Erica Feild

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Fall 2019

Like the term Oriental, the word Moor tells us more about the person who uses it than it does about the thing it supposedly describes. It is thus best understood as a category of the Spanish imagination. Following this astute observation, Erica Feild’s dissertation research asks how Spaniards constructed and reconstructed images of moros (Moors), moriscos (Iberian Muslims who converted to Christianity), and other individuals identified as turcos, berberiscos, mahometanos (Turks, Berbers, and Mahometans) across the Spanish Empire. The terms listed above are all characterized by striking instability. They slip between geographical and religious markers, and are often used imprecisely to refer to Muslims (though morisco also came to denote mixed parentage in colonial Mexico). This slippage also extends beyond terminology to the ways in which individuals grouped into these categories were discussed in literary and historical texts. The central question of this project therefore asks whether, and how, these slippery terms and conflated depictions played a rhetorical role in the construction of a discourse that rendered individuals perceived to be Muslims as other. Furthermore, she is interested in how this discourse changed across the empire as it stretched westward to the Americas and the Philippines. To answer this question, she will analyze depictions of Muslims in a range of texts from Spain and New Spain (c.1550-c.1750): novels, chronicles, geographies, royal decrees, trial records, and correspondence between officials. The GRI Fellowship to Madrid will advance this project and allow Feild to consult documents of central interest that she has already identified in archives and rare book libraries at the following institutions in the city: Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Museo de America.

Find out about Erica’s current work here.

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Hannah Rose Feniak

PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, GSAS | Fall 2019

Hannah Feniak’s dissertation will offer an alternative account of the architecture built during the second half of the thirty-six-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939 – 1975), a time during which Spain’s modernization was promulgated by the regime. Through the study of building materials and their production, she explicates how architecture built in Spain enacted this political strategy, known asdesarrollismo (developmentalism). During late-Francoism, the development of materials, technologies and the construction industry was not simply a side effect in the production of a modern economy; rather, through their entanglement in changing labour practices and living conditions, the industrial initiatives of the regime actively participated in the restructuring of society. Architectural production and built form naturalized the social practices that bolstered the power of the regime by creating novel subjectivities and translating them into lived reality.

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Ricardo Gamboa

PhD Candidate, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, GSAS | Fall 2019

Ricardo Gamboa’s research project “Revolution is a Relation Not An Event: Radical Arts Activism in the 21st Century” examines radical arts activism in Chicago. This is arts activism that occurs in the neoliberal city, led by immigrants, queer people, and women of color, and which occurs in tactical relationship with or outside of institutional channels, and recuperates radical ideologies of the minority and radical movements of the 60s and 70s. Moreover, this research provides an alternate genealogy of arts activism that is rooted in the resistance traditions of people of color and expands the horizons of the radical imagination to re-examine how revolutionary change is thought of. While their focus is on Chicago, where they have done extensive field work for two years, they are interested in expanding the project to have transnational research, if not for the dissertation then possibly for its expansion into a first book project. The last decade has seen economic turbulence in Madrid and they would be interested in seeing how this has affected or spurred arts activism in Madrid. Their principal focus at the GRI site will be writing.

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Panche Naumov

Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, NYU Abu Dhabi | Fall 2019

Professor Naumov’s research work is in the field of materials science, particularly focusing on smart materials for sustainable energy transduction. In the past, he has collaborated with colleagues from Spain, and that collaboration produced several publications, however he was not able to communicate with them in person. During his intended stay in Madrid, he will re-establish some of these collaborations and explore new collaborative research directions in the field. He is particularly interested in combining the experience of some of his Spanish colleagues in materials science for emissive materials with the experimental facilities in NYU Abu Dhabi, and he expects that this collaboration will result in exciting new results that will be important for NYU, NYUAD and his collaborators in Spain. This collaboration could also become a seed for attracting prospective graduate students to the new graduate program in NYUAD.

Find out about Panche’s current work here. 

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Hanna Niczyporuk

PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, GSAS | Fall 2019

Hanna Niczyprouk’s dissertation focuses on how firms and governments shape environmental policies in the European Union. Given the availability of the data, and her fluency in Spanish, Spain is the main focus of her work and she conducts projects on this topic with professors at University Carlos III of Madrid and Pompeu Fabra University (where she completed her Masters degree). Her stay in Madrid will provide her access to the documents essential for the successful completion of her thesis and will facilitate academic collaboration. She has finalized the projects that prevented her from joining GRI in London last year, and is certain that she will be able to participate in GRI in the Fall. She is very excited that Madrid is available this year as it is a perfect choice given the focus of her dissertation.

Find out about Hanna’s current work here.

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Francisco Quintiero Pires

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Fall 2019

Francisco Quintiero Pires’s dissertation examines contemporary movies produced in Portuguese-speaking countries during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This study is unprecedented to the extent that it proposes a transversal approach to investigate how these movies represent racialized and gendered constructions of subjectivities in Afro-Luso-Brazilian territories. Movies by Brazilian, Portuguese, Angolan, Mozambican, and Bissau-Guinean directors complicate masculine concepts such as Gilberto Freyre’s miscegenation and Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.” The works of directors such as Kleber Mendonça Filho, Daniela Thomas, Flora Gomes, Pocas Pascoal, Maria João Ganga, Teresa Prata, Miguel Gomes, and Pedro Costa allow the formation of a new theoretical framework and geographic cartography to analyze the aesthetic and political aspects of a cinema that scholarly studies have ignored. The selected directors respond to the notion of miscegenation, a controversial concept for its association to the ideology of Lusotropicalism. His research engages with concepts such as blackness, multiracialism, hybridity, and creolization in relation to the Portuguese colonialism whose cultural borders are supposedly more porous when compared to the hegemonic British model of colonialism. Although the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre characterized the Portuguese colonialism as unique—for being more open to sexual and racial mixing—, it was foundational to a Western imperial discourse that constructed an early colonial imagery of Africa as a dangerous, primitive, and unruly place, and black Africans as the Other. “Moving through Porous Borders” also disputes the masculine perspectives of Freyre’s and Gilroy’s theories, which have dismissed what he calls “the taboo of miscegenation:” the sexual relationship between white women and black slaves. The proposed theoretical framework problematizes the post-colonial projects of state-building based on multiracialism.

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Michael Salgarolo

PhD Candidate, Department of History, GSAS | Fall 2019

Michael Salgarolo’s dissertation, “Manila Bayou: Race, Property, and Empire in Filipino Louisiana”, traces the history of Filipino communities in Louisiana from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In the late 1850s, Louisiana newspapermen first began to publish reports about ex-sailors from the Philippine Islands who had deserted Spanish merchant vessels in the port of New Orleans. From the 1850s to the 1890s, several hundred of these Manillamen lived in a fishing village on the remote island of St. Mal. By the 1880s, many of these men had moved to nearby Jefferson Parish, where they founded Manila Village, a bayou settlement that contained one of the region’s first commercial shrimp-drying platforms. In 1898, the Philippines became a U.S. colony, and shortly thereafter, many of the Filipino fishermen of Louisiana, along with their white wives and their biracial children, settled in New Orleans. There, they formed a Filipino community alongside Filipino sailors in the service of the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine and Filipino laborers who came to Louisiana from California or Hawaii. Many descendants of these initial generations of Filipino immigrants remain in Louisiana to this day. The project’s connections with Madrid are tangential, but the Philippines was a Spanish colony for much of the period being considered, and thus leaves archival leaves in Madrid.

Find out about Michael’s current work here.

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Cos Tollerson

PhD Candidate, Department of History,  GSAS | Fall 2019

On March 31, 1964, a coup d’état organized by a civil-military coalition toppled Brazil’s reformist president, João Goulart, and initiated twenty-one years of dictatorial rule. The years since World War II had seen rising popular political participation and novel efforts to advance economic inclusion for the nation’s impoverished Afro-descendant majority. Yet those who orchestrated the coup portrayed the power seizure as a progressive measure in defense of eventual democracy. How could the dictatorship’s elite supporters interpret democracy’s subversion as its salvation? And what economic conditions and social values did they consider necessary for an “authentic” democracy? To answer these questions, Cos Tollerson’s dissertation examines the interdependent ideas about development, democracy, and race that circulated in a military college, a think-tank, and an industrialist federation and that predominated among coup-backing elites. He argues that their rationale for overthrowing democracy and vision of an ideal society fused local race-thinking with transnational development theory.

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Gabriela Basterra

Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, FAS | Spring 2020

Professor Basterra will be working on two interrelated projects: One: Researching and writing her monograph “Shaping the Void: Vessels, Concepts, Poems,” which includes a chapter on Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (Prado Museum, Madrid), and another one on Spanish writer Jorge Semprún. Research sites would include the Prado Museum, Biblioteca Nacional and the Filmoteca Española, all of which are a short walking distance from the NYU in Madrid site. And two: Coediting a volume of essays on “Social Suffering and the Condition of Victim” with Jose A. Zamora, PI of the research project “Sufrimiento social y condición de víctima” (Instituto de Filosofía, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas [CSIC], Madrid) in which she is a participant. She will be meeting with both her co editor and the contributors to the volume, who are her research project team colleagues.

Find out about Gabriela’s current work here.

