Graduate Students
This is a self-selective and thus not complete list. For the Yale e-mail directory click here.
Michael Amico received his BA from Dartmouth College in 2007. As a Senior Fellow there, he wrote on the social and cultural intersections of safety and homosexuality and the construction of danger. His exploration revealed how putative prescriptions of health for contemporary gay youth repress their desire, restrain their behavior, and incite fear in the guise of morality and self-esteem. This project has spawned an interest in histories and theories of emotion, psychoanalysis, Method acting techniques, popular psychology, self-presentation, body language, and awkward silences. In connecting these sites of anxiety, Michael is interested in larger questions of how and why people create history and how they live it, how and why they understand community and how they experience it. He sees interdisciplinarity as a reality of existence, so he finds ample ways to integrate and continue many of his other interests, such as acting, singing, canoeing, and cruising.
Francesca Ammon received her B.S.E. in civil engineering from Princeton University and her Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) from Yale School of Architecture. In between, she spent several years working as a strategy consultant and developing an enduring love of travel. Her interests include 20th century urban history and the history and culture of the built environment. Having grown up in the Garden State, she also remains fascinated by all things New Jersey -- including, in particular, the city of Asbury Park.
Megan Asaka received her B.A. with honors in Ethnic Studies from Brown University (2003). Before coming to Yale, she worked as a researcher and oral historian at Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project in Seattle, Washington. Her research interests include Asian American history, public history, and comparative ethnic studies.
Aisha Bastiaans received her B.A. in English and American Literature and Africana Studies from New York University in 1999. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies and the Department of African-American Studies at Yale University. Her teaching and research interests include: race and gender in U.S. history and culture, nineteenth and twentieth century African-American literature, and cultural studies. Her doctoral dissertation explores the relationship between race, gender, and representation through analyses of literary and cinematic treatments of the mulatta figure.
Betsy Beasley earned a B.A. in history from the University of Georgia and an M.S. in Urban Affairs from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her interests lie in post-World War II urban and rural economic development, labor, the service economy, and political culture. At present, she is focusing on the changing relationships among cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the late twentieth century; the mobility (and immobility) of work and workers; and the effects of economic shifts on constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Hailing from Georgia, she has a particular interest in the cities and small towns of the U.S. South. Less academic pursuits include city wandering, thrift shopping, and drinking copious amounts of coffee.
Kathleen Belew, a doctoral candidate, is researching the impact of the Vietnam War on extremist movements in the United States. Following mercenary soldiers, Klansmen, and other actors on the far right from their service in the Vietnam War to acts of violence at home, Belew calls for a full reckoning of the cost of war. She has presented her work at several conferences and in invited lectures, and has received Javits, Enders, and Beveridge funding to pursue her research. She has taught at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interests include United States History since 1865; Violence and Reconciliation, Holocaust to present; Narrative, Memory, and Ways of Telling; and Histories and Theories of Race and Gender. A Colorado native, Belew received her B.A. in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2005, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She lives in Chicago. Belew is a Visiting Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Northwestern University History Department.
Ryan Andre Brasseaux is a Louisiana native whose research focuses primarily on Francophone North America, ethnicity, 20th century social and cultural history, vernacular music, folklore, ethnography, memory and oral history, and public humanities. Before coming to Yale, Brasseaux worked as a research associate for American Public Media?s American Routes and as a museum exhibit designer. He has presented invited lectures at Yale University, to the Fulbright Institute, and the 2004 (and forthcoming 2008) keynote addresses at Nashville?s International Country Music Conference. He has also served as a Louisiana cultural expert for the Associated Press, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, National Film Board of Canada, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and the Food Network. In addition, he is currently a festival presenter/workshop moderator for the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Brasseaux?s third book, Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music, is forthcoming by Oxford University Press. He holds a B.A. in anthropology and Francophone studies from the University of Louisiana, and a M.A. in anthropology from Louisiana State University.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce received his B.A. in African-American Studies and English, with honors, from Columbia University in 2003. At present, he is a third year Yale Ph.D. student in African-American Studies and American Studies who investigates iterations of Black “madness” in late- and postmodernity. He is interested in how notions of “madness” have been ascribed to Afrodiasporic subjects by colonial and neocolonial regimes-and in how Afrodiasporic subjects have appropriated “madness” for insurgent modes of seeing, knowing, being, and performing. La Marr is also a poet, novelist-in-waiting, co-editor of Maroon: The Yale Journal of African American Studies, and an occasional madman (appropriately enough). His hobbies include time travel, transcendental sex, nature documentaries, handwashing, and self-parody.
