2016 Edition Participants
Bedour Alagraa
PhD Candidate African Studies Brown UniversityMy research consists of a comparative study on the geographies of death, catastrophe, the creation of death-driven architectonics, and the liminal material/spiritual space of the 'living dead' in post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. More broadly, she is interested in understanding how different ecologies of blackness are shaped and sustained by their relationship with death and mortality.
Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos
PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, University of São PauloMy name is Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos, 29 years old, and I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. I am currently spending one year as a visiting scholar at the Literature Program at Duke University, USA. In my research, I pursue to establish a link between the works of the Frankfurt School (especially Herbert Marcuse) on the Welfare State, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, on the other. My research interests are mainly: marxism; Western Marxism; neoliberalism; critical theory.
Jiyon Byun
Master's program in English literature, Yonsei UniversityI'm from South Korea and live in Seoul. I am currently studing English literature in master's program. I like traveling and watching moves & plays. I'm interested in postcolonialism, queer theory, gender studies, and modern drama.
Xuenan Cao
PhD student in the Literature Program at Duke UniversityShe has written on Chinese contemporary literature and science fictions, and is working her article on the operation of creating "lines-of-not-flight" in the television and cinema culture in China. In her dissertation, she plans to include literary renderings of "burning books" as evidence in various debates with media theorists such as Innis and Kittler, in an update of the concept of mediation in the age of "new" media. She lives in North Carolina in the U.S. and travels between California, Hong Kong and Beijing throughout the year.
Matilde Cazzola
PhD program in History and Cultures (University of Bologna)I am currently enrolled in the second year of the PhD program in History, Cultures, and Civilizations at the University of Bologna. During the last year, I carried out research at King’s College London and at the World History Center, University of Pittsburgh. I am researching on the conceptions of sovereignty and capital accumulation of some of the governors of the British Empire in the stretch of time between the Stamp Act (1765), which opened the American Revolution, and the Colonial Validity Act (1865), which established the non-repugnancy principles between colonial and imperial laws. After analysing Ireland as the incubator of modern British imperial ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I focus on the political concepts developed during main colonial crises: the American Revolution in the province of Massachusetts-Bay, the years between the abolition of slavery (1833) and the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica and Barbados, and the Sepoy Mutiny (1857) in India.
Sudeshna Chatterjee
PhD student at the Department of Global Governance and Human Security at UMBI'm a second year PhD student at the Department of Global Governance and Human Security at UMB. I work on sovereign exception, bare life, peripheral identities in International Relations and post structural feminism. My thesis particularly deals with sex workers movements and how that speaks to neoliberal binaries.
Arielle Concilio
Doctoral program of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa BarbaraArielle Concilio is interested in translation studies, queer and transgender studies, critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial feminisms, and Latin American/Latinx studies. She received her Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, and will begin studies in the doctoral program of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara in the fall of 2016.
Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima
PhD candidate, Department of Sociology at the University of São PauloI am Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima. I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2016 I am staying one year as a visiting scholar at the Literature Program at Duke University. In my dissertation I research the works from Theodor Adorno regarding his debate on aesthetics and how this is linked to marxism. I am especially interested in marxism, literature and Critical Theory.
Matthew Elia
PhD student at DukeI'm a PhD student at Duke. I have an amazing dog. I love basketball. My research focuses on the political and theological legacies of Augustinian Christian thought in the modern world, particularly with regard to race, colonialism, and the making of the modern self.
Can Evren
Doctoral program Cultural Anthropology, Duke UniversityI work mainly on Ottoman/Turkish modernization with a specific focus on the history of modern sports institutions in the 20th century. I do research on the period before, during, and after the World War I and ask how geopolitical conflict pits two competing political alliances in Turkey against one another - one favoring a pro-British future and the other a pro-German future for the Ottoman Empire/Turkey. My research explores how English inspired concepts of society and history clashed with German inspired concepts in a conjuncture in which the Ottomans were allied with the German Empire against the Entente. Empirically, I research how Turkish sports institutions were shaped within a conflict between English inspired notions of competitive sports and competitive social contract, and German inspired notions of cooperation and national harmony.
Mónica F. Gonzales
PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC BerkeleyI am Chilean and I have a Ph. D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley. I am interested in studying the literatures, cinemas and cultures of the Americas from a trans-American and decolonial perspective. I am currently finishing my book on Modernism, which includes three writers: Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), José Martí (Cuba) and Machado de Assis (Brazil). I would like to share part of my work on Rubén Darío during the Summer School in Bologna.