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Marisa Carrasco-Queijeiro

Professor, Department of Psychology, FAS | Spring 2020

Professor Carrasco-Queijiero’s research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of visual perception and attention. She works primarily with neurotypical young adults. She has three aims during her stay in Madrid: (1) She is considering investigating visual attention and perception in the elderly. She has collaborated in a project of selective attention and memory with a colleague in Madrid (UNED) who is an expert on cognition of the elderly population. She will meet with her and her group to learn about this population and will explore possibilities for a collaborative project. (2) She will concentrate on writing two articles on spatial attention and temporal attention, for which data collection will be completed in her lab this Fall. (3) She has co-organized international workshops on visual attention in Italy, Argentina and India, and has co-edited the corresponding special issues in Vision Research. She would like to explore the possibility of having the next workshop at NYU in Madrid. This workshop would serve to establish research links among investigators in different countries– as she would include faculty from different NYU’s centers (e.g., NYU-Shanghai and NYU Berlin).

Find out about Marisa’s current work here.

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K ANTRANIK Cassem

PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, GSAS | Spring 2020

Antranik Cassem’s dissertation engages with and problematizes how literature represents what is often considered unrepresentable, catastrophe. Focusing on two case studies that are geographically and historically related, Western Armenian and contemporary Iraqi literature; specifically, with regard to the former, literature from from the 1880s to 1930 (before and after the ‘genocide’) and the latter, literature since 2003 (the Second American Invasion). The objective of such a comparison is to compare the form, structure, and content of literature that circuitously inscribes catastrophe. Central to this dissertation is the impossibility of articulating events of such magnitude that are ostensibly impossible to inscribe or represent, because of the scale of collective catastrophe, its incomprehensibility, and the temporality of its inscription—such events have always already occurred. In other words, how can literature challenge the writing and temporalities of events or represent what is lost? Therefore, what remains unique to texts attempting to engage with disaster is how their form seeks to overcome the gaps of death, destruction, and atrocities of scale that ideologically, materially, physiologically, or socially devastate societies and cultures to such an extent that little remains—for example the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, or the recent sequence of wars and sanctions in Iraq. This dissertation argues that depictions of catastrophe and the economy of language competing to describe is diachronically and historically disruptive, which affects the form, content, and style of work. In addition to utilizing their office space to work on the first chapter of their dissertation, Cassem will be taking the opportunity to work on an article regarding Andalusian literature and its contemporary manifestations in Arabic Literature, most notably Radwa Ashour’s Granada trilogy. Furthermore, Cassem will be working on existing Arabic to Spanish poetic translations of Sargon Boulus.

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Smaran Dayal

PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, GSAS | Spring 2020

Smaran Dayal’s dissertation project addresses the manner in which minority American science fiction novelists and writers from the Global South negotiate and construct figures of the human. Dayal is interested in the way authors such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Nnedi Okorafor, and Bruce Deji Olukotun, speaking to specific histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation, engage the question of what counts as human, what doesn’t, and what it means to interrogate this construction (the human) through the speculative mode (science fiction, fantasy, horror, utopia/dystopia, etc.). This ties into broader philosophical questions of Enlightenment humanism and its political valences and uses. As this project continues to develop, and given his disciplinary training in Comparative Literature, he is interested in expanding the scope of his corpus to include Latin American and U.S. Latinx speculative fiction, including that of Carmen Machado, Ángel Arango, Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez Gómez), Élia Barceló and Eduardo Goligorsky. Being based in Madrid will both help Dayal focus on intensively practising his Spanish, as well as learn more about contemporary Hispanophone science fiction and the history of Spanish colonialism — something that he’s begun to do through his association with the Latinx Project at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

Find out about Smaran’s current work here.

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Robert Lubar

Associate Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, FAS | Spring 2020

During Robert Lubar’s Term for Research from the IFA in Spring 2020 he would like to spend 3 months in Madrid to work on a scholarly facsimile edition of Miró’s “Cántic del Sol.” The text will include a detailed introduction/analysis of the book, as well as a chapter considering Miró’s graphic production. Much of his time will be spent writing, with several trips to Barcelona to consult the archives of the Fundació Miró.

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Christine Martinez

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Spring 2020

Christine Martinez’s dissertation focuses on critiques of neoliberal development in Spain that developed during the years of economic crisis (2008-2018) following the end of the decades-long construction boom (1993-2007), a period that radically transformed the Spanish landscape. Martinez works with various types of media, including photographic books on “speculative ruins”, graphic novels, documentary and fiction films, and novels that address economic crisis and real estate speculation. She is interested in how these media and literary forms challenge beliefs that underwrite hegemonic ideologies of economic growth, capitalism as “the only option”, and speculative development and propose more sustainable, long-term ways of defining well-being and prosperity. In the final part of their dissertation, Martinez hopes to engage with the concerns foregrounded by degrowth thinkers (Barcelona is an important hub) and socio-ecological activist groups (many of which, including Basurama and Ecologistas en Acción, are located in Madrid).

Find out about Christine’s current work here.

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Emilia Sawada

PhD Candidate, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, GSAS | Spring 2020

Emilia Sawada’s dissertation revises criticisms of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of mestizaje, as well as criticisms of mestizaje and miscegenation more generally within Spanish, Anglo, and Japanese colonial regimes. Sawada uses the Spanish term “mestizaje” to interrogate and compare 1) the imposed practices of mixed-race reproductive labor in the Spanish colonial and postcolonial era and 2) the revolutionary symbolic systems that organize US/Mexican aesthetics in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and Third World Liberation movements. Specifically, she rewrites Anzaldúa’s metaphor of Spanish colonial mestizaje for the purposes of studying other forms of U.S. biracial experience, and in particular, biracial Asian American identities. From her queer-of-color feminist perspective as a biracial Japanese American woman—a hapa mestiza, to repurpose an indigenous Hawai’ian term for a “half” or “mixed” person—Sawada expands the political significance of mestizaje as a symbolic system. In particular, she avoids reinscribing the biological essentialism that artists and intellectuals continue to ascribe to mestizaje, revisiting its historically anti-colonial and anti-racist utopian vision. Through close reading, interview analysis, and theorization, Sawada explores the revolutionary lives and aesthetics of woman and queer-of-color feminist artists who dwell in the historically “revolutionary” geographic terrains of Chicano Park, San Diego; the San Francisco Bay; and Mexico City. In this process, she hopes to elucidate the psychic consequences more generally of biracial and multiracial life in the post-Civil Rights era.

Find out about Emilia’s current work here.

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Andrew Seaton

PhD Candidate, Department of History, GSAS | Spring 2020

Andrew Seaton’s dissertation is a political, social, and cultural history of the British National Health Service (NHS) in a transnational perspective. As his work considers the relationship of the NHS compared to other health systems, it will be very advantageous for him to be in Madrid and have access to Spanish archives. This will allow him to make meaningful connections between the NHS and its continental European counterparts in his work. Seaton will also work on improving his Spanish, helping him read sources he already has from Spain and Latin America.

Find out about Andrew’s current work here.

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Farah Dih

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Fall 2020

Farah Dih’s research focuses on the Iberian and North African literature and culture of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, with an emphasis on the Converso and the Morisco issue and its role in the configuration of the Spanish Identity. Her dissertation, “Tras la conversión: Identidad, asimilación cultural y relaciones de poder en la España de los siglos XV, XVI y XVII,” establishes a dialogue among the historical and literary production of Conversos (New Christians of Jewish descent), Moriscos (New Christians of Muslim descent), and Old Christians in Spain and North Africa, placing special emphasis on the Spanish authorities’ obsessive pursuit of a purely Christian identity in order to impose their moral and socioeconomic superiority over the Muslim and the Jewish Other. Dih is particularly interested in working with unpublished “aljamiado” manuscripts at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, the Real Academia de la Historia, the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás (CSIC), the Real Biblioteca, and the Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de El Escorial.

Find out about Farah’s current work here. 

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Hanna Niczyporuk

PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, GSAS | Fall 2020

Hanna Niczyprouk’s dissertation focuses on how firms and governments shape environmental policies in the European Union. Given the availability of the data, and her fluency in Spanish, Spain is the main focus of her work and she conducts projects on this topic with professors at the University Carlos III of Madrid and Pompeu Fabra University (where she completed her Masters degree). Her stay in Madrid will provide her access to the documents essential for the successful completion of her thesis and will facilitate academic collaboration.

Find out about Hanna’s current work here.

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Hannah Rose Feniak

PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Art, GSAS | Spring 2021

Hannah Feniak’s dissertation mobilizes architecture, building materials and labor policy as a lens to reconsider the process of modernization in Spain under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975) through the Transición to democracy (1978-1981). In doing so, Feniak demonstrates that capitalist systems, economic liberalization and modernist aesthetics do not correlate to political liberalism in any fixed way. Although the overt brutality of the Civil War (1936 – 1939) and the mass executions of the following decade faded alongside the regime’s failed bid for autarchy, Feniak argues that the nature of Francoist repression transformed into insidious forms of structural violence within the state apparatus, made manifest through interventionist industrial policy, restrictive labour legislation, and cultural and social repression. In Madrid, she has worked within the administrative archives of the regime to uncover links between such sectors, which history often paints as distinct, separate entities (ie. reading cultural changes apart from economic or industrial development).

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Alexis Gambis

Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Film, & New Media, NYU Abu Dhabi | Spring 2021

Professor Gambis is currently working on a film adaptation of the life and science of the father of neuroscience Santiago Ramon y Cajal. He will be working closely with the Cajal Museum in Madrid to begin the development of this science feature film entitled “El Beso,” based on the original name given by Cajal for synaptic connections between neurons. The film will delve into a merge of his personal life and science fiction stories with his science and beautiful illustrations of “neuronal forests” – as he referred to them.