Jalylah Burrell (joint with African American Studies) received her B.A. in English from Spelman College, where she was a Presidential Scholar, in 2002 and her M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University, where she was a MacCracken Fellow, in 2007.� A journalist and blogger, she has contributed to VIBE, the FADER, the Village Voice and the Portland Mercury among other publications. She has also worked as an oral historian beginning with the Spelman Independent Scholars (SIS) and continuing at the national oral history project StoryCorps. Her research interests include representations of the Black middle class, the relationship between Black women and humor and Black music.
Claudia Calhoun joined the joint program in American Studies and Film Studies in 2008. A native of Houston, Texas, Claudia earned her B.A. in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2005. Claudia's interests include 20th century US history, popular media, gender studies, and public history.
Sigma Colon graduated with a B.A. in English Literature and Spanish, and an M.A. in History from the University of Arizona. Her most recent academic work combined her interests in the American West, borderlands studies, 19th- and 20th-century environmental, social, and agricultural history, with narrative theory, and discourse analysis. She is excited about building upon these areas and exploring new intellectual avenues.
Christine DeLucia studied History and Literature at Harvard College (A.B. 2006), and Environmental History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (M.Litt. 2007). Her dissertation examines Native American and settler geographies in the Northeast and abroad after the devastating colonial "Indian wars," tracing connections among landscape, violence, and collective memory in New England, southern Canada, and an Algonquian Atlantic World. The project uses ethnography, material culture, archival documentation, and the physical environment itself to uncover colonial and indigenous spaces of trauma and recovery in the long wake of King Philip's War (1675-78). Christine has also done public history work with the Anasazi Heritage Center and New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, and has coordinated Yale's "Writing History" colloquium.
Andrew E. Dowe (joint with African American Studies) graduated with honors from Yale in 2008 with a BA in African American and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is interested in the ways that literature reflects and informs queer black identity and community, particularly in the queer Afro-Caribbean diaspora.
Amina El-Annan received her BA in English and Geography at UCLA . She worked at KCET on "The Tavis Smiley Show" and in urban planning before coming to Yale. Her interests include postcolonial literature, third world feminist theory, Islam and Modernity, Arab American and Muslim American communities, and responses and representations of September 11th in popular and literary culture.
G. Melissa García is a doctoral student in the American Studies program at Yale University. She is interested in transnational cultural studies and the Americas as an inclusive concept with a broad intellectual and geographic scope. She looks to interrogate competing narratives of gender, class, ethnic and racial formations by focusing on contemporary representations of social violence, particularly the cultural production around the Feminicidio on the Mexico-U.S. border and the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation in Peru. She was born and raised in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and later moved to New York City where she received her B.A. from Hunter College in 2000.
Josh Glick (joint with Film Studies) earned his B.A. from Cornell in English and Aesthetics/Architecture/Media Studies. Before coming to Yale, he worked in the Library of Congress: Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division and as a paralegal in the law firm Storch, Amini & Munves, P.C. His academic interests are focused on the relationship between cinema and urban environments, American documentary film, and historical representation through cinema. His dissertation explores how Los Angeles-based filmmakers used documentary as a form of public history in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tao Leigh Goffe received her A.B. in English with a certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University in 2009. Her academic interests include the study of disaporic literature and various forms of literary expression of dispossessed peoples. Her academic research explores the intersections and interactions between Asian and black subcultures in Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean. So far she has completed independent research on Chinese Caribbean Women’s literature, the poetics of British Islamic Hip-Hop, and postmodern blackface and yellowface.