Rachel Greenspan
PhD candidate in Literature at Duke UniversityRachel Greenspan is a PhD candidate in Literature at Duke University, with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. Her dissertation, "Dreaming Woman: Argentine Modernity and the Psychoanalytic Diaspora," investigates the transnational circulation of psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly as it comes to inform conceptions of sexual difference. Her research interests include critical theory, transnational modernism, women’s studies, film and visual culture, intellectual history, and cultural studies. She has published work in The Comparatist and Polygraph, and is currently co-editing a special issue of Polygraph, “Pleasure and Suspicion.” She is also Managing Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS).
Carol Guarnieri
PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of VirginiaAs a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Virginia, my research focuses on eighteenth-century British and Early American literature. My broader research interests include Atlantic world history, British legal history, critical legal studies, postcolonial studies, hemispheric studies, novel theory, and book history. My dissertation project engages with an archive of novels from the long eighteenth century that narrate British encounters with the colonial Caribbean; it argues that attention to these Caribbean tales offers new possibilities for understanding the way the novel form has imaginatively constructed the British subject.
Daniel Henry
University of VirginiaMy main research interests lie in the area of identity politics and black political thought. I study the way social bonds affect, and are in turn constituted by, identity politics. Toward that end, my proposed dissertation research is an attempt to trace the contours of a politics of "sympathy" in black political thought (this is also an archaeology of the concept beyond its present meanings). I have completed a preliminary draft of a paper on Du Bois's early use of sympathy between leaders and groups.
Ege Selin ISLEKEL
PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at DePaul UniversityEge Selin Islekel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy Department at DePaul University. She received her M.A from DePaul in 2014 and she is currently working on her dissertation, titled “Monstrous Visions: Law, Order and the Practices of Visibility.” Her project focuses on the concept of monstrosity and takes a historical approach to investigate the relation between the politics of vision and death formulated around this concept. She has published articles on the role of death in contemporary biopolitics and the role of subjectivation in the construction of sexuality. Her research interests include Aesthetics, Foucauldian Biopolitics and Decolonial Theory. She has recently accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Loyola Marymount University.
Candice Jansen
Curator and documentarian of photographyCandice Jansen is a curator and documentarian of photography. Her research interests include biography, race, and post-apartheid memory. She is pursuing her doctoral studies in the History of Art as an Archibald Mafeje Scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Her last exhibition BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography opened at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2015. She also is the co-curator of the online exhibit AfriPost: Epistolary Journeys of African Pictures (2014). Candice writes for Another Africa and has held positions at the Center for Documentary Studies, the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University Press, and the Impumelelo Social Innovations Centre. She also teaches at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.
Aino Korvensyrja
PhD student at University of Helsinki, University of KasselI see my research interest, European mobility controls and state racism, as an analytical, practical and collective endevour. My PhD research addresses German deportation policies since the 1990s in relation to a larger EU deportation regime, to a German „culture of deportation“ and to resistant mobilities. I conduct co-research with refugee activists based in Germany on specific deportation practices of African nationals from Germany. I'm active in the Free Movement Network Helsinki, organising campaigns, doing media work and co-editing a magazine on migration and asylum issues.
Ashanti Kunene
BA International Studies honors student at Stellenbosch UniversityI'm a BA International Studies honors student at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. My research is looking at the ontological and epistemological inclinations of the #FeesMustFall student collective and the notion of authentic blackness in postcolonial and post-Apartheid revolutionary spaces.
Nehanda Loiseau
Doctoral student in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke UniversityNehanda Loiseau is entering her second year as a doctoral student in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University with a focus on Francophone Theatre. Her research interests are in the business side of theatre (producing, marketing and sustainability) and she continues to apply these learning lessons in her production of both historical and contemporary plays written about Haiti and the Dominican Republic in particular. At Duke this past spring, she produced a three-day theatre festival that addressed the border of these two countries. Her interests also drive her to consider the ways in which specific theatre techniques can respond to global health concerns and trauma. Ms. Loiseau holds an MA in Playwriting from the University of London, Royal Holloway and an MBA from New York University. Before transitioning to academia, she merged theatre with business at Serino Coyne, an advertising agency for Broadway producers, where her clients included the musicals "Wicked" and "Godspell" and the Off-Broadway theatre company, Second Stage.
Hector Maldonado
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San MarcosTransnational history. Natural resources. XX century. Fishery in South Pacific.
Martina Mallocci
Phd University of BolognaI am currently working on E. Franklin Frazier for my PhD project. My research interests include history of race relations in the U.S., African-American Studies, W.E.B. Du Bois, history of Italian immigrants in the U.S.
