PAST FELLOWS
2023/2024 Fellows
JOSHUA COHEN
Joshua I. Cohen is Associate Professor of art history at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (University of California Press, 2020), and co-editor, with Foad Torshizi and Vazira Zamindar, of a special issue of ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn (June 2023). His current book project, Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War, analyzes African modernist practices in the context of France’s colonial empire transitioning into a capitalist-imperialist sphere of influence.
Mia Curran
Mia Curran is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History. Her research addresses the entanglements of modernisms and race, with a particular focus on diasporic and transnational networks of exchange in the Americas, the production of history and futurity in the visual field, and theories and practices of Black visuality. Mia has taught at Hunter College, Fordham University, and City College on topics including the introductory survey of art history, Modern Art in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Art in the Age of Black Power, and she has held positions in the curatorial departments at the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her dissertation is a monographic study of the work of Aaron Douglas.
Maggie Fife
Maggie Fife is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center who works in ethics, social epistemology, and feminist philosophy. Her dissertation focuses on the roles of hope and moral imagination in political activism, particularly in the prison abolition movement. She is also interested in moral psychology, political philosophy, metaethics, and the role of speculative fiction in ethics. Maggie is an adjunct lecturer teaching social and political philosophy courses at Baruch College and is currently exploring community-based learning models. Additionally, she is a Writing Fellow at Hostos Community College’s Writing Across the Curriculum program.
Janet Neary
Janet Neary is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives, essays in J19, ESQ, African American Literature, MELUS, and a variety of scholarly collections on African American literature and culture. She is the editor of Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays by Lindon Barrett. Her current book-in-progress, Speculative Life: Nineteenth-Century African American Literature and Visual Culture of the West, examines Black Western cultural life in the wake of the California Gold Rush and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
Nandini Ramachandran
nramachandran@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Nandini Ramachandran is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her thesis is a constitutional ethnography that focuses on the evolution and implications of the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It discusses the relationship between law, identity, and daily life in postcolonial India with a particular emphasis on political belonging, customary law, criminal jurisprudence, and the conceptual history of the “tribe” within and beyond anthropology.
ALEXANDER ZEVIN
Alexander Zevin is Associate Professor of History at the College of Staten Island and an Editor at New Left Review. His research interests include the history of political economy and empire, along with intellectual and media history. His first book, Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (2019) offered a new interpretation of the dominant strand of liberalism by examining it through the prism of one of the most influential and enduring of self-proclaimed liberal voices – the Economist.
He is currently at work on a project on the relationship between liberalism and socialism that starts from their emergence out of the crashing of the revolutionary wave of the late eighteenth century, and the criticisms of the socio-economic order that resulted from it posited by the likes of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.
2022/2023 Fellows
Ana Flavia Badue
apulsinilouzadabadue@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Ana Flavia Badue is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Cente. Her research focuses on Brazilian startups that develop digital technologies applied to industrial agriculture. By examining how entrepreneurs, financial investors, and farmers relate to, and make sense of, technologies like drones, nano-satellites, and digital platforms, her work explores thenexus between finance, technology and agriculture. She uses the Brazilian ethnographic case to expand discussions about global capitalism, and to explore contemporary imperial and post-colonial relations.
Scott Erich
Scott Erich is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on ideas of territory, property, and rights around the extraction of marine natural resources (including fish, sponges, pearls, corals, and oil) in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, and is supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program. Most recently, Scott was a visiting scholar at the American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., and was previously based in Muscat, Oman as a Fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs. Scott is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Baruch College, where he teaches courses on cultural anthropology, the ocean, and the Anthropocene.
Siân Silyn Roberts
sian.silyn.roberts@qc.cuny.edu
Siân Silyn Roberts is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She received her BA and MA from the University of Auckland and her PhD from Brown University. She is the author of Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 (UPenn Press, 2014) and the editor of the Broadview edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (Broadview Press, 2018). Her work in the field of early American literature examines how ruptures in style and form emerged as the cultural legacies of new world colonialism, revolution, and slave capitalism. Her new book project, Rewilding the Word: Abandonment, Reclamation, and Climate Crisis, examines the intersections of form, sovereignty, and biocentrism. She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early American, gothic, and environmental literature.
