Graduate Students
Below are some of the graduate students enrolled in the Joint Ph.D. Program.
Aisha D. Bastiaans (American Studies) received a B.A. in English and American Literature and Africana Studies from New York University in 1999. Her teaching and research interests include: race and gender in U.S. history and culture, nineteenth and twentieth-century African American literature, and cultural studies. Her doctoral dissertation explores the relationship between race, gender, and representation through analyses of literary and cinematic treatments of the mulatta figure.
Sofia Betancourt (Religious Studies) received a B.S. from Cornell University in 1997 and an M.Div from Starr King School for the Ministry (a member school of the Graduate Theological Union) in 2003. She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and has focused her intellectual and professional commitments on the intersection of postcolonial theory and liberation theology as a nexus for nourishing activism and social justice work. Betancourt's primary research interests are womanist and mujerista postcolonial/liberation theologies, their impact on religious ethics, and the connection of key protest writers to the construction of theologies that sustain contemporary activism.
Sheriden Booker (Anthropology) received a B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001. She currently conducts research in Cuba.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce (American Studies) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of African-American Studies and the Program in American Studies at Yale University. His dissertation explores how “madness” has been ascribed to Afrodiasporic subjects by Eurocentric and white supremacist epistemes across modernity—and how twentieth-century African-Americans have produced, claimed, and managed “madness” for insurgent imaginations and radical creativities. La Marr's broader intellectual commitments are to twentieth-century African-American literature; Afrodiasporic performance and popular cultures; black feminist theory and criticism; psychoanalytic literary theory; queer theory and criticism; and radical politics and subjectivities. He earned his B.A. (cum laude) in African-American Studies and English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has received grants from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Among his hobbies are time travel, nature documentaries, handwashing, and self-parody.
Jalylah Burrell (American Studies) received her B.A. in English from Spelman College, where she was a Presidential Scholar and her M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University, where she was a MacCracken Fellow. A journalist and blogger, she has contributed to VIBE, the FADER, the Village Voice and the Portland Mercury among other publications. She has also worked as an oral historian beginning with the Spelman Independent Scholars (SIS) and continuing at the national oral history project StoryCorps. Her research interests include representations of the black middle class, the relationship between black women and humor and black music.
Lucia Cantero (Anthropology) received Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, entitled "Advertising Pleasure and Death: Global Health Regimes, Tobacco Consumption, and the Cultural Politics of Transnational Marketing in Brazil," examines science studies, biopolitics, and consumption as they relate to the intersection between aesthetics and politics. Ms. Cantero is presently completing her fieldwork and research in Brazil. Her prior work has dealt with the hermeneutics of Afro-Cuban art as it relates to the global market in Havana. She is also currently working on a documentary film about the Ethiopian diaspora in Cuba, among other photographic and media ventures.
Catherine Culvahouse Fox (French) studies literature and history of the French-speaking Caribbean. She is interested in créolité, literary interpretations of Haitian history, Kreyòl, and the history of the French Atlantic slave trade.
Adom Getachew (Political Science) graduated in 2009 from the University of Virginia, receiving a BA with high honors in Politics and African American Studies. Her primary area of interest is political theory with a specific focus on transnational black political thought, critical theory and post-colonial theory. Adom is particularly interested in the intersections of race, nation and citizenship in this moment of globlization/empire/postcoloniality and wants to think about how anti-colonial scholars can still be useful interlocutors around questions of power and freedom.
Jeffrey Gonda (History) graduated with honors from Princeton University. His dissertation explores the impact of the Restrictive Covenant Cases (1948) on the development of the Civil Rights Movement and the role of housing desegregation in postwar black politics. His research interests include 20th-century political, urban, and legal history with an emphasis on the Long Civil Rights Era. Before joining the program at Yale, Jeff worked as a researcher for Princeton's History Department and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Awendela Grantham (French) graduated with a B.A. in French and International Studies from Yale University in 2005. She received the Montaigne Prize for French in 2002 and was a fellow in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. She is interested in the commoditization of blackness in postcolonial literature and in the writings of Frantz Fanon.
Kristin Graves (French) is a fourth year joint doctoral candidate in African American Studies and French. She graduated from Tulane University in 2008 with a B.A. in French, English, and Art History, as well as minors in History and Italian Studies (summa cum laude). Kristin's work engages literature alongside popular cultural production such as music, dance, and cinema. Her dissertation is on representations of "la belle créole," or beautiful Creole woman, in French and Creole languages. The project tracks transmutations of the "beautiful Creole" as an aesthetic, erotic, and political figure in international circulation from the late 17th century to our contemporary moment. Kristin is especially interested in Louisiana and Haiti, and gendered geographies of both.
Stephanie Greenlea (Sociology) received a B.A. in Sociology in 2005 from Emory University. Her research interests include black protest traditions, social movements, and technology studies. Her dissertation explores anti-racist activism in the "information age."
