Graduate Student Profiles

 

Michio Arimitsu

Michio Arimitsu is a first-year doctoral student in African and African American Studies, with a primary field in English. He received his B.A. from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2002) and his A.M. from Keio University (2005), both located in Tokyo, Japan. His recent publications include "The Realm of an Empire and the Reach of Empathy: Reconsideration of Humanism in Mark Twain ' s 'The War-Prayer' " in Mark Twain Studies (2006) and "A Counter-Sign in the Punch Line: The Tragi-Comic Blending of Identities in Ralph Ellison ' s Invisible Man " in The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan (2006). He is interested in the use of body language and the representation of corporeality in American literature in general and African American literature in particular. His current research focuses on the political and aesthetic implications of the presence of African American boxers in the writings of such authors as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Email: michioari@gmail.

Mia L. Bagneris

Mia L. Bagneris is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University specializing in the history of art and visual culture. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Women's Studies and African American Studies in 1999. As an undergraduate she participated in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program and was winner of the African American Studies Department's Alain Locke Prize. As a graduate student, she has taught for a number of courses in both African American Studies and the History of Art including a course in interracial literature and, with Deborah Willis , a course analyzing race and gender in photography and film for which she won a Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Her dissertation, Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800, contributes to the growing body of scholarship related to circum-Atlantic visual production and the relationship of images to the joint projects of slavery and colonialism. The project also reflects the interest in the construction of race in Western art and the particular focus on images of interracial sexuality and the mixed-race body that have been the hallmark of her graduate scholarship. This year Mia was honored to be one of the five recipients of a Mellon Mays University Fellows Dissertation Grant and to spend time as a fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. She will spend the 2007-2008 academic year as a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research.

Mia, a proud New Orleanian, makes excellent vegan gumbo and is the mother of a fabulous four-year old named Izzie.

Email: bagneris@fas.

 

Sheldon Bond

Sheldon Bond is a second-year graduate student in the AAAS Department with a primary concentration in Government. He received a B.S. from Rutgers University with a double major in Political Science and Sociology. As a Ford Foundation Fellow and a National Science Foundation Fellow, his primary research interests involve Black politics, American politics, political psychology, and interdisciplinary methodologies. He has taught courses at Rutgers University and Hunter College (City University of New York) and lives in New Jersey.

Email: sheldon.bond@gmail

David Brighouse

David Brighouse is a fifth-year graduate student in the AAAS Department.  He received his B.A. in history from Rutgers University in 1998 and an M.A. in history from New York University in 2000.  Before returning to graduate school in 2001, he taught elementary school in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  He has served as a teaching fellow in a number of courses offered in the Department, including “The History of the Civil Rights Movement” and “Philosophical Perspectives on Race and Racism.”  His research interests include African American intellectual history, the social history of American scholars, and the Civil Rights Movement.  He is currently researching a dissertation on scholar-activists during the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Email: brighous@fas.

Linda Chavers

Linda Chavers is a second-year doctoral student in the AAAS program with a focus on English Literature. A Washington, D.C native, she received her B.A. in Cultural Studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2003. From there, she was a broke fact-checker at The Nation magazine, a very enthusiastic editorial assistant at The New York Times Magazine, and a reluctant assistant editor at Vogue Magazine. She's working on finding the connections between violence and forging spaces of agency. Her favorite author is Richard Wright.

Email: lchavers@fas.

Ashley Farmer

Ashley Farmer is a second year doctoral student in African American studies with a primary field of History. She received her B.A. from Spelman College in 2006. Her current research is on African American women in the late 20th century, social movement and organization, and black feminism in the United States.

Email: adfarmer@fas.

Peter Geller

Peter Geller is a doctoral student in African American Studies, having earned a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University. His research interests include black political thought, theories of justice, conceptions of race and racism, and the role of race and class in American public policy.

Email: geller@fas.

Lyndon Gill

Lyndon K. Gill holds a B.A. with honors and distinction in African and African American Studies from Stanford University (2003) and an A.M. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University (2005). His scholarly interests include racial formation and diaspora, the socio-scientific construction of sex and gender, sexuality as a category of cultural analysis, queer cultural production, ritual and corporality within performance genres, desire and the erotic, and post-coloniality. His research currently focuses on the Caribbean and Latin American region in general and Trinidad and Tobago, W.I. in particular. He has been known to write and perform poetry at whim.