Justin Rogers-Cooper
Justin Rogers-Cooper is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and a faculty member in the Master's in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His scholarship focuses on American cultural and literary studies in the long nineteenth century, and the racial and gender politics of labor cultures. He is at work on a book manuscript on the 1877 general strike, and has new work appearing in New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (Bloomsbury 2022) and New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press 2023). He is a frequent guest on the podcast Nostalgia Trap.
Naomi Schiller
Naomi Schiller is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center at CUNY. Her research and teaching focus on urban politics, climate justice, race and racism, decolonizing methodologies, visual and media anthropology, and the state. Naomi is author of Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela (Duke University Press 2018). Her current book project explores urban climate adaptation, housing, solidarity, race, racism and class in New York City. She is also working on a collaborative oral history project about land-use activism, anti-displacement organizing, and urban governance in New York City. Her recent documentary film about food insecurity and mutual aid in the Lower East Side at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic screened at the Bushwick Film Festival, the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, and the Figuera Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain.
2021/2022 Fellows
Ece Aykol
Ece Aykol is a Professor of English and Co-director of Assessment and Institutional Learning at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Ece received BA and MA degrees in English from Istanbul University,Turkey. She completed her doctorate in English and certificate in Film Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She was a lecturer of English and Film at Virginia Commonwealth University prior to her return to CUNY in 2014. Her research focuses on intermediality in memory and diaspora studies. Ece’s recent publications are in the journals Image[&]Narrative and Pacific Coast Philology. Her current research project explores James Baldwin’s transnational legacy among artists from Turkey and the Balkans who reside, remember, and create in the diaspora.
Caity Bolton
Caitlyn Bolton is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research analyzes transnational currents of Islamic reform, development, and knowledge production between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the American Council of Learned Societies, her dissertation examines transnational Islamic organizations working in development and education in Zanzibar, and how African Muslims employ Islamic knowledge to produce their own programs of social change. She speaks Arabic and Swahili, has a BA in Anthropology and Africana Studies from Bard College, and an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University, where she received the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Islamic Africa, the Routledge Handbook on Islam and Race, Items: Insights from the Social Sciences (SSRC), and the edited collection Islamic Scholarship in Africa. She taught classes on religion, Africa, and the Middle East in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College for three years.
CHITRALEKHA
Chitralekha is an anthropologist and sociologist with Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her first book, based on ethnographic fieldwork with armed cadre in India’s long running Maoist insurgency and perpetrators in the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, was an effort to describe and locate the existential ideologies of foot soldiers of violence in both contexts, as opposed to the formalized, literate ideologies of left radicalism or Hindutva [Ordinary People, Extraordinary Violence: Naxalites and Hindu Extremists in India, Routledge, 2012; South Asia Edition 2018]. She has published since in venues including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly; and in several edited volumes. Her recent work appears in The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge, eds. Didier Fassin and George Steinmetz, Duke University Press (2022, forthcoming); and Making Histories, eds. Paul Ashton et. al; series eds. Indira Chowdhury and Michael Frisch, De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2020). She is presently working on a book project on the remembered work of lived history and time on (re) constitutions of resistance and the dreamwork of freedom. Chitralekha’s research has been supported by Nehru Memorial Fund, Delhi (2003-2004) and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, where she was Member (2017-18) and Visitor (2018-19).
Luke Church
Luke Church is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on circum Atlantic narratives of the long 18th-Century, with particular attention to the connections between early America and the Caribbean. Navigating the theoretical terrain of Aesthetic Theory and Decolonial Study, his work highlights practices of living and knowing that are resistant to Enlightenment humanism. He is currently working on his dissertation, Chromatic Dissensus: An Otherwise Archive of Natural Dyes, 1750-1856, which explores an Anglophone colonial archive regarding the production and circulation of natural dyes in order to think through the sensorial disciplining of liberal humanism.