Laura Grappo Laura Grappo graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in Women's Studies (2001). Her interests include queer and feminist theory, contemporary global ethics, anarchism, moral constructions of alterity, anti-colonial futures, speculative fiction, and popular culture. Her dissertation focuses on the notion of "homelessness" as a problematic site of queer and postcolonial existence.
Gabrielle Guise has a BA in English and Religion from Dartmouth College and an MA in English from Columbia University. She is interested in European American representations of Native Americans in nineteenth century literature and visual culture.
Perin Gurel is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She holds a BA in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. Her academic interests include comparative studies of gender and sexuality and the cultures of globalization, with special focus on the postwar United States and Near East. Her dissertation, ?Wild Westernization: Gender, Sexuality, and the United States in Turkey,? focuses on the discourse of "westernization" in Turkey and its effects on international relations and gender and sexual rights movements. Perin is a graduate associate and fellow for the Yale Material and Visual Cultures of Religion Initiative. She also currently works a senior program associate for Women?s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE), a global program, social network and grassroots social justice movement led by Muslim women. She has previously worked as a graduate associate for the Women, Religion, and Globalization Project at Yale, for which she co-taught a class on ?Women, Religion, and Representation." She has presented and published papers on horror film and gender, folklore and nationalism, Islam and the supernatural in Turkish women's fiction, and the feminist and queer movements in contemporary Turkey.
Andrew Hannon received his BA in History in 2003 from Drew University and his MA American Studies from University of Massachusetts Boston in 2007. While at UMB he was co-chair of the United Auto Workers unit representing graduate students and a member of the contract negotiating team. His interests are in the relation between cultural products, producers and consumers and political action. His currently working on a project about the New Left and the Counterculture.
Tisha Hooks is a Ph.D. candidate in the combined degree program with African American studies. Her dissertation addresses the racialization of objects and technologies, militarization as a cultural and social phenomenon, and the everyday. Tisha graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in comparative literature, where she was also a Ford-Mellon Summer Research Scholar. Her current work and interests are informed by an interdisciplinary approach that in addition to African American studies draws on methodologies from history, anthropology, and material culture. She has written broadly on everything from Little Black Sambo in Japan to the Grapes of Wrath, and in addition to the subjects mentioned above, her research interests include community formation, Afro-Asian relations, and 19th and 20th century transnational history, including the history of business, and science, and medicine. She is a former editor for Beacon Press, Praeger Publishers, and the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. In 2007, she was a member of the Yale-China 100, a delegation of Yale students, faculty, and administrators that traveled to China at the invitation of Chinese President Hu Jintao. She is the recipient of the Joseph A. Skinner Fellowship in History from Mount Holyoke College.
Rebecca Jacobs
Eli Jelly-Schapiro received his B.S.F.S. in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University (2004), and his M.Sc. in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics (2006). Working at the interface of postcolonial studies and cultural studies, he is especially interested in settler colonialism, race, labor, and soccer. His dissertation-in-progress explores the long history of the War on Terror and Homeland Security state, through readings of contemporary fiction, film, and theory.
Myra Jones-Taylor (Joint with Anthropology) received her BA in American Studies from Northwestern University in 1997. She is currently writing her dissertation on community efforts to improve quality and access to child care in the city of New Haven. Her interests include ethnography, ethnographic method and public policy. She is particularly interested in the ways families experience and negotiate public policy in their everyday lives. Myra is a member of the New Haven School Early Childhood Council, and on the Board of Directors for All Our Kin, a local organization created to support families by empowering and educating parents in an effort to provide all children with high-quality early care and education. Myra is married and has two children, ages five and three.
Alison Kanosky received her B.A. in American Studies from Northwestern University in 2007. She is originally from Freeport, Illinois. Before coming to Yale, she worked in Medicare health literacy and advocacy in New York. Her research interests center around rural poverty in the United States, including historical anti-poverty policy and regional planning directed at rural communities, as well as literary, ethnographic and political interpretations of the importance of place and region in the U.S.