Find out about Alexis’ current work here.

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LUKE BOWE

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Fall 2021

Luke Bowe’s dissertation focuses on rural abandonment in the context of industrialization in Spain under the Franco regime during the 1940s-1960s. In that period of time, Spain underwent a period of industrialization and economic expansion that caused a massive population shift as residents of rural Spain migrated to large cities and industrial areas in search of better employment opportunities. Concurrently, shifting governmental policy ignored the plight of rural spaces driven by population loss and poor land management. Specifically, his dissertation focuses on the northern province of Asturias, a formerly rural region that became an industrialized center of mining and heavy manufacturing. Bowe engages with literature, films, and government propaganda that represent this tension between rurality and industry, as well as archival material such as photographs, company records, and municipal documents. A GRI in Madrid will enable him to conduct necessary research on materials related to Asturias and industrialization, many of which are held in archives in Madrid, such as the Biblioteca Nacional, the Filmoteca Nacional, and the General Archive of the Administration. Bowe will defend his dissertation proposal in May 2021 and will have completed all coursework by then.

Find out about Luke’s current work here.

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Farah Dih

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS | Fall 2021

Farah Dih’s research focuses on the Iberian and North African literature and culture of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, with an emphasis on the Converso and the Morisco issue and its role in the configuration of the Spanish Identity. Her dissertation, “Tras la conversión: Identidad, asimilación cultural y relaciones de poder en la España de los siglos XV, XVI y XVII,” establishes a dialogue among the historical and literary production of Conversos (New Christians of Jewish descent), Moriscos (New Christians of Muslim descent), and Old Christians in Spain and North Africa, placing special emphasis on the Spanish authorities’ obsessive pursuit of a purely Christian identity in order to impose their moral and socioeconomic superiority over the Muslim and the Jewish Other. Dih is particularly interested in working with unpublished “aljamiado” manuscripts at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, the Real Academia de la Historia, the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás (CSIC), the Real Biblioteca, and the Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de El Escorial.

Find out about Farah’s current work here. 

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ALFO GONZÁLEZ AGUADO

PhD Candidate, Department of Italian, GSAS | Fall 2021

Alfo González Aguado’s dissertation studies the influence of Italian neorealism in Spanish and Latin American cinemas during the 1950s. Although he belongs to the Department of Italian Studies, his project is eminently comparative and transnational. Each chapter is centered around cinematic case studies in Spain, Argentina, and México and how these compare to specific questions regarding Italian neorealism. Hence, Aguado’s project navigates bibliography in the three languages – Spanish, Italian, English. Spending time in Madrid is important for two reasons. First, he will have easier access to secondary resources in Spanish that have been difficult (and, at times, impossible) to access in New York. Secondly, he plans to visit two archives that hold materials very relevant to his  chapter about Spain- the Archivo General de la Administración (in Alcalá de Henares) and the Archivo de la Filmoteca Española.

Find out about Alfo’s current work here.

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ara hagop MERJIAN

Professor, Department of Italian Studies, College of Arts & Sciences | Fall 2021

Professor Ara Merjian will be on sabbatical for Fall 2021 – Spring 2022, and one of his projects during this time will be the continued preparation of an edited volume (co-edited with Professor Robert Davidson of the University of Toronto) of original, foreign language texts on the Spanish Civil War, originally published both in Spain and abroad. He is familiar with Madrid and its research/archival institutions, having lived and researched there in the past. He is also in good rapport with the site director James Fernandez, whose counsel on this edited volume will enhance its development. Madrid remains the preeminent site for research on the Spanish Civil War, including its international ramifications and its intersections with aesthetic theory/propagandistic strategies. This research will also combine synergistically with Professor Merjian’s lecture course – regularly taught in both CORE and J-Term iterations – on Fascism and Anti-fascism, in which the Spanish Civil War and aesthetic responses figures centrally.

Find out about Ara’s current work here.

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Hanna Niczyporuk

PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, GSAS | Fall 2021

Hanna Niczyporuk’s research work concentrates on climate policies, particularly the European Green Deal. In her work she investigates the interactions between firms and legislators. She aims to establish if firms invest in climate measures or if they lobby the politicians to avoid regulation. Her PhD focuses also on Spanish firms, studying the strategies of the fossil fuels and renewable energy producers. She was also a fellow at NYU Madrid in both 2019 and 2020. These stays have proven to be a highly productive time for her. Niczyporuk was able to gather Europe- and Spain-specific evidence, write most of her dissertation chapters, participate in conferences and publish academic papers.

Find out about Hanna’s current work here.

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Nejla Asimovic

PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Nejla Asimovic studies group dynamics within areas of deep societal divisions, with a focus on how digital technologies and social media shape group relations and identity negotiation. She holds a particular interest in the topics of collective memory, with two of her main dissertation chapters having occurred during periods of conflict commemorations. Currently, she is starting a project in collaboration with a non-profit dialogue platform, designed to foster civil online dialogue. While it was initially created with the goal of encouraging civil discourse on college campuses, the platform’s goals have since expanded to fostering collaborative learning across contexts, encouraging communication between diverse groups. She has not yet conducted research in Spain, but has spent six months living and taking political science classes in Madrid (2015). She has ever since been fascinated by the interplay of regional versus national identities within Spain. Asimovic is considering Spain as one of the case studies for her research, testing the effects that interactions on this online platform that promotes cross-group consensus would have on users’ out-group attitudes.

Find out about Nejla’s current work here.

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Jeffrey Fuller

PhD Candidate, Department of French Literature, Thought, & Culture, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Jeffrey Fuller’s dissertation, “Writing the Present in 1930s France (Aragon, Nizan, Malraux)” takes up the question of “committed literature” in the interwar French context, in order to re-frame “commitment” as a relationship of writing to historical time, and more specifically to the present. He analyzes three texts, a poem by Louis Aragon (“Front rouge,” 1930), a literary reportage by Paul Nizan (“Sindobod Toçikiston,” 1935), and a novel by André Malraux (L’Espoir, 1937). In each case, he interrogates the formal consequences of writing about ongoing events of public import. His readings are informed by larger political contexts that provide the content of the works in question, as well as, and perhaps more centrally, the aesthetic debates that influence these works at the level of technique. He employs a transmedial approach in which techniques borrowed from other media (e.g., collage, montage) are brought to bear upon literary texts in order to elucidate their often peculiar characteristics. It is crucial, he argues, to understand these technical approaches as inextricable from the imperative to “write the present,” and thus from a species of literary politics as it emerged in the interwar period, a descendant of the avant-garde (e.g., Dada and Surrealism) and precursor to postwar Existentialism. Fuller will add that Malraux’s L’Espoir is a novel of the Spanish Civil War – for which Madrid is a rather important place – and it is this that motivates him to want to work there toward completing this dissertation.

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Cynthia Gao

PhD Candidate, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Cynthia Gao’s dissertation concerns the influence of revolutionary Asian movements on the radical imagination in the United States in the long 1960s. While as an American Studies PhD Candidate, her primary focus is on the United States, both the Vietnam War and Maoism/the Chinese Cultural Revolution were seen as revolutionary inspirations globally, particularly in Europe. She is looking forward to contextualizing her US-based work with historical comparisons from Spain. Finally, Gao’s research also concerns Chicanx/other Spanish-speaking populations in the US and she would like to be in an environment where she can improve her Spanish skills.

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Angela Haddad

PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Angela Haddad’s dissertation explores the civilizational narratives that were created when migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean settled around the Caribbean basin from 1870 to 1950. At NYU Madrid, she will work on the second chapter of her dissertation, entitled “Caribbean and Mediterranean Disorientation.” This considers how Criollo subjects (the descendants of Spaniards who largely comprised the national elite) and Eastern Mediterranean migrants employed tropes about Andalusia—the medieval conquest of what is now southern Spain by Arabs and the later reconquest of the region by the Spanish crown in the early modern period before its turn to the colonial conquest of the Americas. While references to an Arabo-Islamic golden age nostalgically appear in canonical literature from the Eastern Mediterranean around this time, she asks how migrants repurposed such tropes to simultaneously assert civilizational approximation to Criollos and distance from indigenous communities. Here, Haddad considers the writings of the itinerant intellectuals like Habib Estéfano and Yaqoub Sufair. Further, though tropes about Andalusia first entered Latin America as Spaniards derogatorily characterized colonized indigenous society as ‘Moorish’ (relating to Muslims in Andalusia), she asks how Criollo writings like Enrique Gómez Carillo’s Fez, La Andaluza (1926) and periodicals racialized migrants through reformulations of Andalusian conquest.

Find out about Angela’s current work here.

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Sam Kellogg

PhD Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, & Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development | Spring 2022

Sam Kellogg’s dissertation research—drawing upon perspectives from media studies, human geography, intellectual history, and the environmental humanities—addresses mountains in the Americas as politicized media environments with ambivalent and contested relationships to discourses and practices of connection, globalization, communication, and networking. He traces how today, in the context of global climate change, new forms of digital networking, and international economic integration, mountain regions are being ascribed new meaning and status which both reflects present concerns with conservation, development, and connection, and draws upon much older ideas about mountains as particular kinds of natural objects and exceptional environments. The project is transnational, with two of his case studies located in Hispanophone Latin America (the Sierra Maestra in Cuba and the Cordillera Blanca in Peru); because his dissertation seeks to historically contextualize present-day ideas about connection in mountain landscapes with those of previous eras, it encompasses both historical inquiry and qualitative social research. With this in mind, spending two months in Madrid will move his project forward in several substantive ways. First, it will allow him access to the many archives in Spain which contain documents detailing the Spanish colonial era in both Cuba and the Andes, including geographic and natural descriptions which will yield valuable historical context for his work in the Sierra Maestra and the Cordillera Blanca. Second, it will allow him to further immerse himself in the Spanish language. Third, it will allow Kellogg to further familiarize himself with the Spanish-language scholarship in his areas of research, as well as open opportunities to connect with Spanish academics working on aligned issues and questions.