Fadila Habchi (American Studies) received a B.A. in English with a minor in French
literature summa cum laude from the CUNY school at the City College of New York
in 2011. Her research interests include the treatment of history in African
American novels and francophone literature as well as questions of race, gender
and class.
Ryan Cecil Jobson (Anthropology) received a B.A. summa cum laude in Africana Studies and Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. At present, he is preoccupied with the extraction and circulation of energy resources and its intersection with sites of diasporic exchange in Africa and the Caribbean. More broadly, his research encompasses questions of postcolonial sovereignty, commodity fetishism, and genealogies of anthropological thought in the African Diaspora. Additionally, Ryan maintains an interest in critical pedagogy and educational reform as a frequent contributor to the Ase Academy, an African-Centered Saturday School based in Philadelphia. He is an obliged recipient of the Ford Predoctoral Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Kaneesha Parsard received a B.A. magna cum laude in 2011 in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned the Rittenberg Prize and was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Her research is concerned with mixed-race peoples descended from historically laboring populations in the Caribbean, particularly douglas. She is interested in the ways in which their literary presence proposes novel approaches to the interstices and conceptions of freedom and enslavement, and challenges dominant subjectivities in Caribbean and migrant imaginations as well as in mixed-race studies. She earned Honorable Mention for the 2011 Ford Foundation Fellowships competition. Kaneesha is also committed to womanist thought and anti-violence activism.
Tisha Hooks' (American Studies) dissertation addresses the racialization of objects and technologies, militarization as a cultural and social phenomenon, and the everyday. Tisha graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in comparative literature, where she was also a Ford-Mellon Summer Research Scholar. Her current work and interests are informed by an interdisciplinary approach that in addition to African American studies draws on methodologies from history, anthropology, and material culture. She has written broadly on everything from Little Black Sambo in Japan to the Grapes of Wrath, and in addition to the subjects mentioned above, her research interests include community formation, Afro-Asian relations, and 19th and 20th century transnational history, including the history of business, and science, and medicine. She is a former editor for Beacon Press, Praeger Publishers, and the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. In 2007, she was a member of the Yale-China 100, a delegation of Yale students, faculty, and administrators that traveled to China at the invitation of Chinese President Hu Jintao. She is a recipient of the 2010-2011 Joseph A. Skinner Fellowship in History from Mount Holyoke College.
Nicole Ivy (American Studies) graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Her interests primarily include 19th century African American literature and culture, slavery, theories of the body, and race and medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr. (American Studies) graduated from the University of Georgia in 2005 with a B.A. in English literature. He then taught for two years in Thoreau, NM, a small town boarding the Navajo Nation, where his experiences shaped his interest in African American and Native American cultural exchange. His research, which explores the stories of African Americans and the students they taught in reservation boarding schools during the Civil Rights era, probes questions concerning race and subjugation; the nature of sovereignty, citizenship, and state power; and the tension between competition and collaboration in interethnic campaigns for equality and civil rights. In 2010, Khalil was awarded a Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship from the Ford Foundation.
William Christopher Johnson (History) is a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellow and a third-year doctoral student. Chris received an A.B. in English and history from Vassar College in 2005, and was a Neal-Marshall Fellow in Creative Writing at Indiana University, where he earned an M.F.A. in 2009. His current teaching and research interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and radicalism in black diasporas, theories of transnationalism and racial formation, Afro-Asian historiographies, and the politics of exclusion within the modern nation-state. His dissertation, a transnational history of black power in the Atlantic world, charts the migrations of two generations of Trinidadian students, teachers, and union organizers at the forefront of anti-imperial struggles in the UK, Canada, and the U.S from the mid-1930s to 1970.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Art History) interests lie in the artistic and material cultures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with an emphasis on photography, painting and ideas of fashion and clothing in the British Empire and African diaspora particularly in, but not limited to, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her research has been well supported by both departments here at Yale as well as other research centers including the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Yale Center for British Art and the Women, Religion and Globalization Project. In her third year in graduate school, Anna co-curated the exhibition “Embodied: Black Identities in American Art,” from the Yale University Art Gallery on view from February 2011. Prior to her graduate career at Yale, Anna lived and worked in Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom; she now resides in Brooklyn.
Ana-Maurine Lara (Anthropology) is an artist scholar. She is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe (AB, cum laude 1997) in Anthropology. She is the author of Erzulie's Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006) among other publications, and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her research interests include queer Black artists in the Caribbean, our aesthetic practices, communities and social and political citizenships.
Jennifer Leath (Religious Studies) studies Afro-Diasporic spiritual traditions and liberation theoethics through the disciplines of African American Studies and Religious Ethics. She is particularly interested in the ways that womanist conceptualizations of embodiment inform and transform black women's work ethics. Ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and active in the ecumenical movement, Leath is also attuned to the ecclesiological implications of her scholarship. She received her AB in Social Studies and African American Studies (magna cum laude) from Harvard University in 2003 and her M.Div. in 2007 at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York as a Traveling Fellow.