Leah Mancina Khaghani (Joint PhD in African American Studies) received her BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in Political Science and English Literature. Before coming to Yale, she worked in Washington, DC where she was active in Middle Eastern American politics and studied at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Leah's general interests include postcolonial studies, diaspora, race, nationalism and third world feminism. Specifically, she explores issues pertaining to the Middle Eastern community in the United States and African Americans around issues of identity formation and political mobilization.
Carolee Klimchock holds a B.A. in Art History from Smith College and a M.A. in American Studies from The College of William and Mary. Her areas of interest are cultural and economic history especially from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, performance studies, identity formation, masculinity, aesthetics, New York City, and psychology. Much of her research focuses on how identity is performed and interpreted through the body, its adornment, movement, and rituals. Her current project addresses coach drivers and coaching culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, and how cultural codes of class, gender, and race were ascribed in the clothing, decorum, and ritual of the practice--and how some transgressions of prescribed roles disturbed the social order creating public scandals and media sensation. She is also interested in the art and craft of narrative, creative, and non-conventional writing of history and non-fiction. Before graduate school she served as the archivist for the Keith Haring Foundation in New York.
Hong Liang received her B.A. in English Language and Literature and M.A. in American Studies from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Upon graduation in 2000, she taught English language and U.S. history courses at her alma mater. She was a Fulbright professional associate at Yale in 2004-05, researching on cultural hybridity and modernity in Republican Shanghai. She is interested in the U.S.-China transnational production of knowledge in the twentieth century and the interplay of race, gender, and class in the Asian American experience.
Simeon Man graduated with a B.A. in History and American Ethnic Studies from the University of Washington (2005). His fields of interest include Asian American history, the history of U.S. foreign policy, and critical ethnic studies. His dissertation inquires about the intersections of race and empire through an examination of Asian (American) military service and anti-imperialist politics in the Cold War era.
Monica Muñoz Martinez received a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and American Civilization from Brown University in 2006 where she received the Outstanding Honors Thesis Award for her work entitled "No Se Dejan: The Legacy of Collaboration And Leadership in Uvalde, TX". Her interests include Chicano/a History, Women and Gender History, Borderland Studies, Methods of Memory, Liberation Pedagogies, and Public Humanities. As a Ph.D. Candidate she is working on a dissertation that documents state sanctioned repression practiced by the Texas Rangers and vigilante lynchings in the early twentieth century. This interdisciplinary study traces the circulation of narratives through oral histories, court records, photography, and literature to investigate the role of women and memory in reckoning with the legacies of racial violence in southwest Texas.
Devin McGeehan Muchmore earned his BA in American Studies from Reed College, where he developed broad interests in postbellum US history and transnational studies of nationalism, race, and sexuality. He has conducted research on the American career of the German lesbian-classic film Mädchen in Uniform (1931), and on the legal status of merchant mariners in the Progressive Era. Some of his current interests include the benefits and limitations of comparative methodologies, the history of sexual classification, Euro-American encounters with “primitive” societies, and the social history of transoceanic mobility.
April Merleaux received a B.A. in History from Reed College and an M.S. in Agriculture, Food, and Environment from Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She studies the political and cultural aspects of food and agriculture in the twentieth century. She is interested in the global and local relationships between production and consumption; transnational histories; labor migration; women's and gender studies; children as workers; the relationships among empire, race, labor, culture and economy. She is working on a dissertation on the cultural politics of sugar in the early twentieth century United States empire. Other research interests include meat/sex and cultural histories of shipping containers.
Alice Rebecca Moore grew up in Idaho and Texas. She received her MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and her B.A. from Wesleyan University in Theatre and German Literature. Her interview with Art Spiegelman and his collaborators, “The Ephemeral Page Meets the Ephemeral Stage: Comix in Performance,” regarding their Drawn to Death: A Three Panel Opera, appeared in Theater 33:1 (2003). Alice has presented her work at the conferences Thinking PhotographyAgain (Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies) and Rendering Race Visible: Centralizing the Effects of Racial Realities (University of Chicago). Her research interests include U.S. visual culture, the performance of masculinity, and the production of cultural memory and amnesia. Alice has also worked as a director, dramaturg, writer, and collector of oral histories with various theater groups.