Jack Crawford
Jack Crawford is a teaching artist and art history PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on modes of queer performance in the postwar period. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is currently a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art. She has taught "Modern Art" and "Art in the US" at Brooklyn’s City Tech and currently lives in Nashville.
Hande Gurses
Hande Gurses, originally from Istanbul, is a scholar of comparative literature. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from University College London. Her primary research interests include contemporary world literature, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies. She is also interested in inclusive pedagogies and contemplative practices in higher education. She taught courses on international short story, migration, dystopian literatures, and ecocriticism. Most recently she co-edited a volume on ecocritical approaches to contemporary Turkish literature titled Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film (Routledge Press, 2019). Currently she is working on a book manuscript titled Reframing Bridges and Borders in the Fictions of Orhan Pamuk. In her book she focuses on the imagery of the bridge in the construction and representation of distinct identity categories. She held positions at UMass Amherst, University of Toronto, Ryerson University and Simon Fraser University. She is currently teaching at the English Department, Capilano University.
Kareem Rabie
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. He studies privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, is due out April 2021 with Duke University Press. Previously he was Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford.
Amir Reicher
Amir Reicher is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Mellon/ACLS Fellow. His research is about settlers in the West Bank. Awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, for his dissertation Amir lived and conducted research for almost two years in a remote outpost community in the Judean Desert. His project is about post-fundamentalist radicals as he shows how a national-religious project for the sake of expanding the state is led, paradoxically, by those who try to run away from it. He is interested in what happens after nothing happens; or, to put it differently, when the messiah fails to arrive. Amir holds a B.A in history and philosophy from Tel Aviv University and is an adjacent lecturer at Hunter College where he is currently teaching the introduction to cultural anthropology course.
Lili Shi
Lili Shi is an associate professor and the Director of Speech at the Department of Communication and Performing Arts at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. She grew up in China’s Southwest Yunnan Province and did her graduate work at Arizona State University (MA 2006) and Howard University (Ph.D. 2010) on a feminist critique of acculturation theories based on Chinese immigrant women’s lived experiences of cultural adaptation. Her current research focuses an interdisciplinary approach to study Brooklyn Chinatown’s gendering diaspora through immigrant women’s pregnancy and motherhood within the local and global politics of space, race, gender, and transnationalism. She has presented at various conferences nationally and internationally and is a recipient of the Waterhouse Family Institute Research (WFI) Grant for the Study of Communication and Society, Villanova University, 2016-2018. She has published in China Media Review, Journal of Motherhood Studies along with many other book chapters, and guest-edited Women’s Studies Quarterly’s special issue “Asian Diasporas” in spring/summer 2019. She has been a board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly since 2017.
Nichole Shippen
Shippen received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is currently Program Coordinator and Associate Professor of Political Science at LaGuardia Community College at CUNY. She is the author of Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (2014), for Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice book series. Her book reconsiders discretionary time as a measure of freedom through the concept of temporal autonomy as developed through the Aristotelian-Marxist and critical theory traditions. Her research is further enriched by the respective contributions of feminist, post-colonial, and critical race theory.
Her current research focuses on bordertown violence through the lens of settler colonialism and critical Indigenous theory and its politics of recognition critique. During the 2021-22 Committee on Globalization and Social Change Fellowship, she is completing an article, “Decolonizing Bordertown Violence: Settler Colonialism, Strategies of Elimination, and Indigenous Resistance” and a future book chapter, “If Indigenous Women Counted: Critical Thoughts on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) Legislation in the United States” as part of a larger book project, which will integrate interviews and archival materials from her sabbatical research conducted during the 2019-2020 academic year.