Ximenia Cecilia Martinez
University of TorontoMy name is Ximena, I am from Chile. My initial education is in the area of pedagogy, history and geography. I was born and I grew up in the North of Chile. Place where I also worked for several years. During my years as a student and as a teacher I developed a deep interest in Indigenous Knowledges and Interculturality, probably as part of my personal history. During 2011 I moved to Toronto to start graduate studies in the area of Sociology of Education. Through my graduates studies I have engaged with Decolonial/Anticolonial and Antiracism theories. These perspectives have informed most of the work that I have done in the area of discourse analysis and education, specifically in curriculum. I am currently working on the whiteness of environmental discourses and its influence in social relations in indigenous communities in the Sur Andean Region. I am very excited about this experience and so much looking forward to meeting with students from many places around the world and of course to participate in this intelectual adventure.
Juan Mateo Martínez Abarça
PhD candidate in Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of MexicoPhilosopher, political analyst and writer from Ecuador. Undergraduate degree in philosophy from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, Master in Political Science from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences and PhD. candidate in Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Currently working as a research assistant at Centro de Estudos Sociais – Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.
Research interests: critical theory, epistemologies of the south, the problem of nature in modernity, social movements.
Julianne McCobin
PhD student in the English department at UVAJulianne is a rising second-year PhD student in the English department at UVA. Her research focuses on the intersections of embodiment, materiality, and literary form in twentieth-century American and global literature.
Rijuta Mehta
Assistant Professor of English Connecticut CollegeI am a Deans’ Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the department of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) at Brown University. In May 2016, I received my Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and in July, I will begin my appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. My research focuses on questions of anticolonialism and their relations to photographic and literary production, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and archival practice.
Yvonne Ortiz Moran
PhD student at Theory and Literary History Program at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP).I am graduated in Social Sciences at State University Paulista (UNESP at Marília), I have done my Masters on Theory and Literary History at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) – receiving a FAPESP scholarship – and currently I am a PhD student at Theory and Literary History Program at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). My research is mainly about:Comparative Literature, Spanish-American Narrative, Mexican Literature, Italian literature, Juan Rulfo, Elio Vittorini.
N. Michelle Murray
Assistant Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt UniversityN. Michelle Murray is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests are rooted in contemporary Spanish literature and film and informed by intersectional fields of literary theory, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her first book project, A Home Away from Home, explores gender, migration, and domestic work in contemporary Spain.
Stéphanie H. Najjar
PhD in Political Theory Johns Hopkins UniversityI am a Lebanese-Egyptian who immigrated to Montreal, Quebec when I was a young teenager. I have a BA in Geography from UNC-Chapel Hill and I have now turned to a PhD in Political Theory with Dr. Jane Bennett to solidify my training in the (modern, white supremacist, eurocentric) history of political thought. Located at the juncture between biopolitics, race, and urban geography, my current work pays particular attention to notions of turbulence, deviance, perversion in a racialized urban context. I am interested in danger and risk in North American cities, and why racialized and marginalized groups put themselves in dangerous situations when their lives are already endangered by a biopolitical order that renders those groups "not-quite-living." I work on Sylvia Wynter and Wynterian scholars, Foucault and Deleuze, among others, and I infuse my work with new materialist thought. I have also embarked on a secondary project on dis/belonging, alterity, language, and racialized immigration in Quebec. In this rather personal branch of my current research, I put Derrida in conversation with critical indigenous studies scholars such as Jodi Byrd and Glen Coulthard in order to interrogate the legitimacy of ossified claims to a national Quebecois identity.
SaifUllah Nasar
MA student in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University Budapest.I'm from Pakistan currently pursuing MA degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University Budapest. I'm interested in postcolonial studies, social theory, globalization and political anthropology.
Ellen Nerenberg
Dean of arts and humanities Wesleyan UniversityI am a scholar (and student) of 20th-c Italian cultural studies. My interests include crime studies, screen studies, and feminist and gender studies. I am currently the dean of arts and humanities and trying to assemble a program in Mediterranean Studies. I am looking forward to using the Institute as a place to learn more about the "global south" and ways I might be able to develop this in an undergraduate, liberal arts setting in North America.
Scott Newman
PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University (USA)Scott Newman has a BA in English and French from Oxford Brookes University and a MSt in World Literatures in English from Oxford University (UK). He recently completed his second year in the PhD program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University (USA). Research interests include: literatures of the global south, especially anglophone, francophone, and lusophone African literature; narrative theory and the novel; transnational and world literature; postcolonial and critical race theory.
Francesco Orlandi
Graduate student University of BolognaI'm a graduate student in Archaeology and Political Sciences with interest in Cultural Cooperation, Indigenous Studies and Human Rights approach to Cultural Heritage. In my master's final dissertation I try to combine these interests within an organic discourse in the context of the evolution of international cultural heritage law, from State's centrality to Communities participation with an emphasis on decolonization theory
Dinara Podgornova
Uppsala UniversityMy PhD research grapples with intersectional feminist discourses in post-soviet online spaces. I want to question how global activist frames and categories travel across geopolitical and cultural contexts. I am interested in:
– feminist critiques of intersectionality
– crossings of post-colonial and post-socialist perspectives
– decolonial option
– geopolitics of knowledge production, including gender studies and feminism
Gabrielle Rajerison
PhD student in English at the University of PittsburghGabrielle Rajerison is a writer, teacher, and PhD student in English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research interrogates love’s relationship to aesthetics, political theory, and notions of personhood within black thought and cultural production. Pro-Twitter.