Find out about Sam’s current work here.

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Natalia Aguilar Vasquez

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literature, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Natalia Aguilar Vaquez’s dissertation focuses on contemporary Colombian and Mexican installation art and literature, dealing with the impact of political and social violence in the reconfigurations and reconstruction of urban and domestic space. She studies how those spaces are seen as creative centers for the imagination of new futures and possibilities of being despite and amidst the violence. The time at the research center will allow her to focus on the third and last chapters of her dissertation and will provide a formal working space that she currently lacks. In Madrid, she will benefit from the vibrant Hispanic cultural atmosphere that the Cervantes Institute and the Prado Museum provide. Her interest in the art history of the Americas, historically tied to Spain, influences this choice of location as well. Lastly, the Department of Spanish in New York is closely tied to the research institute in Madrid, and she is looking forward to learning from the Spanish specialist in-situ like Julia Doménech y James Fernandez.

Find out about Natalia’s current work here.

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Alexis Gambis

Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Film, & New Media, NYU Abu Dhabi | Spring 2022

Alexis Gambis is a filmmaker and biologist. His films combine documentary and fiction, often embracing animal perspectives and experimenting with new forms of scientific storytelling. He is currently on a feature film project on Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of neuroscience and the self-proclaimed “Don Quixote of the Microscope.” Ramón y Cajal believed in the power of imagination and the mixing of reality and fiction in enlightening us about the brain and its structure.

At NYU Madrid, Alexis is developing a short film ‘The Brain is a Time Traveler ‘ that will pay tribute to Ramón y Cajal’s pioneering science and visions. This piece is a teaser to a feature film on Ramón y Cajal that director Alexis Gambis is currently developing entitled “The Protoplasmic Kiss.”

Commissioned by IBM and in conjunction with Spain’s Ministry of Science, this project will take a deep dive into the future of science, notably neurotechnology and genetic engineering. The film will draw from texts from science fiction tales written by Ramon y Cajal, under the pseudonym Dr. Bacteria, compiled together as “Vacation Stories.” It was in 1905, the year before he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with his archrival in neurohistology, Camillo Golgi, that Santiago Ramón y Cajal finally risked publishing these provocative tales. They include five ingenious tales that take a microscopic look at the nature, allure, and danger of scientific curiosity.

Divided in three parts, the film will follow the rules of the 1920s surrealist game ‘exquisite corpse.’ Each section will end with an image/text that will connect to the next section, inviting the observer to participate in the assembly of the hybrid brain and the narrative about the future.

Brain imaging by Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman will be featured as our canvas from the early ink 1900s illustrations of Ramón y Cajal to today’s kaleidoscopic, fluorescent ‘brainbows’ to 3D futuristic modeling of neuronal mapping. As we travel through these intricate neuronal networks, Ramón y Cajal narrated by actor/writer Carlos Bardem will speak to us from the past. The sensory experience will unravel the hidden messages encapsulated in our neurons and highlight the brain as a time traveler. The film will be book-ended with 8mm (recreated) footage of a middle-aged Ramón y Cajal in his art/science lab. This cerebral journey across time is triggered by him peering through his brass microscope. In closing, he will stare directly into the camera and share these final words to the conference participants: “Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”

Find out about Alexis’ current work here.

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Karyn Vilbig

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2022

Karyn Vilbig is currently working on putting together a dissertation proposal investigating the relationship between tax policy and welfare state generosity. Because so many of the world’s most robust welfare states are in Europe, spending time in the continent is very appealing to her. Furthermore, there are several Spanish-speaking countries – including Spain – that she is considering for case studies in her research. For example, Chile’s sharp political turns throughout history (from a democracy with a socialist president to a neoliberal military junta) correspond to dramatic changes in both its tax policy and welfare state. She speaks Spanish conversationally, but would love the opportunity to fully immerse herself in a Spanish-speaking country in order to hone that skill and make future comparative research easier.

Find out about Karyn’s current work here.

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Dustin Aaron

PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2022

The Wilderness Within: Visualizing Colonization on the Medieval German Frontier

When German speakers settled the Eastern Alpine Region in the High Middle Ages, they rationalized their movement as a “return” to the wilderness—relying on a unique, local theology that also served to erase native Slavic communities. The images they created, in turn, were equally unusual, and for their uniqueness have been ignored by the field of art history. This project centers those images as facilitators of colonization and interrogates their entanglement with medieval notions of race and the environment. Each chapter reveals a different way wilderness was conceived—rhetorically, theologically, racially, ecologically—and visualized in support of colonization. These kinds of “wilderness thought” are found to resonate through the histories of colonization to this day.

Find out about Dustin’s current work here.

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Malcolm Araos

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2022

Democracy Underwater: The Formation of Publics in Climate Changed Coastal New York City

Large portions of coastal cities around the world run the risk of becoming submerged underwater. By 2050, climate scientists project that about 150 million people globally could be exposed to chronic flooding from human-induced sea level rise, as societies fail to implement even modest attempts to reduce carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. In response to coastal threats, city governments in urban centers are experimenting with large-scale flood infrastructure as a way of adapting in place, as well as contemplating the controversial possibilities of retreating away from rising seas. Scholars, policymakers, and activists alike have emphasized the importance of public deliberation and democratic decision-making in the development of adaptation activities. Advocates have noted the desirability of including residents and other civil society actors as one way to legitimize and bolster the procedural justice dimensions of government initiatives. Malcom Araos’s dissertation is about what happens when publics and the state attempt to collectively prepare for a warmer, wetter future. The following question guides this study: How are individual residents, groups, and institutions summoned to participate politically in the problem of climate change in New York, how do they organize, and what conflicts emerge? Setting out to answer this question quickly reveals a subset of debates taking place in New York over competing forms of expertise; climate justice, housing, race, and representation; and over the production of legitimate knowledge about the changing climate, which form the empirical material of the dissertation. To answer the question, the dissertation presents an in-depth case study of the design and planning process over two large-scale adaptation infrastructure projects in New York. Drawing on over 250 hours of participant observation over four years, over 30 in-depth interviews, and several hundred technical documents and news articles, the dissertation presents a fine grained analysis of conflicts among residents, local neighborhood groups, and government officials over the future of the city’s climate changed coastline.

Find out about Malcolm’s current work here.

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Chui Wa Ho

PhD Candidate, Department of Music, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2022

Radio and democracy in US-occupied Japan (1945-1952)

Chui Wa Ho’s dissertation traces the historical development of American radio campaigns in Japan during the US occupation from 1945 to 1952. These radio campaigns reveal changing ideas about radio listening practices and democratic citizenship, in particular, the role of listening in the formation of the (socio)political subjects in postwar Japan. Building on philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory on the roles of sound and listening in propagating colonial subjectivities, she argues that Japanese radio listeners became prime targets to American occupation personnel as radio provided opportunities to reshape Japanese political subjects that would eventually align with American postwar policies. The re-shaping of Japanese (listening) subjects necessitates a revision of Japan’s imperial past that downplays Japanese commoners’ roles in the war. At the same time, occupation personnel were confronted with the impossible task of evaluating Japanese people’s attainment of the subjectivity that Americans desired, which further stirred the anxiety among occupation personnel as they feared that Japanese subjects, who failed to listen, would become ungovernable. Ho’s study intervenes in current scholarly discourses in sound, music and media studies by underscoring sound media’s role in transforming audience perceptions of one’s socio political relationship with the state and a nation’s histories.

Find out about Chui’s current work here.

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Sarah Iverson

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences | Summer 2022

Reckoning with Race: Concepts of Descent-Based Groups in Organizations

Sarah Iverson’s dissertation is motivated by the need to understand how organizations reconcile ambiguous or even contradictory understandings of race when exposed to the dual forces of social construction and race-conscious organizational initiatives, which she terms a racial reckoning. Iverson investigates the race concept, or the web of beliefs underlying how actors define and understand perceived descent-based differences in the United States. How do organizational actors make sense of and use the concepts of descent-based difference in day-to-day work? How are race concepts negotiated in social interaction? How do race concepts and racial categories operate at the level of the organization? To answer these questions, she examines concepts of race at a community health center during the Covid-19 pandemic; she conducted 20 months of ethnographic data collection, and over 50 interviews. Iverson argues that through daily interactional practices, employees at the community health center strategically drew on variegated race concepts in order to achieve their goals. The work culture of the organization rejected group-based hierarchy but promoted a deterministic relationship between group membership and behavior. Ultimately, racial group members were conceptualized as culturally homogenous, hindering the organization’s efforts to provide racially equitable care. By highlighting the importance of institutions in understanding the meaning of race — overlooked in both the academic literature and industry diversity, equity, and inclusion work — she hopes to make a critical intervention in scholarly and mainstream understandings of race/ethnicity and organizations

Find out about Sarah’s current work here.

