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 twentieth century urban and suburban history, particularly in the migration and settlement patterns of Americans in the postwar years. At present, she is focusing on the impact that large-scale national transformations–including the Second Great Migration of African Americans, state-sponsored suburbanization, and the development of the Sunbelt economy–had on the built environments, economies, politics, and culture of local places, particularly small towns and rural communities in the South after World War II.
Kathleen Belew received her B.A. in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2005. Her interests include vigilante violence related to race- and class-based conflict; transnational violence and reconciliation; memory, collective identity and monument-building; and oral history, narrative and testimonies.
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.
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 research focuses on past environments and their representations, with special interest in war, remembrance, and landscape; Native American studies; cartography and local place-knowledge; polar and maritime exploration. She has worked with the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service on interpretation and preservation projects. narration and memory.
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.
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. Student in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Graduate Qualification). She received her B.A. in English and American Studies from University of California, Berkeley, where she was awarded the University Certificate of Distinction. Her academic interests include transnational feminist theory, the effects of globalization and neoliberalism on folklore and vernacular genres, and comparative studies of gender and sexuality, with special focus on the United States and Turkey. She is an affiliate of the Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization and The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Colloquium at Yale. Her current work, supported by a Yale Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS) grant, is on Westernization and gay identity in contemporary Turkey. She has most recently published on the utilization of feminist rhetoric by the incumbent Muslim party during the country's 2007 national elections.
Sarah Haley received her B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College in 2001. Her interests include 19th and 20th century histories of race and punishment, history of gender and sexuality from 1865 to the present, 20th century radical social movements, and prison studies.
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.
Brandi Hughes (joint with African American Studies) graduated from the University of Virginia in 2001 with a B.A. in Literature and American Studies. Interests include: Late 19th and 20th century U.S. cultural and social history with particular focus on historical remembrance, racial identity, and Afro-Native communities following Reconstruction.
Eli Jelly-Schapiro grew up in central Vermont. He 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). His interests include the history of labor in settler-capitalist societies, and postcolonial studies. Before coming to Yale, Eli worked as an intern for Labor Notes magazine in Detroit.
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.
Jinan Joudeh received her BA in English from Duke University (2001) and an MA in English (Critical Theory) from the University of Sussex (2002). She is currently writing her dissertation on hoaxes and literature, focusing on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Henry James. Her other interests include modern literature and critical theory. ception' of deconstruction in the United States.
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.
Hong Liang received her B.A. in English Language and Literature and M.A. in American Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Upon graduation in 2000, she taught English language and US history courses in her alma mater. She was a Fulbright professional associate at Yale in 2004-05 to do research in US transnational and international history with a focus on cultural hybridity and modernity. She is interested in the interplay of race, class, and power in the Asian American experience, especially the experience of the Chinese students in the US during the exclusion era.
Ben Looker received his B.A. in 2000 from Washington University in St. Louis, with majors in Urban Studies and Music, and his M.A. from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He received a Fulbright to Canada in 2001-02 to research ethnicity and the arts in Toronto. Interests include urban history and theory, empire and the city in popular culture, the Black Arts Movement, and jazz history and historiography.
Simeon Man received his B.A. in History and American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington (2005). He is interested in exploring the intersections of race, citizenship, and empire in Asian American history and twentieth century U.S. history. His research focuses on the role of the military and militarism in shaping post-World War II U.S.-Philippines relations, Asian migrations, Filipino American subjectivity and ideas about U.S. nationhood.
Monica Muñoz Martinez received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Ethnic Studies with Honors and a second concentration in American Civilization from Brown University in 2006. Martinez is the recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the CV Starr National Service Fellowship, the Karen T. Romer Undergraduate Teacher Research Assistantship (UTRA), and received the Outstanding Honors Thesis Award for her work entitled "No Se Dejan: The Legacy of Collaboration And Leadership in Uvalde, TX". Her thesis investigates a working class Mexican American school walkout in 1970 and reevaluates traditional qualifications of leadership in grassroots activism. This history documents the contributions of parents in the Mexican American Parents Association during the school walkout by highlighting the collaboration between mothers and students during the protest. Martinez will continue her research on Mexican American social movements in the American southwest in the American Studies program.
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 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, fashion columnist and artist, Madison’s research interests engage with performance studies; modern and contemporary art; the global art market; luxury industries; mass culture and the everyday; the history and culture of New York City; and queer studies. Madison’s ongoing project is an ode to professional diva Victoria Beckham."
Michelle Anais Morgan received her BA in Arts & Humanities from the University of Southern Maine, Lewiston-Auburn College (2003) and her MA in American & New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine (2009). Her Master’s thesis looks at representations of “deviant” female bodies on illustrated Progressive Era postcards and how women negotiated the circulation of these images. In the American Studies program at Yale, Michelle plans to complete the Qualification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on 19th and early 20th-century visual and material culture, tableaux vivants, gendered and queered constructions of place and space, and issues of visual embodiment in popular culture more generally. Her poetry, creative non-fiction, and mixed-media artwork have been published or are forthcoming in over two-dozen literary journals and anthologies, and she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for poetry in 2007. She enjoys skirts and boots, drinking red wine, being unapologetically queer, and analyzing R. Kelly’s lyrical metaphors for clues about how to rule the world.
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.
(Angela) Naomi Paik is native Texan transplant to New York City, where she earned her B.A. in Women's and Gender Studies and Asian American Studies from Columbia University. As a Ph.D. candidate, she is working on a dissertation that examines legal and cultural narratives that describe the U.S. state's production of rightless people through its practices of imprisonment in camps. Her broad interests include comparative ethnic studies and Asian American studies, U.S. imperialism, globalization/globalism, feminist studies, law and culture, and 20th century and contemporary U.S. literature. She is also a member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture and the Marxist and Cultural Theory Reading Group.
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, social media, and the history and literature of the American Midwest.
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.
David Stein (Joint with African American Studies) was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. At Wesleyan University, he majored in Black Studies and Sociology. He is a member of the imprisonment industrial complex abolition organization, Critical Resistance. His research focuses on how rehabilitative paradigms are deployed in order to sustain the imprisonment industrial complex in the United States. His greatest intellectual influence is the work of Sylvia Wynter. Other interests include "gangster" rap, eugenic logics, and the idea of borders.
Quan Tran graduated from UC Irvine with a double-major in Asian American Studies and Comparative Literature and a minor in German Studies. Her research curiosity hovers around cultural production in the Vietnamese diaspora and comparative colonial encounters through visual representation. Her creative energy finds its home on the pages of damau.org, a bilingual literary website, under her faux pseudonym trầntụêquân. She is also the new Graduate Assistant at Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center.
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.
Susie Woo received her BA in art history from UC Irvine and her MA in Asian American studies from UCLA. Between academic programs, she worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art coordinating various outreach programs for teens and professional development programs for teachers. Her dissertation focuses on Korean War migrants, namely military brides and adoptees, who entered the U.S. after the war and before the Immigration Act of 1965. She is especially interested in how this particular group of women and children affected U.S. and Korean notions of race, kinship, citizenship and nation.