Jini Kim Watson
Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her research and teaching focus on Asia Pacific literature, film and cultural studies in relation to decolonization and the global Cold War; spatial and urban theory; questions of sovereignty and political modernity; and Marxism and critical theory. She is the author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021); The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota UP, 2011); and has also co-edited, with Gary Wilder, The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham UP, 2018). Watson received her PhD from Duke University and undergraduate degrees in architecture and liberal arts from the University of Melbourne and University of Queensland, Australia.
2020/2021 Fellows
CHITRALEKHA
Chitralekha is an anthropologist and sociologist with Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her first book, based on ethnographic fieldwork with armed cadre in India’s long running Maoist insurgency and perpetrators in the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, was an effort to describe and locate the existential ideologies of foot soldiers of violence in both contexts, as opposed to the formalized, literate ideologies of left radicalism or Hindutva [Ordinary People, Extraordinary Violence: Naxalites and Hindu Extremists in India, Routledge, 2012; South Asia Edition 2018]. She has published since in venues including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly; and in several edited volumes. Her recent work appears in The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge, eds. Didier Fassin and George Steinmetz, Duke University Press (2022, forthcoming); and Making Histories, eds. Paul Ashton et. al; series eds. Indira Chowdhury and Michael Frisch, De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2020). She is presently working on a book project on the remembered work of lived history and time on (re) constitutions of resistance and the dreamwork of freedom. Chitralekha’s research has been supported by Nehru Memorial Fund, Delhi (2003-2004) and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, where she was Member (2017-18) and Visitor (2018-19).
Miriam Ticktin
Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research; she will start a new position as Associate Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center in Fall 2021. Previously, she held positions at the University of Michigan, and at Columbia University. She has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Between 2017-19, she co-directed the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Imaginative Mobilities” at The New School. Ticktin has written on immigration, humanitarianism, border walls, and gender and race in France and the US, including a book entitled Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, and a co-edited volume called In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care. She was a founding co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Ticktin is currently at work on two related book projects: 1) a short book on innocence as a political concept, and how it produces an unending search for purity; 2) a book on border walls as transnational technologies, with the goal of reimagining the idea of bordering.
JULIE LIVINGSTON
Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and of History at New York University. She is interested in the body as a moral condition and mode of experience, taxonomies and the relations that challenge them, African thought and political and moral imagination; relations between species, and the public health consequences of capitalism and economic growth. Livingston has been an invited fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is the author of Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019), Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005). A member of the Social Text collective, she is co-editor of two special issues of Social Text: Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool) and Interspecies (coedited with Jasbir Puar). She has become interested in debt through her participation in the NYU Prison Education Program Research Collective.
LEIGH CLAIRE LA BERGE
Leigh Claire La Berge's work concerns aesthetics and political economy, broadly speaking. Her first book, "Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s" (Oxford, 2014), tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her most recent book, "Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art" (Duke, 2019) explores the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she calls "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, she is the co-editor of the collection, "Reading Capitalist Realism" (Iowa, 2014). La Berge is currently working on a new book entitled "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary." The title says it all.
Hosu Kim
Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and an affiliated doctoral faculty of Critical Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center. Her current research project examines an idea of care, healing and reparation at communities and sites afflicted with state violence, such as including Korean transnational adoptees’ DNA activism, the former US military base, civilian massacre, the grounds of popular protests in South Korea. She is the author of Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016.
KAREEM RABIE
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. He studies privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, is due out April 2021 with Duke University Press. Previously he was Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford.
CHINA SAJADIAN
China Sajadian is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. With support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Orient-Institut Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation, her dissertation examines agricultural labor relations in Lebanon, a tiny country hosting the highest number of refugees per capita in the world. Focusing on the Syrian-Lebanese borderland region of the Bekaa Valley, her research explores the significance of a refugee crisis that is critically shaped by previous histories of migration. Based on archival research and daily fieldwork with Syrian refugee-farmworkers, the dissertation examines how a loss of cross-border mobility for labor migrants throughout the Syrian war has reconfigured agrarian relations, with a focus on the intersection between circuits of debt, moral concepts of obligation, and gendered regimes of labor exploitation. She holds a BA in Government from Smith College and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University, where she was a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. She was a fellow in the Middle East Political Economy Summer Institute in 2016 and the Lebanon Dissertation Summer Institute at American University of Beirut in 2018. She taught for three years in the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College.