Email: gill@fas.

Wendy Grant

Wendy E. Grant received her B.A and M.Phil degrees in French and French Caribbean Literature respectively from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She was also awarded the A.M degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2006. Wendy's research interests include Caribbean migrant narratives, the literary portrayal of parent-child relationships, and the formation of West Indian immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Wendy is currently preparing a dissertation on the representation of intergenerational relationships in novels written by Lakshmi Persaud, Merle Collins, Edwidge Danticat, and Paule Marshall.

Email: wgrant@fas.

Meghan Healy

Meghan Healy is a Ph.D. candidate in African Studies, training as an historian of modern Africa. She received an A.B. in History from the University of Chicago in 2005 and an A.M. in History from Harvard in 2007. She is currently conducting research for her dissertation on the social history of Inanda Seminary, South Africa's first boarding high school for African women, which she plans to continue in Durban during the 2008-2009 academic year.

More broadly, her interests center on race, ethnicity, and rights mobilizations in modern southern Africa; gender and colonialism in Africa; African educational history; South African-American cultural and political collaborations; international philanthropy; and comparative and transnational historiography. Meghan has served as Head Teaching Fellow for Prof. Caroline Elkins' core course in modern African history, and she currently serves as a Research Seminar Tutor for Prof. Erez Manela's HIST 1957: International Society and for visiting Prof. Eric Tang's HIST 1659: Afro-Asian Encounters in the Modern World. She is also a founding member of the African Studies Graduate Student Association, a new group for students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences interested in expanding and deepening Harvard's commitment to research on African issues.

Email: mehealy@fas.

Michael Jeffries

Michael Jeffries is a fifth year doctoral student interested in black identity and hip-hop culture. He holds a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Swarthmore College (2002), and is writing his dissertation on hip-hop and black masculinity. His recent publications include work on hip-hop feminism (Gwedolyn Pough, ed. - Home Girls, Make Some Noise!) and interracial dating (The Du Bois Review). To view Michael's CV, please click on this link.

Email: jeffries@fas.

Christina Knight

Christina Knight is a second year graduate student in AAAS with a secondary field in History of Art and Architecture. She received her BA with honors from Stanford University in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities in 2005. She has worked with San Francisco Bay Area performing arts nonprofits and in arts philanthropy at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She is interested in the connection between embodied practices and subjectivity. Her current research centers on representations of racial identity, racial memory, and slavery in contemporary dance and drama in both the United States and Brazil.

Email: cknight@fas.

Cameron Leader-Picone

Cameron Leader-Picone received his B.A. from Yale University in 2003 in African American Studies. At Yale, he focused on the interrelationships between African American literature and music. While that continues to be an interest of his, in his fifth year at Harvard he is focusing on contemporary African American literature and its relationship to changing understandings of race in American society.  Cameron also enjoys loud rock music and television.

Email: cleader@fas.

Carla Martin

Carla Martin is a third year graduate student in the Department of African and African American Studies in the discipline of Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Ethnomusicology. Having worked with Cape Verdean communities in Africa, Europe, and the United States for six years, she is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork on the intersection of sociolinguistic and musical practices of Cape Verdeans in Cape Verde and the diaspora. Carla's regional interests include Africa, especially Cape Verde and formerly Portuguese Africa, the African Diaspora, North America, and South Asia, and her academic interests center on the study of music, linguistic anthropology, "Creole" studies, popular culture, race and gender, education, and development.

Carla has served as a Teaching Fellow for AAAS 175: Introduction to African Music; AAAS 140z: The Other African Americans; AAAS 20: African Languages and Cultures; AAAS 97: Race and Humanism, Sophomore Tutorial; and the Harvard African Language Program. She is a Board Member of the Capeverdean Creole Institute and works closely with a variety of nonprofit organizations and individuals dedicated to community development and cultural exchange in New England. She received an AM in Anthropology in 2007 and an AB in Anthropology in 2003, both from Harvard University.

Email: cdmartin@fas.

