2023-24 Academic Fellows
Each year, we welcome a new group of scholars to the BBQ+ academic fellowship program. The fellowship fosters ongoing relationships between the fellows and BBQ+ that continue after the academic year is done, and past cohorts remain an integral part of the BBQ+ community.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Molly Benitez
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Molly Benitez (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Molly’s research sits at the intersections of race, gender/sexuality, and labor and utilizes ethnographic and autoethnographic methods to record and analyze the experiences of LGBTQ+ trades workers.
They are currently working on their manuscript, tentatively titled Becoming Your Labor: Identity Production and the Affects of Labor, where they weave together these intersections along with theories of work and affect theory (traced through women of color) to analyze how the conditions of work (physical, social, and cultural) produce and reproduce workers’ identities, bodies, and communities, or how work works on laborers. This production of workers occurs through the ‘affects of labor’ – the visceral and active consequences of our working environments that metabolize through our bodies.
In 2021 Molly was awarded the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Award. In 2018 Molly co-founded the Seattle-based Reckoning Trade Project and Junqtion, a virtual community space made by and for TLGBQIA2S workers. In 2022 Molly founded the LGBTQ+ Trades Worker Archive housed at the Harry Bridges Labor Center at the University of Washington. Molly currently sits on the board of the National LGBTQ Worker’s Center.
Alyssa P. Cole
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Dr. Alyssa Cole is an Assistant Professor in African American Studies, specializing in the intersections of history, health activism, and Black communities in the Midwest. Dr. Cole completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of Kansas, where she also received an M.A. in African and African American Studies. Dr. Cole’s research focuses on health activism, exploring the historical context and contemporary implications of Black individuals and communities advocating for better health outcomes. Her current work, Movement Before the Movement: Black Women’s Health Activism in Kansas City, explores the roles of Black women who advocated for health equity during the early twentieth century. Her research explores the intersections of race, class, and gender, highlighting Black individuals’ agency in their pursuit of health equity.
Keren He
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I am an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained as a scholar in modern Chinese and Sinophone literature, media, and culture, I am particularly interested in theorizing aging and suicide—the inversion of productivity and vitality—as resistant politics of living against the principle of developmentalism, which frequently instrumentalizes individual life courses for state and capital agendas.
In my proposed book project for BBQ+, Anti-Aging in Chinese-Speaking Worlds, I examine how Chinese old age, once privileged in both family and politics, has been reconfigured as an abject form of life as the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong transitioned into aging societies. The book addresses escalating ageism and intergenerational tension in Chinese-speaking societies and beyond by leveraging old age to redefine well-being, agency, and development vis-à-vis the biological and linear view of life. It also advances “age” not as another marginal identity, but as an intersectional analytical nexus that illuminates crisscrossing social hierarchies.
Beyond research, I am an avid bunny advocate and enjoy volunteering for local bunny rescues, where I am learning posthumanism in action.
Brenda Lara
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Joe is an Assistant Professor of History at Gonzaga University, where he works on medieval Islamic religion, science, and literature. His monograph-in-progress, Remembering Bodies: A Medieval Islamic History of Human Enhancement, focuses on medical practices promoted by Arabic and Persian treatises of ethics between 900 and 1400 CE, especially as they relate to the enhancement of Muslim scholars’ intellectual capacities. His broader interests include scholarly identity formation in medieval Islamic societies, premodern emotion and embodiment, queer sexualities of the medieval Middle East, and the depiction of Islam in video games, fantasy, and science fiction.
Joe received bachelor of arts degrees in theology and history from Fordham University, Lincoln Center (2011), before relocating to Boston. There he received a master of theological studies in Islam from Harvard Divinity School (2013), and a master of arts and doctoral degree from Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (2015, 2021).
He has previously taught at Dartmouth College’s Department of Religion, and served a term of three years on the editorial team for Duke University Press’s Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. He has held research appointments at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, and the I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.
Joseph Leonardo Vignone
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Brenda Selena Lara (she/they/ella) is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department. She received her doctoral degree from UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies with an emphasis in Gender Studies and Experimental Critical Theory. Born and raised in South Los Angeles, her upbringing influences her historical, theoretical, and literary research analyzing LGBTQ+ Latinxs’ lives, knowledge, and deaths. Brenda Lara’s current book project “Turning to the Ghosts” examines queer Latinx scholars’ untimely deaths in academia. Her research has been awarded the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship. Brenda Lara’s in-press publications include “Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Salvadoran Women’s Epistemic Hauntings Across Temporality, Space, and Borderlands” in Monsters & Saints: LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling and “Cubans, Queers, and Quinces: Undressing Sexualities, Borderlands, and Feminist Rituals in Netflix’s ‘One Day at a Time” in Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies.
Tara Suri
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Tara Suri is a feminist historian of science with a focus on colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her research examines South Asian political economies that have shaped knowledge production in twentieth-century medicine and biology. She is at work on her first book, which is a global history of South Asia’s biomedical trade in rhesus monkeys.
Tara is a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Harvard Center for History and Economics. She completed her Ph.D. in Princeton’s History Department in 2022.