Key Jo Lee (Art History) received a B.A. in Art History summa cum laude from Rutgers University in 2009. Her interests include modern and contemporary African American and African diasporic art especially contemporary permutations of the 19th century blackface minstrel figure in the works of artists of the African diaspora. She is particularly concerned with the legacy of the minstrel mouth and the mouth in general as a site of racial, social, and economic difference.
Madeleine Lipshie-Williams (English) has a BA in Africana Studies from Brown University and is currently thinking about stories and power.
Deborah M. March (American Studies) is a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. She earned her B.A. in English literature from the CUNY Honors College at the City College of New York in 2006. Her interests include African American literature, visual culture, the history of the book, and anthologies of all kinds. She is currently at work on her dissertation, a study of photographically illustrated books, periodicals, and scrapbooks by African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. She and her family reside in Frederick, Maryland.
Melissa Mason's (Political Science) work focuses on comparative politics and political economy. Specifically, her research interests include the incentive structures provided by labor market institutions. She is interested in how this affects the relationships between labor unions and immigrant/ethnic communities.
Carlos A. Miranda's (American Studies) areas of specialization include American and African American Studies; Science and Technology Studies; 19th and 20th Century Theories of Race; and Body Studies. His areas of competence include but are not limited to Social and Critical Theory; Visual Culture; Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Miranda's dissertation research situates itself at the center of polemics involving conceptions of late capital, humanism, and bio-technologies. His project concerns itself with the ways the relationship between capital and bio-technologies renders the human body as a conflicted space and demands that scholars re-imagine conceptions of racialization, gender, and labor in the global present. Miranda received his B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, and institutions such as the Ford Foundation have funded his research. He is co-editor of Abrading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry. Special Journal Issue. Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. He has been Project Assistant for Yale’s Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization (Directed by Prof. Hazel Carby) since 2006.
Lauren Pearlman (American Studies) graduated with honors from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in African American Studies (2004). She is primarily interested in the political and cultural legacy of the Black Power movement and the development of black consciousness in the post-Civil Rights era. Other interests include 20th century African American literature and intellectual history and the relationship between scholarship and activism. Before coming to Yale, she worked for a civil rights law firm in Washington, DC and with the Appleseed Foundation in their Austin, Texas office.
Delaina Price (History) is a native of the Houston area and earned her B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) from George Washington University in 2004, where she double majored in History and English. Delaina also received a master's degree in education from Harvard University. She is interested in African American and political and social history of the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Jayne Ptolemy (History) graduated in 2006 from Albion College where she studied History and Ethnic Studies. Her interests include race formation in Early American history, particularly as it interacts with urban issues, economic prejudice, and benevolence.
Robert Sambat (American Studies) received a B.A. in Women's Studies and English from Queens College, City University of New York (Phi Beta Kappa), 1998. Robert is a professional guitarist/ singer/ songwriter/ session musician/ recording artist; commercial artist/ fantasy illustrationist/ political cartoonist; fantasy/sci-fi writer/ historical novelist/ occasional poet / dancer. He is also graduate student advisory/ member of the Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANAAY), founding member/ mediator of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America (YGSNA), an active member of the Black Rock Coalition, and a vigorous supporter of local bands and music. His research and teaching interests include: Federal Indian Law, Red Power and the Resurgence of American Indian Identity and Culture during the 20th Century; blues music, its history, meanings, and applications; phenomenological approaches to music and performance; theories of racial and gender formations; and 19th century African American and women's literature. Robert's dissertation, entitled "Blood-Letting," focuses on the history of blood quantum as a determinant of Indian-ness and its relationship to self-determination and aboriginal rights in Indian Country, with a particular emphasis on the tribal nations of Connecticut.
Brandon M. Terry (Political Science) is a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellow. His dissertation is a philosophical reconsideration of the conceptions of citizenship, equality, and power instantiated through political thought and action in the civil rights movement, in light of the historiographical turn toward “the long civil rights movement” in contemporary scholarship. Brandon graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with an AB in Government and African and African American Studies in 2005, receiving the Andrew Ramroop, Alain Locke, and Judge Charles Wyzanski prizes. He received an MSc in Political Theory Research as the 2005-2006 Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. His academic interests include Black intellectual and political thought, political philosophy, 19th and 20th century U.S. history, philosophy of race and racism, poverty and crime in social theory, and the aesthetics and sociology of hip-hop culture. A native of the Baltimore area, he has written for The Huffington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Harvard Crimson, and The Oxford Isis, and provided commentary for Time, The Boston Globe, MTV News, The Nation, and other national and international publications. Brandon is presently residing in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ruthie Yow (American Studies) graduated in 2005 from the University of Virginia, where she majored in American Studies and Poetry Writing. Her undergraduate study focused on race and Southern literature. After college, her work for an AmeriCorps program, City Year, guided her toward graduate study of school desegregation and the culture and politics of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She is currently ABD and has tentatively titled her dissertation, “Children Left Behind: School Desegregation in Atlanta, 1965-2010.” The dissertation will use ethnography and oral history to consider the cultural processes of school desegregation in the 1960s and the re-segregation trends of the present day.
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