Atlantic World Graduate Student Profiles

Adia Cullors, New York University

Research Interests: Race, Gender, and Slavery; the Body, Medicine, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century North America, Transatlantic History, Black Radical Resistance

Advisors: Jennifer Morgan and Nicole Eustace

Dontay M. Givens II, New York University

Email: dmg9793@nyu.edu

Research Interests: premodern aesthetic theories; poetics; technologies and theories of (re)presentation; anachronisms; portraiture; (re)presentations of slavery and the slave trade; early modern literature

Advisor: Misho Ishikawa

Emma Griffin, New York University

Email: eg3762@nyu.edu

Research Interests: Seventeenth-century transimperial Caribbean, slavery and empire, African diaspora

Advisors: Jennifer Morgan and Rebecca Goetz

Samantha Wagner, New York University

Email: sbw9438@nyu.edu

Research Interests: My research focuses on histories of culture, contact, and memory in the 18th and 19th-century Upper Midwest. I am interested in Indigenous and environmental history, with a particular focus on the importance of the environment in cultural and collective memory-making.

Advisors: Nicole Eustace and Martha Hodes

Madison Bastress, New York University

Email: mjb920@nyu.edu

Research Interests: My research focuses on questions of space, identity, and belonging in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. In particular, I am interested in Native American and Indigenous relationships with land and place, and in the ways that perceptions of place relate to categories of race and gender.

Advisors: Nicole Eustace and Elizabeth Ellis

Nuala F. Caomhanach, New York University

Email: nfc231@nyu.edu, ncaomhanach@amnh.org

Dissertation Title: “Curating Madagascar: The Rise of Phylogenetics in an Age of Climate change, 1880-2020″

Research Interests: My research focuses on the concept, meaning, and construction of biological Time and Space across three bodies of scientific knowledge—ecological, malagasy, and phylogenetic– as applied to conservation ideology and policy from the late nineteenth century to present day Madagascar.

Advisors: Karl Appuhn and Myles Jackson

Erica Duncan, New York University

Email: end253@nyu.edu

Research Interests: My dissertation centers on the lives of enslaved and free African children in the British Atlantic, and I consider how British settlers circulated these children to facilitate the settlements of South Carolina and the Bahamas between 1715 to 1838. I argue that by centering on these children’s bodily, emotional, and spiritual worlds, we see how settlers used them as tools of settlement and how these children became essential to shaping ideas of freedom within the Black Atlantic.

Advisors: Jennifer Morgan, Michele Mitchell, and Michael Gomez

Zingha Foma, New York University

Email: zf714@nyu.edu

Research Interests: I am interested in textile trading between Europeans and West Africans (Gold Coast) during the 18th century.

Advisors: Michael Gomez and Julie Livingston

Xinyi Hu, New York University

Email: xh726@nyu.edu

Research Interests: My research involves race, gender, and capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century British Atlantic. I am also interested in the afterlife of slavery and how it was related to racial capitalism.

Advisor: Rebecca Goetz

Daniel Joslyn, New York University

Email: daj334@nyu.edu

Research Interests: 19th- U.S. and Middle East; history of religion; intellectual history

Advisors: Martha Hodes; Steven Hahn

Madeline Lafuse, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Email: mlafuse@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Research Interests: I study enslaved people poisoning their masters in nineteenth-century New Orleans from a cultural perspective. I am interested in how poison reveals contradictions between the household, national expansion, and slavery. I am also interested in the history of emotions and affect studies.

Advisor: David Waldstreicher

BJ Lillis, Princeton University

Email: blillis@princeton.edu

Dissertation Title: “A Valley between Worlds: Slavery, Dispossession, and the Creation of a Settler-Colonial Society in the Hudson Valley, 1659-1766”

Research Interests: Atlantic slavery and African Diaspora Studies; Native Studies; settler colonialism; Dutch and German immigration; comparative colonialism; gender, sexuality, and the family; and public history.

Advisor: Wendy Warren

Helena Yoo Roth, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Email: hyoo@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Dissertation Title: “American Timelines: Imperial Communications, Colonial Time-Consciousness, and the Coming of the American Revolution”

Research Interests: My research focuses on communication networks in the 18th-century British Atlantic and examines political and cultural conceptions of time in colonial America. I study the role of mail packet ships and serial print culture in the imperial crisis and the coming of the American Revolution.

Advisor: David Waldstreicher

Geneva Smith, Princeton University

Email: gajsmith@princeton.edu

Dissertation Title: “The Currency of Race: Slave Courts and Compensation in the British Atlantic”

Research Interests: I work on slavery, race, and the law in the seventeenth and eighteenth century British Atlantic. In particular, I am interested in how slave courts as an institution catalyzed the development of legal knowledge amongst enslaved peoples and different classes of white society in colonial Jamaica, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Advisors: Hendrik Hartog and Wendy Warren

Dante A. Whittaker Jr., New York University

Email: daw496@nyu.edu

Research Interests: I am interested in studying the 19th century South, slavery, race, capitalism, politics, and agriculture. I have a particular interest in researching how black men and women leveraged agricultural knowledge and production to further their emancipation political claims.

Advisors: Steven Hahn and Martha Hodes