Advanced Doctoral/Dissertation- Level Fellows
Joe Baez
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Joe Baez is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies department at The George Washington University. In her dissertation, Joe looks at how fat women and fat femmes of color represent themselves in the arts and in media in response to racist, fatphobic, misogynistic stigmas. As a scholar, Joe radically dreams of transforming the ways we love ourselves, our bodies, and each other.
Maya Bhardwaj
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Maya Bhardwaj is a queer South-Indian-American scholar, organiser, activist, and artist + musician. Maya spent the past 10 years prior to academia working as a community organiser across Black and Brown, queer, and working-class communities in the USA, UK, Mexico, India and now South Africa. They are currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, writing on South Asian diasporic leftist activisms, queernesses, and solidarities with Black liberation struggles, and she plays violin and makes art with comrades when she can.
Nabila Islam
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Nabila Islam is a scholar-activist and a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University. Her dissertation answers the question of whether migrant and refugee detention is racially, colonially, and globally structured. Using archives in four countries — the United Kingdom, Switzerland, United States, and Bangladesh — and using a connected history approach, Nabila argues that detention is not a racialized practice by accident or a practice that has recently become racialized, but rather that race has been central to the use of detention against migrants and refugees from inception. In fact, detention became a thinkable and desirable policy solution to migration and the seeking of refuge globally because imperial state actors practiced and perfected detention in order to rule colonized and racialized subjects on the move. Furthermore, she argues that, after decolonization, former imperial and postcolonial state actors, as well as international organizations, have sustained a global system that continues to detain racialized migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees as a matter of policy.
Nabila earned BAs in history and politics at York University and an AM in sociology at Brown University. In addition to investigating the historical trajectory of migrant and refugee detention in her dissertation, she is researching Alternative to Detention (ATD) programs based on electronic detention technologies. With people directly impacted by ATD and community partners at the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, she explores the harms of and resistance efforts to ATD as the co-principal investigator of the Pursuit of Dignity project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and Migrantes Unidos. Her work has also been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Social Science Research Council, the Association of Asian Studies, Sociologists for Women and Society, the Cogut Institute for Humanities, the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia.
Jiya Pandya
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Jiya is an academic and activist invested in praxis-driven and accessible writing, teaching, and organizing. They are currently a PhD candidate in History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, working on a dissertation on the concept of disability in nationalist, post-colonial, and transnational social welfare spaces between the 1930s to 1990s. Their broader research and teaching sits at the nexus of critical disability studies, modern South Asian history, global history, and feminist and queer theories of the body. When not in the carrel or classroom, Jiya is engaged in progressive South Asia organizing, graduate labor politics, and disability justice community. More information on their work can be found on their website: https://www.jiya-pandya.com/
Hebatallah Tolba
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Hebatallah Tolba is a feminist freelance creative writer, researcher and currently a doctoral candidate at the university of East London, UK. Her dissertation looks at how Egyptian Muslim women’s subjectivities emerge through the material relationality between the human and more-than-human in their religious rituals practice, notably with fasting, praying and funeral and burial rituals. Adopting a feminist decolonial methodology, Hebatallah approaches the research as a journey of self-discovery entwined with the personal narratives of twenty Muslim Egyptian women’s material, affective and emotional experiences. Given the strongly gendered nature of religious rituals, the research extends the conversation to feelings, objects, space, and the more-than-human as not only material but relational. Recognising the vital materiality of these everyday practices draws attention to the multiplicity, diversity, and complexity of the religious experience anchoring the knowledge produced in the lives of Muslim women beyond the dichotomy of Secular vs Religious or discourses that blame or are apologetic for religion.
Hebatallah Holds an MA degree in Education, Gender and International Development from the Institute of Education, London and her writings have been published by the Arab Council for the social sciences, Rowaq Arabi, BBC Arabic, Mada Masr and Goethe Institute in Egypt.
Karla Larrañaga
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Karla Larrañaga is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the department of Chicana/o Studies. Her dissertation project examines Guadalupana online community formation as well as digital performances of piety as materialized through digital cultural production. This project situates these online religious communities, performances and new rituals as valuable tools for producing knowledge, identity, and virtual sacred space. These virtual sacred spaces become digital altars and an archive of memory that defies borders and boundaries associated with able-bodiedness, location, and citizenship status. This project aims to expand our understanding of Guadalupana religious performance and ritual so that alternative acts of worship are recognized widely.
Karla earned her B.A. in Chicano Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from Loyola Marymount University in 2017. She has also earned an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Cultural Studies from Kansas State University in 2019 and an M.A. in Chicana/o Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2021. Karla is a Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellow (UIC) and a Mendell Graduate Fellow for the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life (UCSB).
Sara Seweid-DeAngelis
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Sara Seweid-DeAngelis is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Feminist Studies with a minor in Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has received inter- and trans-disciplinary training, and thus, her work lies at the intersections of Critical Disability Studies, Critical Fatness Studies, and Feminist Science and Technology Studies. Her dissertation is entitled "Beauty, Race, and Belonging in the Shadow of Enslavement: Visual Culture and Egyptian Nation-Building (1910-1965)" and it is a detailed study of Egyptian nationhood that examines race, gender, class, and dis/ability through the prisms of beauty and ugliness. Her research has been supported by various fellowships and grants including The University of Minnesota’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF), The Diversity Predoctoral Teaching Fellowship at University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM), The Department of Education's Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) annual and summer fellowships, The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+), The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), among others. Over the past several years, she has designed and taught courses in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology departments at various institutions in Minnesota. She currently lives in New York City with her spouse, toddler, and two cats, while she completes her dissertation research and writing.
