Citlali Escobar (she/her) is interested in why Latinx/e communities migrate to the Midwest and how their communities interrogate, shift, and transform Latinidad as a political and social identity. Citlali's research primarily excavates Chicano Movements in the upper Midwest and highlights Minnesota, where she was raised. Through mixed-methods research, Citlali positions women as the main social movement actors and unveils new sites of protest, resistance, and insurgency in the region between the mid-to-late twentieth-century.

Victoria Maung is a first year PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. Her work broadly examines the relationship between contemporary consumer and corporate culture against the backdrop of transnational capitalism. She holds a B.A. in Global Liberal Studies from New York University. Her previous work experience lies in the fashion industry, where she has held operations, public relations, and editorial roles.

I study the politics of migration, rights claims, and diasporic group identities. Most recently, my research has focused on the legal and physical infrastructures that govern transnational climate mobilities. I am interested in analyzing how law (including legal contradictions and gaps) produces differential and unequal mobilities in service of capitalist, colonial, and imperialist projects. My work considers the possibilities and limitations of different discursive and legal tools––namely, human rights and climate reparations narratives––for resisting oppression. In the past, I have written about the way that representatives at the 1955 Bandung Conference strategically leveraged human rights and created a Third World identity to pursue anti-colonialism. I have also examined rights claims and cultural identity at the local level, analyzing a diasporic community's efforts to resist cultural erasure in Toronto’s Little Jamaica. I completed my BA (Hons.) in Diaspora and Transnational Studies and Ethics, Society, and Law at the University of Toronto.

Alex Chun (he/him) is an American Studies PhD student. He is interested in how queer Asian/Americans negotiate intimacy, gender, sex, race, and (un)belonging within affective economies of sexual desire. Before coming to Brown, Alex studied journalism and American Studies at Northwestern University. For his senior thesis, he spoke with queer Asian/American performers and sex workers about aesthetics and performances of race, gender, and sexuality on OnlyFans and other erotic social media platforms. Alex has written and produced for Smithsonian Magazine, Self Evident: Asian America’s Stories, and INTO Magazine, amongst others. In 2022, was a Fulbright Canada-Mitacs Globalink Research Fellow.

Born a citizen of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and a descendant of the House of Ninigret, Sherenté seeks to uplift their people, the sole Indigenous nation in Rhode Island. Sherenté is a renowned advocate for the Twospirit (LGBT Native) community after their battle for acceptance in the Powwow circuit was recorded in the documentary “Being Thunder”. For this work, Sherenté was named a 2019 LGBT History Month Icon. Sherenté has walked in NYFW, has been featured in news sources including the NYT, NBC, Yahoo!, and NPR, is a 2018 Presidential Scholar, was a 2019 Tedx Speaker, was admitted into the 2022 cohort at Yale Norfolk School of Art and is a graduate from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design through their 5 year Dual Degree Program. Now enrolled in the American Studies PhD program at Brown University, Sherenté is currently publishing their first book.

Carolyn E Lau is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at Brown. Her research interests include place-making and alternative social networks, the politics of built environments, and community resistance to gentrification and displacement. Carolyn was a Fiducia Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned an MA in American Studies. She received a BA in Metropolitan Studies from New York University and was a Fulbright-Hays recipient to Xi’an, China. 

K Yin (they/them/ta) is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies. Their current research explores the anarchic possibilities of an Asian/American aesthetics that attends to discourses of the (in)human. Their project looks to metaphors of the ecological and otherworldly, primarily engaging 19th- and 20th-century visual archives and contemporary Asian diasporic art and performance.

Isaac Essex (they/he) is a Ph.D student in the American Studies Department. They work in trans studies, decolonial environmental humanities, and aesthetics and visual culture to think through queer and trans endurance amid hostile climates, extractive atmospheres, and ecological precarity. His work is particularly interested in what it means to be queer and have bad feelings, how to move through them, and how to find common places for persistence. They think with the notion of 'weathering' as it refers to the act of endurance that is being worn down, and the attempts to withstand atmospheric pressure that foster modes of survival amid a climate of hostility. Isaac holds a B.A. in English and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Istifaa Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. They hold a BA from UC Berkeley in Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Istifaa’s research looks to queer/trans of color performance, aesthetics, and speculative fictions for its disruption of colonial and transatlantic violence. Her project is attuned to Black, Indigenous, and queer diasporic modes of creative practice and survivance across interspecies/elemental intimacies through conditions of historical dispossession. In so doing, they deeply consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. Istifaa is thinking with the concept of porosity, as the space in between matter, to think through the permeability and in-between-ness across sites such as flesh, disease, conspiracy, and apocalypse as inhabitations and praxis of queer/trans of color life and precarity. Istifaa is also a filmmaker/artist and pursues collaborative and movement-based projects that center creative and sensorial modes of knowledge production.