Madison Moore (ABD) earned an Honors BA in French Literature from the University of Michigan (2006), where he wrote an undergraduate thesis on hip-hop style, class and ethnicity in a genre of French gay pornography. Before matriculating at Yale, Madison studied in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (“Sciences-Po”) while conducting ethnographic research for the thesis. In 2005 Madison was awarded the Beinecke Fellowship for Graduate Study, and in 2006 the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. A classically trained violinist, pop culture writer and creative director, Madison’s research interests engage with performance studies, art since 1945, fashion studies, dance music culture, black popular culture, as well as the history and culture of New York City. His dissertation project, which looks at performances of glamour from the disco era to the present, recasts spectacularity as a positive tool of self-assertion.
Michelle Anais Morgan received her BA in Arts & Humanities (2003) and her MA in American Studies (2009) from the University of Southern Maine. Her Master’s thesis looked at representations of “deviant” female bodies on illustrated Progressive Era postcards and how women negotiated the circulation and exchange of these images. Her research interests focus on 19th and early 20th-century visual culture, tableaux vivants, gossip, performance studies, and issues around queerness in popular culture more generally. She is also completing the Qualification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Michelle’s poetry and scholarly work has been widely-published and she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2007. When she isn’t working she enjoys skirts and boots, red wine, and being unapologetically queer.
Dara Orenstein grew up in Modesto, CA and graduated from Harvard University in 1996 with a BA in African American Studies. After college she moved to New York City and held various jobs with public defenders and prisoners’ rights advocates. Two weeks before 9/11 she began a yearlong stint as an adjunct lecturer on critical race theory at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the experience inspired her to apply to graduate school. Now she is at work on a dissertation that combines a range of concerns — economy, geography, photography, law, and critical theory — to uncover the cultural and political history of foreign trade zones in the United States.
Lauren Pearlman (joint with African American Studies) graduated with honors from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in African American Studies (2004). She is primarily interested in the political and cultural legacy of the Black Power movement and the development of black consciousness in the post-Civil Rights era. Other interests include 20th century African American literature and intellectual history and the relationship between scholarship and activism. Before coming to Yale, she worked for a civil rights law firm in Washington, DC and with the Appleseed Foundation in their Austin, Texas office.
Miriam Posner (joint with Film Studies) is a native of San Jose, California, who graduated from Reed College in 2001. One of her interests is the ways that images help construct "official" knowledge, and especially knowledge about the body. Accordingly, her dissertation looks at ways that doctors have used media like film, photographs, X-rays, and PowerPoint to develop and communicate ideas.
Aaron Potenza received his B.A. in History and Women's Studies from the University of Rhode Island (2004). Upon graduation he worked as an LGBT liaison for a local non-profit and undertook graduate work in American Studies at the George Washington University. He is currently a second year PhD student at Yale University, where his interests include queer theory, gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, U.S. political and social history, identity formation and negotiation in late capitalism, and the shifting politics and meanings of gender and sexuality in U.S. culture (and subcultures). His current project, supported by a Yale FLAGS grant, attends to the complex relationship between same-sex desire and cross-gender identification in Postwar America.
José Jesse Ramírez received his BA in English from Santa Clara University in 2006. His undergraduate thesis, titled "The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past," is a political rereading of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. He plans to study U.S. social and cultural history, radical left-wing literature and politics, labor movements, racial and ethnic formation, and critical theory.
Yenisey Rodriguez I received a B.A. with honors in History from the University of Chicago (2006). I was recently awarded a Mellon and Ford predoctoral fellowship to pursue my graduate studies. I am interested in pursuing avenues of research pertaining to the experience of Caribbean migrants across the 20th century. I am particularly interested in exploring citizenship below the legal institutional level in order to consider how cultural and racial boundaries played a significant role in the shaping of migrant communities. By developing an understanding of U.S. immigration as a site of exchange and community formation I will be able to trace the political currents that have shaped Caribbean communities on the U.S. mainland. My overall research interests include how the experience of migrants is connected to problems of work and nationhood as part of a larger critique of labor reform and social justice. Other interests include 20th Century U.S. History, Latin American History, transnationalism, comparative race theory and labor history.
