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Participants for the Migration, Mobility, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities Institute
Optionally, the 26 selected participants will share information here after confirming participation, in March 2019.
Anita Baksh is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York (CUNY). Trained in Caribbean Literature with a Certificate in Women’s Studies, she received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her teaching and research interests include Caribbean literature, South Asian and African diasporic literatures, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and composition. Her publications on women’s writing and Indo-Caribbean cultural production appear in The Journal of West Indian Literature and WSQ as well as in such collections as Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016).
Ricia Anne Chansky is Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is coeditor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and editor of the new Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series. She coedited The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader and edited Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives and Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. She is a 2018–2020 Voice of Witness Fellow, a partner in the Humanities Action Lab “Initiative on Climate and Environmental Justice,” and a Fulbright Specialist in US Studies. She has recent and forthcoming essays on disaster studies, disaster pedagogy, climate and social justice, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean as well as on oral history, transnational and diasporic identity constructions, contested national identity, and gendered identity constructions.
Rachel Denney is a Ph.D. candidate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, with concentrations in Political Science and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on the relationship between developing state governments and non-governmental organizations in Central America and the Caribbean. From Fall 2013-Spring 2015, Rachel was a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, studying Haitian Creole. Rachel has a professional background in the international non-profit sector.
Bastien Craipain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago where he studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone intellectual histories and literatures. Specifically, he is interested in the intersection of literature and the social sciences with regard to historical processes of racial emancipation, cultural formation, and national construction. Currently, he is investigating the ways in which late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Haitian intellectuals engaged with the field of anthropology to challenge the production of scientific-racist discourses on Haiti and people of African descent.
Nathan H. Dize is a PhD Candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University where he specializes in Haitian literature and history. He is a content curator, translator, and editor of the digital history project A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. He is also the co-editor of the H-Haiti series “Haiti in Translation,” which interviews translators of Haitian writing. Nathan has published articles, reviews, and translations in journals such as sx archipelagos, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Francosphères, and sx salon.
Yanie Fécu received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with the support of a pre-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in the departments of Music and Africana Studies. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century pan-Caribbean literature, with particular interests in auditory culture, history of technology, and postcolonial theory.
Juliet Glenn-Callender is the Campus Librarian at University Libraries of the University of The Bahamas - North Campus. She manages the operations of the library and provides course related library instruction to students. She is currently working with the faculty in the English Studies Department to capture the information that has been generated from the first year English students’ research projects. The goal of the project is to be put the information gathered into a form that is accessible to the rest of the university population and eventually the wider community.
Her focus is to build a digital repository which will provide access to primary materials reflecting the historical, social, economic and cultural development of the people of Grand Bahama. The materials will be used to help support the curriculum for Caribbean Studies related courses being taught at the university or which will be coming on stream in the near future.
Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, dj, and professor specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. She is Assistant Professor of Africana and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.
She received her Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University and PhD in American studies from Yale University.
Born in London and raised between the UK and US, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Goffe has held academic positions at New York University, Princeton University, and Hunter College, CUNY. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Anthurium, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.
She is at work on two books. The first, A History of Touches: Vernacular Archives of Afro-Asia, explores the poetics and entanglements of African and Asian diasporas in the Caribbean. The second, Pon De Replay: Gender, Sexuality, and DJ Cultures, is a manifesto on black feminist praxis, technology, and nightclub culture.
Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann is assistant professor in the Writing, Literature & Publishing department at Emerson College where she teaches courses in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx literatures. She is currently completing a book that argues for the centrality of literary magazines to pan-Caribbean discourse and Caribbean literary production. Her published and forthcoming articles include work on literary magazines, literary infrastructure, and the intertextual relationship between Aimé Césaire and Lydia Cabrera. She also regularly translates literature between English and Spanish.
Molly Hamm-Rodríguez is a doctoral student in Educational Equity and Cultural Diversity at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, bridging linguistics, anthropology, education, and ethnic studies (especially Dominican and Puerto Rican Studies). Her work explores the intersections between language, im/migration, culture, social identity, and schooling, with a focus on transnationalism, diaspora, citizenship, and relational racialization. She is currently working with another graduate student on a collaborative StoryMap project with teachers from two Central Florida high schools serving more than 200 Puerto Rican students displaced by Hurricane Maria. Through the project, students and families will explore the meaning of “home” in the context of displacement. Molly is an active member of the American Anthropological Association, Caribbean Studies Association, Comparative and International Education Society, and Latin American Studies Association. She received an M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Ronald Angelo Johnson is a historian of the early United States. His specializations are diplomacy, religion, and the Atlantic World. Of particular emphasis are early U.S. foreign relations, immigration, the African Diaspora, and cultural encounters
He is currently writing his second book, “Shades of Color”: Racialized Diplomacy and the Haitian Diaspora in the Early American Republic. This work explores how the ideals of the Declaration of Independence created the foundation of early American diplomacy and informed subsequent Atlantic revolutions. It examines the diplomatic and cultural connections between the western Atlantic world’s first two nation-states. Combining materials from Caribbean and European archives with a wide range of U.S. printed and manuscript sources, Revolutionary Relations is the first study to identify 18th and early 19th-century migrants from Haiti as an immigrant group and to measure their contributions to early American society.
