recently returned from Fulbright-sponsored fieldwork in Venezuela, where she conducted her dissertation research on the development and pedagogies of Alma Llanera, a program founded to include traditional llanera music within the national Venezuelan system of music education, “El Sistema.” Sandoval received her Masters from Oxford University and her BA from Soka University of America, and was a Sistema Fellow at New England Conservatory. Her project seeks to share her fieldwork findings with El Sistema-inspired music education programs, specifically to cultivate […]

Originally from Colombia, Denisse Andrade is an educator, curator and activist currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York.  Denisse looks at the poetics and politics of land in the Black Radical Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Denisse’s project consists of using archival material on Black and Brown radical movements to create a People’s Library where people can engage with historical material and ultimately produce a collective publication.

Marquis Bey is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell University’s English department. His dissertation, The Blacknesses of Blackness: Feminist Fugitivity and Radical Transness, explores the radical potentiality of Blackness as a conceptual force of fugitivity rooted in feminist and trans theorizing. Marquis is also a published essayist, and has written for general audiences on the subjects of Blackness, feminism, and transgender subjectivity. As a Public Humanities Fellow, Marquis will develop “theorizing on the block,” leading discussions that show how academic thinkers’ theory is present within pop culture and media, and how theory is deeply relevant to our everyday lives

Tanja N. Aho is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University at Buffalo, where she is completing a dissertation on the racialized pathologization of states of intensity in anti-neoliberal discourses, ranging from radical left manifestos and neoliberal literature to pop psychology blogs and the sharing economy. Her other work on madness/disability, political economy, and television has been published in several anthologies and is forthcoming in American Quarterly, Lateral, and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. In 2015 she served as the interim managing editor of the Disability Studies Quarterly and is currently the chair of the […]

Hugh Burnam (Mohawk Nation, wolf clan) is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University.  He holds a B.S. in Individualized: Ethnic and Minority Studies (2010) and an M.A. in Adult Education (2011) from Buffalo State College.  His research interests include social justice in education, community engagement efforts, language revitalization, environmental advocacy, and Indigenous genders. Hugh’s dissertation explores Indigenous student experiences in higher education, nation-building, and Indigenous masculinities.  As a Public Humanities Fellow, Hugh proposes a project called The Haudenosaunee Thought Project, which will generate critical intergroup and intragroup conversations about Indigenous identities within Haudenosaunee communities and neighboring communities.

Almudena Escobar López is a Ph.D. student in Visual and Culture Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation explores the notion of collaborative aesthetics in relation to ideas of artistic cooperativism, paying particular attention to the filmmaker’s cooperatives founded in the 1960s in New York, San Francisco, and London. Almudena’s fellowship project will explore the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative (NYFC) and its collectivist spirit in relation to the current collaborative global tendency in community cultural development. The project involves facilitating the public access of the NYFC archive, and a screening series that will function as open inter-generational spaces of […]

Javier Gastón-Greenberg is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University working on comics and other visual media-narratives. His dissertation will focus on the construction and crisis of hero mythologies in Cuba and Latin America. With his Public Humanities Fellowship he will develop and implement a project called Hero Genesis, a high school curricula that employs comic book culture and its secret language to discover the hidden powers residing in immigrant youth in New York City. It aims to do this by channeling youth expression through professional development workshops for educators and in-school responsive curricula that harnesses multimodal comic-themed medias […]