Visiting Fellows
Fellow, Cultural Studies, Sabancı University
Dilara Çalışkan is currently working at Sabancı University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Forum. In 2014, she graduated from Sabancı University’s Cultural Studies Master Program with a thesis titled “Queer Mothers and Daughters: The Role of Queer Kinship in the Everyday Lives of Trans Sex Worker Women in Istanbul.” Since 2010, she has been involved with Istanbul’s LGBTI Solidarity Association, which particularly focuses on human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, opposes the criminalization of sex work, and supports its recognition as work.
Fellow, African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University
Hazel Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization at Yale University. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999).
Fellow, History and Literature, Harvard University
Todd Carmody is a Lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard University, where he teaches broadly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literature and in disability studies. He previously held an ACLS New FacultyFellowship in UC Berkeley’s Department of English and a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship from Harvard’s W.E.B.
Fellow, English, Fordham University
Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, has been teaching and writing about disability since Rosemarie Garland-Thomson lighted his path into the field more than fifteen years ago. His most recent piece is “Disability Studies 2.0,” which appeared in American Literary History in 2010.
Fellow, Economics, London School of Economics
As Senior Program Manager at Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul, Rana Zincir Celal worked with Columbia University faculty to design and implement collaborative programs in Turkey.In Cyprus, she was involved in establishing the Home for Cooperation, producing art exhibitions on contested histories, developing educational materials on enforced disappearance with The Elders and the International Center for Transitional Justice, and advocating for a gender perspective in the peace process.
Fellow, Anthropology, Hunter College
Ruchi Chaturvedi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2007. Ruchi’s research focuses on questions of political violence, popular politics and its contentious relationship with the ideology and institutions of liberal democracy. The lifeworlds of local level political workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right in Kerala, South India, their acts and experiences of violence, and the criminal courts where these workers have been tried have been Ruchi’s key ethnographic resources so far.
Fellow, Architecture, National University of Singapore.
Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces (2019) and co-editor of Asian Cinema and The Use of Space (2015). She conceptualized, researched and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014). Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender, and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context.
Fellow, English, Princeton
Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and the Associate Chair in the Department of English and a core faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory and works in twentieth-century American literature, with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press), which explores the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law.
Fellow, English, Hunter College
Sarah Chinn teaches nineteenth century literature at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work primarily explores questions of race, embodiment, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and The Invention of Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Fellow, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Laura Ciolkowski’s teaching and research interests include gender & sexuality studies, feminist pedagogies, social justice movements, literary and cultural theory, the literature and theory of mass incarceration, and sexual and gender-based violence.
Fellow, Writing and New Media, MIT
Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is faculty director of the C3 game culture and mobile media initiative. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory. Under the name M. Singe, she co-founded the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project, established in 1995.
Fellow, Education, Hunter College, CUNY
David J. Connor is an Associate Professor in the School of Education of Hunter College, CUNY. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on disability and education. David's areas of interest include teacher education, learning disabilities, inclusive education, and social justice issues. For the last decade he has contributed to the development of the growing field of Disability Studies in Education.
Fellow, Inclusive Policies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences Centre
Qudsiya Contractor is an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies, School of Research Methodology.
Fellow, History, Florida International University
Dr. Cornelius's research examines the development of “racial science” during the nineteenth century. Her book manuscript titled /'More Approximate to the Animal:' African American Men and Women’s Resistance to the Rise of Scientific Racism in Mid-Nineteenth Century America/ provides a gendered analysis of the ways in which African Americans - enslaved and free, lettered and illiterate - addressed scientific theories of racial differences.
Fellow, Disability Studies, Hofstra University
G. Thomas Couser retired in 2011 from Hofstra University, where he was a professor of English and founding director of the Disability Studies Program.
Fellow, African American Studies and Anthropology, Yale University.
Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. She is the editor of Gender: Space (MacMillan) and co-editor of a special issue of Public: A Journal of Imagining America on art and knowledge production in the academy. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
Fellow, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University
Christina Crosby has worked at Wesleyan University since 1982, where she is Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her subfields are Victorian studies and Feminist Studies. She has published The Ends of History: Victorians and the 'Woman Question' and essays and reviews in Victorian Studies, PMLA, College English, and elsewhere.
Fellow, Photography, School of Visual Arts
Jordan Corine Cruz (b. 1993) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, video, and sound. Using traditional materials, imagery, and layered sound as cultural signifiers, Cruz creates interactive spaces and objects that focus on the intersections between self-identification, labor, gender, and displacement.
Fellow, Social Sciences, Rural University of Rio de Janeiro
Professor at the Três Rios Institute at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. PhD in Social Sciences (PUC / Rio). Master in Social Sciences (PPCIS / UERJ). Post-doctorate by the Department of World Language and International Studies (Morgan State University / USA).
Fellow, Portuguese, Rutgers University
Daniel da Silva’s research specializes in gender, sexuality, race, performance and popular music in the Portuguese-speaking world. His forthcoming book, Trans Tessituras: Transatlantic and Transgender Luso-Afro-Brazilian Popular Music analyzes popular music iterations of transgender voices in Brazil, Portugal and Angola to show how they amplify and refigure the gendered conventions of Portuguese-language popular music genres by pulling at national and transatlantic histories of race, gender and sexuality.
Fellow, English, University of Illinois at Chicago
Lennard J. Davis is Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had also served as Head. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. He is also director of Project Biocultures a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere.
Fellow, Sustainability, Columbia University
Over 16 years of experience as project coordinator in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), Sustainability, Social Responsibility, Sociocultural and Socioenvironmental Education and research. Coordination of +50 long, medium and short term projects in the areas of human rights, social memory, community media, environment, preservation of material and immaterial cultural heritage, with wide experience in complex environments such as conflict zones, isolated communities and extreme poverty.
Fellow, Art Studies, Kulturakademie Tarabya
The artist is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants to Argentina and was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. Since 1988 she has lived in Berlin. Her artistic work deals with issues related to the burden of national identity, memory, the role of minorities in the society and the potential of a space "in between". Her work uses a very heterogeneous language (installation, video, sound installation, rugs).
Fellow, Law History, Emory
Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose scholarship examines the interaction between social movements, political culture, and legal change. Dinner’s research focuses in particular on how law responds to vulnerabilities that derive from familial and employment relationships, at home and at work. Her courses and curricular interests include Property, the Fourteenth Amendment, Family Law, Employment Discrimination, and Legal History.
Fellow, English, New York Institute of Technology
Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in American literature, writing, and medical humanities. She has published essays on mental illness in film, antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs, physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre, teaching Melville online, and the poetry of Amy Lowell, among other subjects. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disabilities Studies and is co-editor (with Catherine J.
Fellow, Political and Social Philosophy, Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University
Elsa Dorlin is Professor of political and social philosophy at the department of political science and involved in the department of women’s studies and gender and sexuality studies at Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University (France). Dorlin specializes in feminist philosophy and theory and historical epistemology of sexuality. Dorlin’s research also focuses on critical theory and postcolonial studies.