Sophonie Joseph: I am a doctoral candidate in the Urban Planning Department at Columbia University. My teaching specializations are in community planning and research methodologies, with a data visualization focus. I primarily use geographic information systems (GIS) to display spatialized statistical analysis. I am interested in digitizing historic maps for comparative analysis. My research focuses on environmental justice in the built environment of the US and Caribbean.
Aaron Kamugisha is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. His latest book is titled Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2019), and is the editor of five edited collections on Caribbean political and cultural thought. He is a member of the editorial working committee for the journals Social and Economic Studies, Journal of West Indian Literature, and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer whose scholarly work focuses on sexuality, performance, and literature in the Caribbean and Africa. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the Caribbean Studies Association best book award, and her research has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford, Mellon, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations. Her poetry collection is Rock|Salt|Stone, and she has performed around the world. King is Co-Chair of the Caribbean International Resource Network, President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Creative Editor of sx salon, and Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.
Audra Merfeld-Langston is associate professor of French at Missouri University of Science & Technology, where she has created and directed a series of study abroad programs to Latin America and the Caribbean. She also led the development and launching of a new academic minor in Latin American Studies for Technical Applications, supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Her publications address topics including LSP (languages for specific purposes), contemporary French culture, and the development of intercultural communication skills during study abroad. Her current research analyzes physical representations of historical memory in Martinique. She is active in the American Association of Teachers of French and engages in initiatives to incorporate Francophone Caribbean-related materials into language courses at both the K-12 and Higher Education levels.
K. Adele Okoli is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas in affiliation with the African & African American Studies and Gender Studies Programs. She holds a joint doctorate in African American Studies and French from Yale University. Using feminist, decolonial, and new historicist methodologies, her work centers on discourses of race, gender, and desire, particularly in Francophone and Creolophone Haiti, Louisiana, the Caribbean Diaspora, and nineteenth-century France. She also works and teaches on fashion history and theory. She has published in academic journals including Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, as well as in non-academic venues such as The Haitian Times. She is currently editing a special issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures entitled Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts.
Lisa Ortiz earned her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies with minors in Latina/o Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is grounded at the intersection of (im)migration, media, education, gender, and Latina/x/o studies. Her current research juxtaposes representations of Puerto Rican migration in the media with narratives of intergenerational individuals engaging in rural-to-rural migration between the islands and the United States in the 21st century. In doing so, she examines how neoliberal discourses of value, devaluations, and progress point to ethnoracial ties and tensions embedded in Latina/x/o life in the Midwest. During 2019-2020, Lisa will be joining the University of Iowa as a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow to continue her research and to administer aspects of the Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging.” Prior, she was an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate faculty in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Illinois State University.
Shearon Roberts is an assistant professor of Mass Communication and affiliate faculty of African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. She teaches courses in converged media, digital storytelling, broadcast production and Latin America and the Caribbean. She has published on Caribbean media today, particularly Haitian media, in peer-reviewed journals and as book chapters. She is the co-author of Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster and she is a co-editor of HBO’s Treme and Post-Katrina Catharsis: The Mediated Rebirth of New Orleans. She currently directs My Nola, My Story, a multimedia platform for the stories of people of color who have called New Orleans home. She has worked as a reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean.
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert completed a PhD in Caribbean studies at the University of Warwick in 2018. She is a practising literary translator and is currently employed as an Early Career Researcher (ATER) by the Université de la Réunion (Indian Ocean), where she teaches translation and literature for the English department. Her research investigates Caribbean literatures in translation and focuses on transversal, non-vertical modes of circulation for Caribbean and Indian Ocean literatures. She is currently working on the manuscript of her first monograph, provisionally entitled The Caribbean in Translation: Thresholds of Dislocation (Peter Lang Oxford).
Associate professor senior Jose R. Vazquez teaches architecture and interior design, history of architecture and theory at Miami Dade College. He has curated several exhibitions focusing on Miami’s historic architecture for History Miami Museum. As co-recipient of a State of Florida Historic Resources Grant he developed instructional material for a community education project on architecture and historical preservation. In 2018 he was awarded a Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) travelling fellowship funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to develop a teaching module on Puerto Rico’s architecture in the context of the Caribbean. Currently he is organizing The Miami Vernacular Project, a historic building survey, documenting historic shotgun houses in a Bahamian immigrant community located in Coconut Grove, Miami.
Keja Valens is Professor of English at Salem State University. She teaches and writes on Caribbean literature, queer theory, and food writing. Her recent books include Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, December 2013) and the co-edited Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal (Rutgers, 2018). She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Recipes for National Culture: the Colonial and Decolonial work of Caribbean Cookbooks.
Erin Zavitz is an English teacher at the Bosque School in Albuquerque, NM. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Florida where she specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Haiti. Her research has appeared in edited books and Atlantic Studies and Haitian History Journal. She serves as an editor for the scholarly blog Age of Revolutions and is a member of the Oral History Association International Committee. Erin is a contributor to dLOC, including an Endangered Archives funded collaborative digitization project for 19th-century Haitian newspapers. She has also integrated Timeline JS and StorymapJS in her teaching at the university and high school level.
This Institute has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Institute, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.