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Johanna Sluiter

PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2022

Johanna Sluiter’s dissertation provides the first monographic study of the Atelier des Batisseurs (ATBAT) – an architectural-engineering collective formed in postwar France and active in former colonial territories between 1945 and 1962. In addition to highlighting the work of ATBAT, her research seeks to explicate the move from single-author to team-based practice, consider the valences of architectural modernism in various cultural and climatic contexts, and narrate the development of transnational, development aid agencies (such as UN-Habitat). Organized into four chapters treating collective housing case studies, her project examines both the suitability and shortcomings of architectural modernism across a range of cultural, geographic, and ideological divides during the era of reconstruction, decolonization, and Cold War tensions. Thus, while focus rests upon a single group and typology, the analyses formed and questions raised pertain to wider artistic and political debates defining the latter half of the twentieth century. By examining architectural modernism in tandem with emergent political agendas, Johanna reconsiders the connections between aesthetics and politics, and trouble assumptions of modern architectural historiography to date.

Find out about Johanna’s current work here.

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Alfo G. Aguado

PhD Candidate, Department of Italian Studies, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Fall 2022

Alfo Aguado’s dissertation studies the influence of Italian neorealism in Spanish and Latin American cinemas during the 1950s. Although he belongs to the Department of Italian Studies, his project is comparative and transnational. Each chapter is centered around cinematic case studies in Spain, Argentina, and México and how these compare to specific questions regarding neorealist cinema. He navigates a bibliography in the three languages – Spanish, Italian, English. Aguado will access important archives and resources with relevant materials for his dissertation, like the Archivo de la Filmoteca Española Archivo de la Fundación Carlos Velo. He will also coordinate in person a film cycle on transnational neorealism at the University of Madrid (Complutense) with Professor David Escudero (UPM), with whom he plans to publish a piece in the future.

Find out about Alfo’s current work here.

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Jason Ahlenius

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Fall 2022

Jason Ahlenius’s dissertation explores the politics of labor and race in nineteenth-century Mexico’s borderland regions through literature, visual studies, contract, and other media. The project seeks to understand how Mexico, one of the first and most radical abolitionist nations in the Americas, justified and obscured practices of forced labor in agricultural capitalism in Tejas, Yucatán, and Chiapas. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and NYU’s Graduate Research Initiative to carry out archival research in Mexico, the U.S., Guatemala, Cuba, and Spain. He has also published his work on the sensational literature of the U.S.-Mexican War in Western American Literature.

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Camila Arroyo Romero

PhD Candidate, Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Fall 2022

Insistent Dislocations: Choreographic Experiments is a research project that analyzes choreographic experiments that highlight performances of dislocation, both embodied and spatial, to argue for how communities transform survival and aesthetic tactics through creative practice. The project puts forward a notion of insistent practice, arguing that the driving force behind these projects lies in the constant repetition of experiments that prioritize objectless study and communal gathering. Spanish artists Aitana Cordero, and Manuel Rodriguez, both Madrid based, are dance and performance practitioners whose work will be featured in the project. Being in Madrid will allow Camila Arroyo Romero to meet the artists, interview them, and experience their work live. Similarly, she is interested in conducting research at the performance archive at the Museo Reina Sofia Library and Documentation Center, as well as their Central Archive.

Find out about Camila’s current work here.

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Ignacio Bajter

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Fall 2022

Ignacio Bajter’s dissertation examines materiality and aesthetic ideas in the Latin American avant-gardes (1910-1930), based on a transatlantic, materialist, and culturalist perspective. This field is informed by European avant-gardes, in artistic and political dialogue with several paired Latin American movements. Spain was the transit point for many Latin American artists and theorists in the 1910s and 20s. Specifically, Madrid-Barcelona were bridges between Paris-Berlin and Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sao Paulo, Lima, Santiago, and Mexico City. In Madrid, Bajter will access collections of historical avant-gardes held in specialized libraries and museums (Museo Reina Sofia, Residencia de Estudiantes, Archivo Lafuente-Santander, Fundación March). During his residence at NYU Madrid, he is also a visiting researcher at the Universidad Complutense.

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Leonard Cortana

PhD Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Fall 2022

Leonard Cortana is looking at the memorialization and un-erasure of assassinated feminist and anti-racist activists. After the execution of Afro-Brazilian Councilwoman Marielle Franco in March 2018, different groups have created transnational networks of advocacy from Spain to call out for justice for her murder. In 2019, A whole conference was organized at the Museum Reina Sofia to celebrate her legacy with a group of feminist activists from all over Europe. Amnesty International Madrid has conducted a transregional campaign all over the country. Cortana is in the later writing stage, but the Madrid archives will help him finish his chapter on the activist interconnections between Spain and Latin American countries.

Find out about Leonard’s current work here.

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Ramon Resendiz

PhD Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, & Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development | Fall 2022

Ramon Resendiz’s work brings attention to the erasures within settler archival museum accounts of the violent dispossession of Mexican and Indigenous communities with the arrival of Anglo settlers in the southwest. These visual documents contrast dominant settler museum narratives foregrounding questions about production practices, politics, and professional experience. His research reveals: 1) How the visual culture of settler colonialism is encoded and sustained in everyday life; 2) Oral and storytelling practices of remembrance and resistance by Indigenous peoples against settler violence; and 3) how documentary filmmakers document and perform acts of visual resistance that reject settler mythologies of a Texas devoid of Mexicans and First Nations prior to their arrival. He interrogates the visual and archival processes by which these geographies are “bordered” by settler colonialism and engender systemic violence and dispossession. Through his findings, Resendiz argues that critical visual documents and filmmakers create counternarratives that destabilize dominant conceptions of nationalism, national history, race, and geographic bordering logics.

Find out about Ramon’s current work here.

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Maria Paz Almenara

PhD Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, & Education, Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, & Human Development | Spring 2023

Maria Paz Almenara’s dissertation project deals with the way technologies and methodologies transform land into data and mobilize knowledge in the interest of mineral extractivism and mining corporations in Latin America. A key chapter deals with landscape assessment methodologies used to give quantified values to the aesthetic qualities of an area designated for mining or infrastructure projects. Although her work focuses on the applications of these scientific protocols in the Andean region, the dominant methodological and policy frameworks used are often developed in European contexts, particularly in Spain. Research in Madrid would complement their fieldwork in Peru and allow for an expanded understanding of the international networks of knowledge transfer that inform political and technical processes in Latin America and consider the continued relevance of colonial histories and imperial dynamics across the two regions.

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Amanda Renee Blewitt

PhD Candidate, Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, & Humanities, Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, & Human Development | Spring 2023

Amanda Blewitt’s dissertation research analyzes how local actors in Honduras — a fragile environment plagued by ongoing violence — view peace and their role in cultivating it. She explores a variety of forms of peacebuilding, including formal and nonformal approaches to preventing violence, as well as Hondurans’ views on how to address the root causes of instability and injustice. Her fieldwork, which she carried out between January and December of 2022, involved three interlocking methodological components. First, to synthesize lessons learned through civil society, she interviewed more than 50 Hondurans who work in nongovernmental violence-reduction efforts, in roles ranging from directors to field staff. Second, to understand how ordinary Hondurans view opportunities for disrupting violence in their everyday environments, she facilitated focus group discussions with 41 residents of violence-prone areas along the country’s northern coast. Finally, to contextualize these conversations, she observed the activities of several local organizations that target urban, youth, and gender-based violence. While in Madrid, Amanda will be analyzing data and writing. Her dissertation fits into a broader research agenda focusing on civil-society, educational, and arts-based approaches to reducing violence and promoting human rights in Latin and North America; and applying peacebuilding lenses to contexts and problems that are often overlooked by the peace and conflict studies field.

Find out about Amanda’s current work here.

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Gavin Kilduff

Associate Professor, Department of Management & Organizations, Stern School of Business| Spring 2023

Gavin Kilduff is working on research on status dynamics in groups, as well as on the effects of play on intergroup biases. He will meet with other scholars in management, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology while in Madrid.

Find out about Gavin’s current work here.

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Yana Lysenko

PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2023

Yana Lysenko focuses on both Soviet literature and media along with contemporary Ukrainian literature and media. Her current research interest involves looking at the Soviet involvement and depiction of the Spanish Civil War within both Spanish and Russian perspectives. Particularly looking at media, she is curious to research how the official Soviet attitude towards national struggle and civil war within the Spanish context could potentially relate to the Russian media’s depiction of the Ukrainian war from 2014, including attitudes towards civil war, fascism against socialism, and the representation of identity in relation to official ideological narratives. There has also been some indication in research of Ukrainian popular support for the cause during the Spanish Civil War, which particularly interests her. She is eager to see evidence of correspondence between these two cultures, and archives giving evidence of the Spanish partisan responses to the conflict between these spheres.

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Ximena Málaga Sabogal

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2023

Ximena Málaga Sabogal’s dissertation “Andean Waves: Radio, Language, and Indigineity in the Peruvian Altiplano” examines how Quechua language and identity are produced for and by Indigenous radio in the Peruvian Altiplano and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at Radio Onda Azul in Puno, she shows how radio plays a crucial role in the (re)construction of identity categories, especially through ideologically based practices such as linguistic purism and cultural gatekeeping in Quechua-speaking programming. She analyzes the field of radio production by focusing on the complex ways in which Quechua, as a language and as an identity, is made and remade in the media even before—and in the process of—being broadcast to the public. She has completed two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru and is now in the writing stage, although she is still following up on some recent developments in her research. One of those is the importance of international discourses on indigeneity and how they translate into the local radio work that she has been observing. Every year at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, FILAC – an international organization for the development of Indigenous peoples – holds a course on Indigenous rights for Latin American Indigenous leaders. During her stay in Madrid, she will meet FILAC teachers and students to enrich her ethnographic data.