JARRETT MORAN
Jarrett Moran is a doctoral candidate in History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he is writing a dissertation on the history of the concept of culture in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth century. He has an MA in Modern European studies from Columbia University and a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University. As a graduate teaching fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he has taught courses on the history of British radicalism and empire. He is currently a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Baruch College.
MICHAEL RUMORE
Micheal Rumore is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation, titled “Black Water: Race and the Human Project in the Indian Ocean Imagination,” approaches the Indian Ocean as an African diasporic site. The project interrogates why dominant notions of oceanic “cosmopolitanism” appearing frequently in the field of Indian Ocean studies tend to exclude Blackness and Africanness. Ultimately, his research engages contemporary questions of “cosmopolitical” solidarity and diasporic subjectivity in resistance to globalized processes of dispossession and proliferating ethno-nationalisms. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as the edited collection Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, Social Text Online and Studies in the Fantastic. In addition, he teaches literature and writing courses at Lehman College, and has also taught at LaGuardia Community College and Queens College.
2019/2020 Fellows
Jesse Schwartz
Jesse W. Schwartz is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing & Literature Major at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. He had held fellowships with the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst in Osnabrück, Germany, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities here in New York. His interests include radical American history and literature, periodical studies, Marxism, critical race and ethnic studies, and Russian-American cultural relations. He is currently at work on a project that traces the cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersection of race and politics, with a particular focus on representations of the Bolshevik Revolution in US print cultures. A member of the editorial board of Radical Teacher, his work can be found there as well as in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Olivera Jokic
Olivera Jokic is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at John Jay College CUNY. Her work examines relationships among literary texts and other fields of writing called on to serve as genres of evidence and evidence of experience. Her publications have focused on texts treated as documentation of eighteenth-century British colonialism, on the constitution of archives of gender and personal archives of women writers, as well as on the related histories of writing about historical subjects and literary characters. She joins the Committee to work on a project which considers how afterlives of 'socialism' circulate in the work of artists, scholars, and activists from Yugoslavia and Cuba, to press on narratives about spectral nation-states, their catastrophic social experiments, and lifecycles of political imagination.
Lou Cornum
Lou Cornum was born a member of the Diné tribe in Chandler, Arizona. They moved to New York City in 2007 and have lived off and on in Brooklyn ever since. They are currently a PhD candidate in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center where they are completing a dissertation titled (for now) "Skin Worlds: Beyond the Human in Black and Indigenous SF since the 1970's". Lou writes art criticism, book reviews, other essays on a range of topics, short sci-fi stories, short smutty stories and stories with both. These writings have appeared in Art in America, Canadian Art, Frieze, The New Inquiry, Real Life, Venus Saturn Sqaure Zine and the edited collection Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island. They are an editor at The New Inquiry.
Kamran Moshref
Kamran Moshref is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation makes the case for a planetary political theory. In imagining what politics on a planetary scale might look and feel like, it draws on resources and fragments from the histories of Marxism, anticolonial thought, technological and aesthetic representations of the Earth, and experiments in democratic economic planning. He has taught political science and political theory at various CUNY colleges, and currently teaches Non-Western Political Thought at Lehman College. He is also a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Brooklyn College.
Jessie Fredlund
Jessie Fredlund is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the intersections of environment, religion and gender in a key water catchment area in Tanzania. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork with rural communities in the Uluguru Mountains, her dissertation explores the history and politics of rain in the context of global climate change and rapid downstream urbanization. She has taught anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she is currently serving as a Writing Fellow. She also currently teaches anthropology at the NYU School for Professional Studies.