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. My dissertation, Unthinking Sex: Cultural Sites of Compulsory Sexuality and the Politics of Desire, endeavors to confront the often-unchecked centrality of sex in modern subjectivity and queer and feminist. Integrating feminist theory, queer of color critique, cultural studies, and feminist science studies, my interdisciplinary research aims to trouble the cultural ubiquity of sex as object, right, and duty, and to unsettle normalizing ideas about capacity as they are articulated to the liberal human through biopolitical regimes of sexuality and desire. I previously earned an MA in Oral History from Columbia University and a BA in Global Liberal Studies with a minor in French from New York University.

Jenny Dolan is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Her research interests include the history of American self-help culture, the history of science, and narrative theory. Her work has been published in The New York Times. She is currently an Interdisciplinary Opportunities Graduate Fellow at the Pembroke Center. Jenny is writing a dissertation that historicizes willpower by tracing how the concept became legible in the context of the rise of corporate capitalism and American empire building and later became empiricized by scientists. Unfortunately, the concept of willpower has produced a hierarchy of humanity, so Jenny’s hope is that denaturalizing willpower will create space for envisioning alternate modes of selfhood that might make life more livable for more people.

My dissertation “Expert Advice: Mediating Social Science’s Public Aspirations, 1930-1965,” investigates how American social scientists used mass media to popularize their ideas. I tell two stories together: the rise of the social scientific expert or public intellectual at midcentury and the institutionalization of mass communications technologies. I look to items that I group under the term “prescriptive media objects”: mass media texts that bear the mark of prescriptivity, informed by the social sciences, in their writing, aesthetics, and especially their intended function. I use objects like educational films and television, public service announcements, self-help writing, mass surveys, and other evidence of the quotidian and ephemeral presence of the social sciences in American life. Chapters examine pop-psych “personality tests” in the popular press, “social guidance films” in the classroom, a university course taught over broadcast television, psychological experiments related to the safety of billboard advertising for automobile drivers, and the Walt Disney attraction “The Carousel of Progress.”

Katharina Weygold (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. In her dissertation, Katharina studies African American women’s ideas about Haiti and their writing, performances, artwork, and interactions and collaborations with Haitians in the context of U.S. imperialism in Haiti from the U.S. occupation (1915 – 1934) to the Duvalier regime (1957 – 1986). Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, the project explores how focusing on women changes our understanding of the meaning of Haiti and U.S. imperialism for African Americans. Katharina holds an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University and an M.A. in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. 

Bryant Brown Jr. is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Beholden to diasporic Black studies scholarship situated at the nexus between queer of color critique, cultural studies, performance studies, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory, his research asks: how and what does inventive Black art demand? His dissertation, tentatively titled Antimanifesto Poetics: Black Avant-Gardism’s Queer Critique of the Manifesto Genre, suggests that Black avant-gardist manifestos refuse a static collectivity, and a fixed political platform, as a basis for cultural organizing. Instead, he argues that Black avant-gardism uses nonsensical poetics to invite habits of the mind that motivate a relentless confrontation with modernity’s founding racial antagonisms. Bryant holds a BA from the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University, and a MA from the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. 

Education

• B.A., Black Studies, Columbia University, 2015
• M.A., Public Humanities, Brown University, 2021

Matthew Kateb Goldman (he/him) is a scholar of critical cultural studies, working across queer theory, urban and environmental humanities, and the politics of knowledge production. His research and teaching interests specifically connect queer of color critique and minoritarian feminist theory with the cultural study of U.S. urban environments. Matthew's dissertation project reads visual, textual, performance, and ephemeral productions across the New York City subway, to critically theorize 'transit' as a technique of U.S. metropolitan power. This project argues that transitivity consolidates as well as queers modern U.S. racial and sexual regimes of the subject through urban space. Matthew holds an M.A. in Public Humanities and a Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, both from Brown University, along with a B.A. with Highest Honors in Sociology-Anthropology from Swarthmore College. 

Allyson LaForge is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation project, “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Organizing in the Northeast,” examines the role of Indigenous women as leaders who held their communities together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using material culture among other tools to enact diplomatic protocols, resist settler colonialism, and ensure Indigenous futurity. Weaving together material culture histories, “Materializing Futurity” features the stories of Nipmuc basket-maker and leader Sarah Maria Arnold Cisco, Odawa quillwork artist and leader Margaret Blackbird Boyd, and Narragansett and Wampanoag knowledge-keeper and educator Princess Red Wing. Their resurgent work sustained Indigenous homelands, sovereignty, and knowledge. Allyson’s current exhibit at Mystic Seaport Museum, Restor(y)ing Indigenous Collections, features the art and knowledge of artists Brittney Peauwe Wunnepog Walley (Nipmuc) and Julia Marden (Aquinnah Wampanoag).