Find out about Ximena’s current work here.

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Robin Neuhaus

PhD Candidate, Department of Teaching & Learning, Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, & Human Development | Spring 2023

In the Spring, Robin Neuhaus anticipates that she’ll be in the final stages of writing her dissertation. Her dissertation is about how child development research is translated and communicated in blog posts, on the news, and through social media. She is measuring the extent to which online content is sensationalized, and how accurately research is portrayed.

Find out about Robin’s current work here.

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Fabio Parasecoli

Professor, Department of Nutrition & Food Studies, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development | Spring 2023

Fabio Parasecoli’s research project focuses on the application of design methods to food systems. Specifically, he proposes to explore approaches and practices of identification, support, and promotion of food heritage by facilitating collaborations between designers (especially those who work in the field of gastronomy and food), academics, administrators at various levels of the government (from the local to the national), experts in sustainability, communication professionals, and actors from the private sector: agriculture, livestock and fishing, restaurants, hotels, and tourism in general. With this objective, he plans to organize a two-day workshop that applies design methodologies – specifically, systemic design and design thinking- to develop innovative and applied initiatives that reflect the interests and priorities of the different actors interested in food heritage. NYU Madrid will support the workshop, providing the necessary spaces and local coordination assistance; and use the project as the centerpiece for their annual seminar. He will use his academic and design contacts in Spain to organize the workshop, whose results will be later disseminated through international publications, participation in conferences and other cultural events in the US and other countries, as well as through the development of a prototype of a university course on food heritage that could be either offered online or adapted to the various NYU sites. The proposed project expands the research on the cultural politics of food heritage that he started with his 2017 book Knowing Where it Comes From: Labeling Traditional Foods to Compete in a Global Market, and continued with his Fulbright Specialist Program in Barcelona, Spain in the summer of 2019, his ongoing collaboration with the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food in Tours, France, and his new book Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics, forthcoming in June 2022 with Columbia University Press.

Find out about Fabio’s current work here.

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Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar

PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, Graduate School of Arts & Science| Spring 2023

Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar’s dissertation will focus on mapping the network and exchanges among artists circulating in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain between 1898 and 1940. The analysis will focus on the role of the concept of Hispanoamérica in the literary and artistic production of a few writers and artists. He will showcase the complicated dynamics of Hispanoamericanismo in narratives about nation-building portrayed by Mexican and Colombian artists after their journey in Spain. Some of the networks he will consider are the links between the students in Academia de San Carlos in Mexico and the Generación del 98 in Spain. During his travel to Madrid, he expects to examine the exchanges between Mexican artists like Roberto Montenegro (1885–1968), Ángel Zárraga (1886–1946) with Spanish counterparts such as Julio Romero de Torres (1874–1930), Eduardo Chicharro (1873–1949), Ricardo Baroja (1871–1953), and Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (1871–1959). On the other hand, he is interested in considering the Tertulia del Café Pombo in Madrid and the Latin American artists visiting the city during this period.

Find out about Juan Gabriel’s current work here.

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Ameya Tripathi

Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Faculty of Arts & Science | Spring 2023

Ameya Tripathi will be converting his dissertation to a book. As well as reconnecting with archives such as the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo and the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the opportunity to work with the Casa de México, Casa Árabe and Casa de la India will help him immensely in deepening the anticolonial focus of the last two chapters of “Documents of Revolution: Literacy, Translation and Internationalism in the Spanish Civil War”. Major protagonists in his book project, including Arturo Barea, Najati Sidqi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, spent significant time in Spain during the war. As they advanced a new, non-aligned internationalism, they developed a new poetics of documentary writing, photography, radio and film. The trip will also give him the opportunity to study the reception of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose poems were translated from English to Spanish by Zenobia Camprubí and others in Spain, as he develops future projects. Having met the Director, James Fernández, in online meetings with el taller at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (the intellectual community part of the IUDC working on Iberian studies), he is well familiar with NYU Madrid’s pioneering work connecting Black Studies to Spanish cultural studies, including the amazing series Conciencia-Afro and the new anti-racism observatory being established at the center. Working with Jim and faculty including Antumi Toasijé, Aída Bueno and many others, he will be able to develop his own research interests, book projects with an archival practice and anticolonial focus.

Find out about Ameya’s current work here.

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Kevin Wells

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2023

Kevin Wells is beginning work on his dissertation which focuses on the following questions: (1) The intersection of identity and life-stage on city-suburb mobility, (2) the role of social networks in informing neighborhood preference and (3) the relationship between city economic conditions and suburban voting patterns in the 2016 presidential election. Taken together, this dissertation focuses on the various factors that inform where people live and how they behave.

Find out about Kevin’s current work here.

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Caroline Bowman

PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2023

My dissertation project focuses on the social and political thought of G.W.F. Hegel. In the dissertation, I defend a novel interpretation of Hegel’s theory of human freedom as defended in Hegel’s 1821 Philosophy of Right. Hegel advances a thesis about freedom that challenges conceptions of freedom dominant in the liberal tradition: he argues that freedom, rather than consisting merely in independence from other agents or from one’s community, has an irreducibly interdependent component. More specifically, he argues that to be fully free, a citizen of a state must regard the common good and freedom of all citizens as among their ultimate aims. My dissertation develops a reconstruction of Hegel’s argument for this thesis that shows how Hegel’s social theory constitutes a radical transformation of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy.

Find out about Caroline’s current work here.

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Yasmeen Chism

PhD Candidate, Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Summer 2023

My dissertation, “Tracing black Movements: Chor[e]ographing Displacements in North Carolina’s Piedmont,” begins with the assertion that black presence in North Carolina’s Piedmont, like that throughout the black diaspora, represents an ongoing history of displacement. I contend that black presence in the region, even through displacement, can best be followed via historical and contemporary traces of black movements. My project unites performance studies, archival assemblages, feminist jurisprudence, critical urban studies, and black feminisms.Starting in the Progressive Era and concluding in the Black Power Movement, this project is bookended by major national happenings throughout North Carolina. While my project is grounded in a region (Piedmont) within a region (Southeastern US), the contentions that I make are not only applicable to other locations but are always already international in their scope. My transdisciplinary project unearths new approaches for examining a region which has been largely undertheorized and expands existing conversations about black displacements.

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Elisa Corona Aguilar

PhD Candidate, Department of Music, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2023

Elisa Corona Aguilar’s dissertation traces Mingus’s musical and literary narratives of Mexico, which throw light on his complex ideas about race, origin, composition, and spirituality. Through his constant crossing of borders projected in his work and life, he challenged ideas about race, nationality, musical genres and literary genres.

Find out more about Elisa’s work here.

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Daryl Meador

PhD Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Summer 2023

Texas cinema is weighed down by its own mythologies. It is defined by willful cowboys, self-reliant settlers, and moralizing oilmen. Few states so desperately define themselves by such a storied past and of white, market-driven ascendency. Yet, the outgrowth of these myths—rampant extractive economies and private power—have made Texas increasingly inhospitable toward sustainable life itself. Daryl Meador’s dissertation explores how Texas’ cinematic worlds and their representational tropes have compounded the destruction of livable futures brought about by colonial and capitalist histories in the state. It also probes through these totalizing projections at the material histories underneath them. The stories of perseverance by those who don’t fit the mold of the ideal Texan contain far-reaching lessons of defiance, survival, and creativity in a state that historically and presently enacts some of the most extreme forms of racial and state violence and control in the United States.

Find out more about Daryl’s work here.

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Matías Morales Cerda

PhD Candidate, Department Public Administration, Wagner School of Public Service | Summer 2023

Matías Morales’ dissertation studies the causes and consequences of primary and secondary school mobility, a phenomenon that is widespread across school systems around the world, but poorly understood. He uses data on student-level cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes and reported preferences of families for different schools in Chile. This allows to overcome two empirical challenges: first, that families choosing to switch are not a random sample of the population, which could bias the estimated relation between switching and outcomes; second, being able to determine what determines switching decisions, which can be inferred by observing families preferences for different attributes. Importantly, inertia in families’ switching behaviour might imply that the demand is captive and thus the incentives for schools to provide quality in a highly liberalized market for education, as the Chilean, might fade out.

Find out more about Matías’ work here.

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Lauren Treihaft

PhD Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Summer 2023

Since its onset just over ten years ago, the transnational effects of the global financial crisis have been studied across a range of scholarly domains with a number of theorists providing critical accounts on the relationship between economic decline, sociality, and political subjectivity. More specifically in the context of cinema studies, scholarly interest in the aftermath of the Great Recession has primarily revolved around its repercussions for the film industry on the North American front. The impacts of the crisis on the European film market have only very recently been seriously taken up by global film scholars. Thus, by narrowing in on the emanation of a twenty-first century deadpan mode in Swedish, Greek, and Italian cinemas— film cultures and discourses emerging from two of the nations most adversely affected by the Eurozone crisis, Greece and Italy, and Sweden which lies outside the of the Eurozone, and a much later member of the European Union. Lauren Treihaft aims to scrutinize the trend to reveal it as a political aesthetic of recession in response to The Great Recession. She plans to do so through a close analysis of films by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, and Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. Such a comparative approach examines how the discourse on crisis and subsequent rhetoric of recession are visually mediated and creatively mobilized by European filmmakers who share a propensity for flat modes, recondite worlds, and abstruse affectations. Those qualities culminate in what Treihaft will qualify as an emergent transnational aesthetic of recession and deadpan as well as a sensate epochal modality. Ultimately, she argues that the recurrence of the recessive style not only speaks to the distinctive aesthetic features of recession era European cinema, but it contributes to a larger examination of the rhetorical function of deadpan as an affective register and a mode of capturing trauma, precarity, compassion fatigue, and ultimately what is ontologically at stake in an age of continual crisis.