Robert Sambat. (Joint with African American Studies). B.A. in Women's Studies and English, Queens College, City University of New York (Phi Beta Kappa), 1998. Professional guitarist/ singer/ songwriter/ session musician/ recording artist; commercial artist/ fantasy illustrationist/ political cartoonist; fantasy/sci-fi writer/ historical novelist/ occasional poet / dancer. Graduate student advisor/member of ANAAY (Association of Native Americans at Yale); founding member/mediator of YGSNA (YAle Group for the Study of Native America). Active member of the Black Rock Coalition and vigorous supporter of local bands and music. Research and teaching interests include: Federal Indian Law, Red Power and the Resurgence of American Indian Identity and Culture during the 20th Century; blues music -- its history, meanings, and applications; phenomenological approaches to music and performance; theories of racial and gender formations; 19th century African American and women's literature. Dissertation, entitled "Blood-Letting," focuses on the history of blood quantum as a determinant of Indian-ness and its relationship to self-determination and aboriginal rights in Indian Country, with a particular emphasis on the tribal nations of Connecticut.
Andrew Seal received his B.A. from Dartmouth College with high honors in English and a second concentration in Religion. After graduation, he campaigned for Barack Obama in Indiana and Ohio and worked for the Yale College Publications Office as an editorial assistant on the "Blue Book." He is interested in popular fiction, the intellectual and literary history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the American Midwest. He maintains a lit-blog at http://www.blographia-literaria.com/
Elizabeth W. Son is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Wellesley College (2000) and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge (2002). Her interests include Asian American cultural studies, performance theory, transnational gender issues, and trauma and memory in Asian diasporic cultural forms. Her essay, “The Spaces of Engagement of The Medea Project, Theater for Incarcerated Women,” appeared in e-misférica 3.1 (Summer 2006), the on-line journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics. Her dissertation research focuses on the transnational processes of remembering and negotiating the history of Japanese military sexual slavery in Asian and Asian American performances/embodied practices.
Chloe Taft graduated from Williams College in 2005 with a BA in American Studies and Sociology. Before coming to Yale, she worked as a reporter covering medical technology, and she continues to be interested in reaching a broad audience with her work. Her academic interests include ethnography, cultural landscapes and the built environment, and American religion. Her dissertation will focus on the post-industrial identity of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Quan Tran is a Ph.D. candidate, who graduated from UC Irvine with a double-major in Asian American Studies and Comparative Literature and a minor in German Studies. Her dissertation examines the different means through which post-1975 diasporic Vietnamese convey knowledge about their histories and memories. These sites of knowledge production include memorials, archives, community organizations, and variety shows. Her creative impulses find their home in poetry and free form writing, which can be read at www.damau.org, a bilingual literary site, under her faux pseudonym trầntụêquân.
Van Truong grew up in South San Diego. She received her B.A. in Writing-Literature with a minor in Ethnic Studies from U.C. San Diego (1999). Before coming to Yale, she worked with various nonprofit arts and community development efforts in Los Angeles. Her research interests include comparative ethnic studies and literature, particularly related to issues of im/migration, diasporic identity/community formations, border studies, popular culture, and performance.
Charlie Samuya Veric, Ph.D. candidate and member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, deals with critical issues in American literature, postcolonial studies, and cultural theory. The editor of Anticipating Filipinas and coeditor of Suri at Sipat, he had been educated at the University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University before joining the program in American studies at Yale University. Some of his works have been published in American Quarterly, Common Knowledge, Kritika Kultura, Rethinking History, and Socialism and Democracy, among others. He is currently writing his dissertation, "Everyday Events: Face, Aesthetics, Modernity," which examines the symbolic and material uses of face in culture at large. When he is not at work, he writes and translates poetry.
Talya Zemach-Bersin received her B.A. with honors in American Studies at Wesleyan University. She has published several articles on the politics of international education, including "Selling the World: Study Abroad Marketing and the Privatization of Global Citizenship," and "American Students Abroad Can't Be 'Global Citizens.'" Her additional research interests include postcolonial studies, ethnography, cultural tourism, knowledge production, and diplomatic history.