Lorenzo Ravano
PhD student in Political Thought and Institutions University of BolognaI am a PhD student in Political Thought and Institutions at the Department of History, Cultures and Civilizations, University of Bologna. My research is on the Political Thought of Black abolitionism in the Atlantic World (1760-1865) as the genealogical moment of the so-called Black Radical Tradition.
Research interests: Modern and contemporary Political Thought; Black Atlantic culture, politics and philosophy, Critical Theory, Atlantic and Global Intellectual History, Post Colonial Studies.
Ethan Reed
Doctoral candidate at the University of VirginiaEthan Reed is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia working with 20th and 21st century texts on problems of affect with a focus on frustration and all the other feelings, political situations, and cultural formations with which it is entangled. He is also interested in the digital humanities, and was a 2015-2016 Praxis Program Fellow in the Scholars' Lab.
Holly Runde
Phd candidate in the department of French, University of VirginiaI am a Phd candidate in the department of French at the University of Virginia. When I am not teaching or researching, I enjoy hiking, doing yoga, and visiting Virginia's many vineyards.
My dissertation is on post-WW2 abortion narratives, and the counter-cultural feminine consciousness they produce. I am also interested in Black feminist authors of the French Caribbean, and look forward to exploring the Global South this summer.
Martino Sacchi Landriani
Phd University of Bologna and Paris1 Sorbonne-PanthéonI was born in Milano where I had my BA in Modern Literature and then moved to Bologna for the Master in Comparative Literatures. I wrote my MA dissertation on the relationship between the first volume of Capital and Foucault's 1970s courses on power. I'm currently finishing the second year of my Phd within a co-tutoring program between the University of Bologna and Paris1 Sorbonne-Panthéon, with a research project in History of Political Thought tentatively titled: "Liberal Citizenship and Police Identification Technologies in XIX Century France and Antilles: a Global History of the Livret Ouvrier".
Sa Smythe
Doctoral Candidate in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa CruzSA Smythe is a Doctoral Candidate in History of Consciousness with designated emphases in Literature and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz having previously read Russian Philology and Italian at the City University of New York, and Italian, Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. SA is currently President of the AAIS Queer Studies Caucus and the publishing editor for THEM: Trans Literary Journal and The Critical Contemporary Culture Journal at the London School of Economics. As of Spring 2015, SA Smythe is also a VSR in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge and Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London in the Centres for Cultural Memory and Contemporary Women's Writing.
SA's intellectual formation stems from European and Slavic literary studies, linguistics, postcolonial historiography, Black British and Caribbean cultural studies, queer studies, and critical geography. The dissertation is titled "L'Italia Meticcia: Belonging and Blackness in Postcolonial Italy."
Lorenza Starace
Comparative and Postcolonial Literatures student at the University of BolognaI am currently studying Comparative and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Bologna. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Italian Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome. My current researches involve French and Italian postcolonial literatures, geocriticism, and contemporary literature. I have been working in publishing for the past two year and in 2014 I co-founded a digital publishing house specialized in the recovery of Italian popular fiction.
Anna Thomas
PhD candidate in the English Department at Brown UniversityAnna Thomas is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Brown University. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, colonial and eugenic thought, critical race theory, and ethics.
Cristopher Vázquez Muñoz
3rd-year PhD candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford UniversityI am 3rd-year PhD candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. I am interested in race and ethnicity; queer of color critique; decolonial thought; narrative; media studies; and "coming of age" experiences in literature and in ethnographic testimony.
Simone Vegliò
PhD Candidate at King's College LondonI am a PhD Candidate at King's College London (department of Geography). My current research looks at urban transformations in Latin America by considering the cases of three of the most iconic capital cities: Buenos Aires (1880-1940), Mexico City (1920-1950), and Brasilia (1956-1964). Over the last few years, I have been interested in Postcolonial and 'Decolonial' Studies and been trying to use these perspectives in the analysis of Latin America. Furthermore, I am interested in the figure of Antonio Gramsci and have published an article on the comparison between Gramsci and the Cuban José Martí.
Yuan Xianxin
Post-doctoral fellow at Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study in Humanities and Social SciencesI am currently working as a post-doctoral fellow at Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS), Tsinghua University, Beijing. I got my phd degree at Tsinghua University, January 2016. My phd dissertation is about culture movements and mass politics in 1920s China. My research interest includes cultural history and literature of modern East Asia, Marxism and critical theory.