Find out more about Lauren’s work here.

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Allen Feldman

Professor, Department of Media, Culture, & Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development | Fall 2023

Professor Allen Feldman is writing a comparative-history of contemporary prison reform and abolition movements stressing the visual culture of prison activism. This comparative research extends his publications on prison regimes in Northern Ireland, apartheid South Africa and Guantanamo (Feldman 1994, 2015). Professor Feldman is seeking dialogues with scholars of and representatives from Spanish prison reform and prison abolitionist organizations such as: Grupo de Estudios sobre la Historia de la Prisión; Plataforma por el Centro de Memoria de la Cárcel de Carabanchel; C.O.P.E.L. (Coordinadora de Presos en Lucha); Tokata Bulletin sobre luchas actuales dentro de las cárceles del estado; Centro de Internación de Emigrantes. His focus in and beyond Madrid is informed by the response of incarceration scholars and activists to the “Report to the Spanish Government by The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment” (2020 Council of Europe), which documented ill treatment of prisoners and detained migrants such as: guard retaliation, official regimes of position abuse (“sujeción mecánica regimental”), the “Fichero de internos de especial seguimento”– the special module regimen for political, mentally ill and substance misusing prisoners– and the inadequacies of Covid medical care.

Find out about Allen’s current work here.

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Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Literature, NYU Shanghai | Fall 2023

While in Madrid, Professor Anna Kathryn Kendrick plans to focus on her second book, Fossils, Handprints, Bones: Human Time and Deep History in Twentieth-Century Spain. Her work brings deep history and art into conversation. Surveying intellectuals and excavators; artists and psychologists; poets and scientists; and curators and educators, it argues for a terrestrial reading of cultural production before and after the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). As in her first book on the science and aesthetics of childhood in Spain, which won the MLA’s 2021 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for Spanish and Latin American Studies, Professor Kendrick plans to go deeply into cultural sources to interrogate how artists and writers translate scientific ‘enigmas’. Her new work considers artists as archaeologists, zooming into ways in which successive figures enact a conscious work of temporal “unearthing.” She is interested, as well, in how museums of prehistory have engaged contemporary interpretations of their collections, whether through artist Carlos Irijalba’s “skins”, shaped by 3D renderings of Spanish caves like Altamira and El Pendo; monochrome works by the photographer Teresa Correa that aestheticize museum archives, prehistoric objects and the “Madre” skeleton of the Canary Islands; or Carmen Calvo’s engagement with paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga at Madrid’s Valle de los Neandertales in 2020. Equally, Professor Kendrick is motivated by what might be called ecocritical and feminist readings of deep time, such as María Zambrano’s Claros del bosque (Forest Clearings, 1977) and Clara Janés’ Fósiles (Fossils, 1985), the latter on which she has recently submitted an article and plan to develop into a book chapter. Being at NYU Madrid will be helpful to Professor Kendrick’s research, with interlocutors such as Julia Domenech (visual arts and gender) and Lee Douglas (anthropology and forensic science); as well as external collaborators at UC3M (Prof. Álvaro Ribagorda) and Universidad Complutense (Prof. Santiago López-Ríos), who work on histories of science and education in early twentieth-century Spain, among many others in the immediate academic and geographical vicinity.

Find out about Ana’s current work here.

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Antonia Lant

Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Fall 2023

Professor Antonia Lant’s current book takes a narrow approach to a giant preoccupation of the last fin-de-siècle, heredity. It seeks to reveal this topic’s shared visual and written manifestations in the work of artists and scientists, in France and Spain. Broadly speaking, Professor Lant’s study works to erode disciplinary boundaries in demonstrating the shared concerns crossing between the biological and aesthetic spheres. The umbrella of heredity sheltered the era’s fascination with primal questions: Where does the new begin? Why are children not copies of their parents? Can it be known who descends from whom? These queries carried systems of race and division, and sustained an interest in specific aesthetic forms (the cleaved image), media, and materials, from staining and microscopy to drawing, printing, photography, sculpting, and even filming. Spain was a center of such energetic traffic among thinkers and creators, and Professor Lant’s task while at NYUMadrid will be to research the dimensions of this network, and to draft a chapter on it. She plans to center the chapter around painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (celebrating the 100th anniversary of his death this year); psychiatrist, neurologist, policy advocate, and leading histologist Luis Simarro, trained by Jean Martin Charcot in Paris (and Sorolla’s family doctor); and their mutual friend, neurologist and illustrator Santiago Ramón y Cajal, later winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology together with Camillo Golgi for their decipherment of the structure of the nervous system. All these investigators sought to envisage the character of inheritance using a range of traditional and modern media. The results shed light on the current preoccupations with rendering reproduction, and its politics.

Find out about Antonia’s current work here.

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Luis Rincón Alba

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts | Fall 2023

Created in the mid fourteenth century by royal decree in Sevilla, the “Cabildos de Nación Congos y Gitanos”, were “mutual aid” societies that later were transplanted in the Americas. There, they played a critical role in the formation of folkloric and religious traditions, they offered enslaved Africans solace and protection, and, in many instances, their activities were linked to riots and slave revolts. In Professor Luis Rincon Alba’s book project, Dance to the Hurt! Carnival Performance, Riots, and Festive Mutuality he pays attention to the fact that most carnival traditions in Cuba, Colombia, Trinidad, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic can be traced back to these Cabildos, however, not much is known about their formation or centralized legislation. During his time at NYU Madrid, Professor Alba plans to visit libraries, archives, and seek out historical documentation regarding the formation and activities of the cabildos in Madrid and Sevilla. His archival research will focus on the “Archivo de Indias” (Sevilla) and in the disappeared Museo de Ultramar’s ethnographic collection (Museo de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid). Professor Alba’s focus on these two collections follows the research need to establish a preliminary understanding of how the activities of the Cabildos were registered in the archive, this initial visit will be merely preliminary (two weeks approximately), and to witness firsthand how some objects from the Museo de Ultramar collection were confiscated by the police and colonial authorities to Cabildos de Nación in La Habana (Cuba), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), and Puerto España (Trinidad). These research periods will assist Professor Alba in gaining a transatlantic scope that is much needed for his research project and his book manuscript.

Find out about Luis’ current work here.

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Robin Neuhaus

PhD Candidate, Department of Teaching & Learning, Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, & Human Development | Fall 2023

Robin Neuhaus’ research explores how child development research is communicated and portrayed online, via social media, blogs, and news articles. Often research is used as a means of lending credibility to opinions and perspectives that may be anxiety provoking for parents – and may also have important implications for public health. Drawing on methodology used to examine the communication of other areas of science, including climate change and pandemics, Neuhaus’ dissertation will examine how studies of screen time and attachment are discussed online.

Find out about Robin’s current work here.

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MICHELLE CASTANEDA

Assistant Professor, Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts | Spring 2024

Professor Michelle Castaneda’s work investigates dance, performance art, and immigration. She plans to spend the Spring and Summer in Madrid studying the practice of Flamenco dance. Professor Castaneda will be visiting dance and theater archives and libraries in Madrid, as well as attending Flamenco performances, festivals, classes, and rehearsals.

Find out about Michelle’s current work here.

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JOSÉ GABRIEL FIGUEROA CARLE

PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2024

Jose Gabriel Figueroa Carle’s dissertation, “The Ends of Enchantment: Disaster Poetics in/from Puerto Rico”, aims to study the poetics of memory after disasters in recent Caribbean history and takes Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a case study for how scenes of national grief spark social movements as well as moments of collective memory work that transcend place and literary genre. After leaving Puerto Rico in 2018, Carle’s academic research and creative writing interests began to center the responses of islanders to the 2017 hurricane season, which caused an exodus of over 200,000 residents, especially around writers and artists who have chosen to archive the immediate aftermath with the specific pedagogical intent of showcasing the detrimental effects of climate change, lingering colonial disasters, and gentrification/displacement. A central conceit of this dissertation is to consider Caribbean hurricanes (and other “natural” disasters that characterize the region) not as mere objects of study but as a poetics that showcase the specificity of the Caribbean disaster experience through form (coastal erosion, narrative fragmentation, stories of displacement and degradation) and content (hurricanes as forms of knowledge, as vehicles for collective consciousness-building). Based on conversations with curators and visual artists, Carle’s dissertation is now potentially expanding towards conversations with islander artists working and creating outside of Puerto Rico and United States to examine how climate change has contributed to sparking diasporas within diasporas, that is, new waves of forcibly-displaced migrants that overwhelm previously well-established migration circuits. During her semester in Madrid, Carle plans to 1) conduct archival research in the Archivo General de Indias with respect to what is in the historical archive related to hurricanes in Puerto Rico before US colonial rule; 2) visit the Naval Museum in Madrid to uncover visual art pieces/artists related to hurricanes in the Caribbean; and 3) meet with curators, poets, and artists, like Leo (Edwin) González or Marta Jazmín, who currently reside in Spain to analyze how past hurricanes still resonate as cornerstones for collective memory-building among newer and older migrants within the Puerto Rican diasporic communities abroad.