Master’s/Early Doctoral Fellows
Spencer Frye
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Spencer is a graduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and an Alain Locke fellow at Cornell University. Their interest areas include phenomenology, social ontology and feminist & queer metaphysics. They are currently working on a project intended to culminate in a collection of essays in which they interrogate the possibility of epistemic white privilege, or put otherwise, mental racial states. In so interrogating, this work will consider the possibility that racial identity might be complicated by some racial quality of one one’s knowing and subsequently, will make a case for the reorientation of racial solidarity efforts.
Isaiah Frost Rivera
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Isaiah Frost Rivera is a Staten Island born and raised scholar, maker, and black digital speculator pursuing his PhD in the African and African Diaspora Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include metamodern horror, queerness, and Afro Diasporic performances of self-sovereignty in the digital age. They hold a BA from CUNY Brooklyn College in English with a double minor in LGBTQ Studies and Puerto Rican & Latino Studies. They also hold an MA in Regional Studies (Latin America and the Caribbean) from Columbia University, as well as an MA in English from Lehigh University. Isaiah’s writing has been featured in Lolwe, Horror Homeroom, and Speculative Nonfiction. His poem “The Commuters” won first prize in the CUNY Labor Arts “Making Work Visible” contest. To read more of their work, visit Isaiah’s WordPress blog The Poetic Xenolith where he writes critical essays about horror films and popular media.
Shebati Sengupta
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Shebati Sengupta is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). They hold an MA in American Studies from UNM, and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Currently, Shebati is looking at frameworks of porousness and boundedness as a way of understanding nation-state building projects. She is particularly interested in how those state building projects intersect with responses to public health crises such as COVID-19. At UNM, Shebati is part of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Certificate program. She is also an instructor in the American Studies department. They created and instructed the first Intro to Asian American Studies course ever taught at UNM. Shebati is also involved with creative writing, and has attended retreats at VONA and Roots, Wounds, Words. She is interested in storytelling as craft, as theory, and as methodology.
Minh Huynh Vu
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Minh Huynh Vu is a 3.5th-year doctoral student at Yale University pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Interested in everyday material cultures of discard, decay, and decomposition amidst the ongoing aftermath of U.S. empire, Minh is writing a dissertation on the cardboard box as a reproductive technology of war and militarism across the 20th and 21st centuries.
Leslie Torres
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Leslie Torres is a master's student in the MA to PhD history program at Texas A&M University. Her research is centered on how racial violence and self-determined and outsider-perceived conceptualizations of ethnic Mexicans as a separate race or ethnicity from Anglo Americans influenced ethnic Mexican social and political organizing in late 19th and early 20th century Texas. She primarily studies both law-abiding and reactionary Mexican resistance, mutualistas (Mexican mutual aid societies), the 1919 J.T. Canales Texas Ranger investigation, vigilante and state-endorsed lynchings, and social constructions of race and ethnicity. Her master's thesis is tentatively titled, "'Bad Sons of Uncle Sam': Ethnic Mexicans and Acts of Resistance in Early 20th Century Texas."
Undergraduate Fellows
Zoé Coker
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Zoé Coker is a fourth-year student at Howard University, majoring in Africana Studies and minoring in Philosophy from Houston, TX. Her current research project asks how the historical development of a jazz institute at Howard University reflected the institution's broader political landscape in the late 1960s. She is also a prospective graduate student in Ethnomusicology. Beyond academics, she enjoys writing poetry, gardening, and community engagement.
Daniel Foster
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Daniel Foster is a senior at Harvard College pursuing a joint concentration in Social Anthropology and African American Studies with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and a language citation in Spanish. Daniel’s academic interests include African diaspora religious studies, Afro-Caribbean history, digital ethnography, and sociolinguistics. Currently, Daniel is writing his senior thesis on Black American practitioners of Yoruba religious traditions, particularly Ìṣẹ̀ṣe and Lukumi from Nigeria and Cuba, respectively. On campus, Daniel has cultivated his passion for music of the African Diaspora as a member of the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College and built community among Caribbean students at Harvard as Vice President of the Harvard Caribbean Club.
Kourtney Payne
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Kourtney Payne is a fourth year Sociology and Anthropology Major, Public Health Minor from Atlanta, Georgia. Kourtney serves as a Social Justice Program Fellow, UNCF/Mellon Mays Fellow, Pad Project Coordinator, and Knittens Founder and President on Spelman's campus. Kourtney's current research interests include Black queer theory, Black womanist theory, Black sexuality studies, and critical epistemological studies. Kourtney commits herself to a scholar-activist pursuit by continuing the work of Black Womanist and Queer Theorists that came before her, signifying her role as a researcher as an ancestral ode to their very significant contributions to Black Liberation.