Find out about José Gabriel’s current work here.

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SERENA MOSCARDELLI

PhD Candidate, Department of Italian Studies, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2024

Serena Moscardelli’s project critically interrogates the focus on folklore and rural areas of recent Italian film (since 2010). While her research is focused on cinema, her interest in folklore extends to visual arts, literature and other forms of cultural production, thus demanding a comprehensive critical study that has been missing hitherto. The first chapter is going to focus on the delimitation of the concept of folklore and its relevance in Italy today. The second chapter will address folkloric storytelling in film and the third the relationship between folklore and place. Finally, the last chapter is focused on aesthetics and politics. The relation between cinema and folklore is not limited to Italy but much recent Spanish cinema presents it too, hence Moscardelli’s interest in Madrid. Moscardelli plans to use her time in the city to give more breadth to her research, with the possibility of meeting with local faculty as well as accessing important archives and resources for her dissertation, such as Filmoteca Española.

Find out about Serena’s current work here.

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MIRIAM PENSACK

PhD Candidate, Department of History, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2024

Miriam Pensack’s dissertation project, “Registers of Sovereignty: The Struggle for State and Self in Cold War Latin America,” traces the imbricated history of the former Panama Canal Zone and the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba over the course of the twentieth century. The founding of Guantánamo Bay as a U.S. military base in 1898 coincides with Washington’s intervention in the Cuban Wars of Independence from Spain (often referred to as the Spanish-American War in the United States). Panamanian independence from Colombia followed shortly thereafter, and the United States also played a significant interventionist role in that development. Due to Cuba’s more recent colonial relationship to Spain, and Panama’s significance as a transnational hub for global commerce, both countries maintained significant ties to Spain. These ties manifested most notably in the form of migration of Spanish citizens to these Latin American countries over the course of the twentieth century. To study these relationships, and specifically migration between Cuba, Panama and Spain during the twentieth century, Pensack plans to conduct six weeks of archival research in Spain’s National Historical Archive in Madrid during the Spring 2024 semester.

Find out about Miriam’s current work here.

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SAFA SALIM

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Spring 2024

Safa Salim conducts survey experiments that examine how ethnoracial prejudice manifests in people’s evaluations of violence and romance. Specifically, one part of her research agenda has a US focus on bias towards interracial couples, while another is an international project examining ethnic discrimination in blame attribution for sexual violence. Given both her research focus and the non-US tilt of her project, being at the Madrid site will be useful for several reasons. International scholarship on race and ethnic studies has a distinct emphasis from US scholarship due to differences in how race is officially counted by the state, and historicized and depicted in contemporary media. Spain in particular has been in the news in the last few months, as have some of its neighbouring countries, for its approach to addressing ethnoracial prejudice and discrimination. As a country grappling with its approach to cultural sensitivity and diversity afresh, NYU’s Spanish site in Madrid will be a particularly useful place to be in as she develops her own dissertation work on ethnoracial prejudice. Salim looks forward to the opportunity to connect with local scholars to help her navigate non-US scholarship on these themes, and creating a professional network she can rely on in case of a possible move to European academic institutions in the future.

Find out about Safa’s current work here.

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ROMAN CHACÓN

PhD Candidate, Department of History, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2024

Roman Chacon’s dissertation traces how the study of folklore and music became an instrumental vehicle for international solidarity during and after the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915-1934. His project explores a moment when Haiti was at the center of a cosmopolitan network of anthropologists, folklorists, musicians, dancers, writers, and radicals who contributed to major contemporary discourse on revolution, freedom, and human equality. On the heels of the occupation, American cultural luminaries including Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Katherine Dunham, Melville Herskovits, and Harold Courlander traveled to Haiti to collect and catalogue folk songs and dance. What they learned in Haiti would go on to shape the trajectory of their careers, and in turn influence future generations of artists, institutions, and intellectuals. Chacon’s story is of how Haiti contributed to the meaning of cultural revolution in the twentieth century.

Find out about Roman’s current work here.

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Annie Garlid

PhD Candidate, Department of Music, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2024

Annie Garlid’s research engages with sound and music studies, environmental studies, media studies, and religious studies to investigate an ecological turn within an international scene of experimental electronic music based in Berlin, Germany and dispersed online. Garlid became involved in this scene as a musician, writer, and organizer over nine years living abroad in Germany, and she has continued to watch it develop since 2018, when she moved back to the United States to begin her PhD. Garlid’s dissertation explores the ways in which recent music or sound art engages with the classical elements, from water to soil to air to fire. The artists employ these resources as overarching creative concepts, write lyrics about them, or record them from a variety of distances, either alone or alongside live music performance. In many cases, these recordings are layered into electronic compositions. While the international scene I study has a footing in Berlin, my research subjects are from America, Japan, Bolivia, Sweden, and Finland. All of them are female-identifying, non-binary, Indigenous, and/or people of color. By concentrating on the work of minoritarian artists, Garlid’s work reroutes a white masculinist canon of environmental sound art.

Find out about Annie’s current work here.

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Yitong Hu

PhD Candidate, Department of Administration, Leadership, & Technology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development | Summer 2024

Extensive research has been conducted on heterogeneity in the production of human capital, with particular emphasis on disparities in the returns to majors. Some of the earnings heterogeneity among majors is undoubtedly due to selection, but recent evidence also points to the importance of human capital development from the major itself (Hastings et al., 2013; Kirkeboen et al., 2016). The choice of college major significantly influences the structure of courses students undertake, thereby shaping the competencies and skills they acquire throughout their college education. Viewed from this angle, a major can be conceptualized as a collection of skills. The varying returns associated with different majors can, therefore, be interpreted as differing returns to the distinct skill sets acquired through each major. Somewhat surprisingly, however, there is little work that systematically characterizes the skills associated with college majors and their relation to differences in earnings. To fill this void, this dissertation seeks to answer these three overarching questions: Do variations exist in skill profiles across majors and within majors at a single institution? Are variations in skill profiles learned in courses within majors associated with differences in earnings? Do the skill formation and labor market returns to skills display disparities across gender and racial lines? This work serves as a valuable addition to the limited existing research centered on skill acquisition during college education. It is also vital for understanding education and income inequality from a more micro perspective compared to major and educational attainment.

Find out about Yitong’s current work here.

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Laura I Esquivel Martinez

PhD Candidate, Silver School of Social Work | Summer 2024

Laura Martinez’s dissertation aims to help fill the theoretical gaps in existing research on health and behavioral health service use among Latino subgroups with comorbid depression and diabetes and contribute to current research knowledge. Informed by the Andersen and Newman Health Care Utilization Model, the proposed dissertation research explores access to healthcare for Latino subgroups with co-occurring depression and Type 2 diabetes using data from the Hispanic Community Health Study (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [NHLBI], 2010). The specific aims of this three-paper dissertation proposal are to: Paper 1: Examine the longitudinal trends of health service use among Latino subgroups with and without co-occurring diabetes and depression. Paper 2: Examine risk and protective factors for Latino subgroups with diabetes and depression in accessing and using health services, and Paper 3: Explore whether the relationship between co-occurring depression and diabetes and service use varies as a function of smoking and alcohol used by Latino subgroups.

Find out about Laura’s current work here.

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Marlene Reich

PhD Candidate, Department of German, Graduate School of Arts & Science | Summer 2024

Marlene Reich’s dissertation examines the complex interrelation of capitalist/neoliberal discourses and concepts of happiness, tracing the evolving notions of a happy life in novels of the 19th to 21st century. Methodologically, my analysis focuses not on the motif of happiness, but on the narrative modes and structures used to capture this elusive feeling. While scholarly debates commonly claim that new Enlightenment theories and capitalist discourses produced a sentimentalized and reified concept of happiness in the 18th century, my dissertation questions this assumption. It proceeds from the hypothesis that the impact of capitalism is not revealed in a complete denarrativization of happiness, but simply in a change of the modes of narrative storytelling. Thus, Reich’s project enquires how structures of excess, of atemporality and utopian space are utilized to narrate a form of happiness beyond consumerism and utilitarianism. In this way, she hopes to demonstrate that novels are more than just reflective surfaces echoing societal tendencies. Rather, they critically engage with the fraught concept of happiness by opening up an imaginative space in which multiple perspectives come to bear, ultimately creating their own “theory of happiness”.

Find out about Marlene’s current work here.

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Camila Arroyo Romero

PhD Candidate, Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts| Summer 2024

Camila Arroyo Romero’s dissertation is a study of choreographic experiments in Mexico from the year 2000 to the present. Considering the popular quotidian and the artistic practice, this work insists on distorting and complicating notions of dance, performance, and choreography, thinking of them as expanded fields of sensible and political exploration. The project analyzes choreographic experiments that highlight performances of dislocation, both embodied and spatial, to argue for how communities transform survival and aesthetic tactics through creative practice. This project highlights experimental practices of a group of selected Mexican and non-Mexican artists and practitioners as they explore alternative modes of creation which in turn transform and de/form the boundaries of the choreographic. These boundaries are altered in choreographic performances that manifest in dance and performance art pieces, in underground dance studios and parties, as well as through other media such as painting, video, music, and sculpture. These works help us wonder, not only what can choreography be, but what can choreography do?

Find out about Camila’s current work here.

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