Amber Moulton-Wiseman

Amber Moulton-Wiseman received her B.A. in History from Gettysburg College (2002) and her A.M. in History from Harvard University (2007). Her primary research interests include 19th- and 20th-Century African American history, portrayals of race and interracialism in American literature, theories of race, ethnicity and cultural belonging, slavery, lynching and racial violence, and interracial intimacy in the United States.

Email: amoulton@fas.

Laura Murphy

Laura Murphy is a sixth year graduate student in the department of African and African American Studies. Her areas of specialization include West African literature, 19th and 20th African American literature, slave and neo-slave narratives, theories of memory and monuments, human rights narratives, and modern-day slavery. She is currently writing a dissertation on representations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Anglophone West African fiction. Her recent publications include articles on Amos Tutuola, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo. Her work has been published in Research in African Literatures, Studies in the Novel, and the Journal of the African Literature Association, as well as two edited volumes of literary criticism. She is also a consultant to several non-profit organizations that work to abolish modern-day slavery in the US and in Africa.

Email: lmurphy@fas.

Jennifer Nash

Jennifer Nash received her A.B. in women's studies from Harvard College in 2001 and her J.D. in 2004 from Harvard Law School. She is currently writing a dissertation on representations of black women in Golden Age pornography. Her other academic interests center on black feminism, black sexual politics, critical race feminism, and interracial intimacy.

Email: nash@fas.

Cameron Van Patterson

Cameron Van Patterson is a doctoral candidate in the African and African American Studies Department studying contemporary African American art and visual culture. His academic research interrogates the relationship between visual and performance art, social genres of difference like race and gender, and the politics of representation in American social history. While retaining a broader view of the ways in which art and politics intersect throughout the African Diaspora, Patterson's work places particular emphasis on the visual politics of race, "critical memory," and abstraction in twentieth-century African American art and history. His forthcoming dissertation is entitled, "Unmasking Modernism: Discursive Incursions in Contemporary African American Art."

Born and raised in Long Beach, CA, Patterson graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where he earned a B.A. in African American Studies with a minor in Education. Patterson has taught at the high school and college level, and is currently a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University where he serves the college as a Resident Tutor at Lowell House.

A visual artist and aspiring curator, Patterson is currently working on a series of collage installations that explore the relationship between music, history, and race in an effort to create critical spaces for dialogue where students can grapple with complex ideas and important social issues through the arts.

Email: cpatters@fas.

Chérie Rivers

Chérie Rivers is a second year doctoral student in the Department of African and African American Studies with a secondary field in music. She received her B.A. in Film Scoring from the Berklee College of Music in 2005, and continues to work as an active composer. Her academic research interrogates the use of music and rhetoric in African and diasporic film and their role in the formation of cultural identities. Chérie works with activist filmmakers both in Senegal, West Africa and in the US.

Email: crivers@fas.

Jacqueline C. Rivers

A second year graduate student, Jacqueline C. Rivers has an AB/AM in Pyschology & Social Relations from Harvard, with an emphasis on Cognitive Psychology. Jacqueline was the founder and Executive Director of MathPower, a leading community based non-profit in Boston for mathematics education reform in urban schools. From 2001-2004, she also served Executive Director for the National TenPoint Leadership Foundation. Interests: Research that contributes to the understanding and amelioration of black academic underachievement, with a focus on culture, family, and schools. She is currently involved in research that contributes to the understanding and amelioration of black academic underachievement, with a focus on culture, family, and schools.

Email: jrivers@fas.

Zolisa Shokane

Proudly South African indeed, I am currently a special student at the department of African an African American Studies with major interest and focus on African studies. I obtained my undergraduate from the University of Lesotho (Lesotho) and did M Admin studies at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). Before joining the AAS team at Harvard, I was employed as a director in strategic planning and administrattion at the national department of agriculture in Pretoria. I am passionate about issues concerning women development and gender.

Email: zshokane@fas.

Josef Sorett

osef Sorett is currently finishing up his dissertation in the Ph.D. program in Harvard University 's Department of African and African American Studies. At Harvard, he has concentrated his studies on African American religious history, and his research interests include religion and the arts, popular culture, and the role of religion in public life. His dissertation, Spirit Soundings: Religion, Race and the Arts in Twentieth Century America, engages the arts as a lens into the America religious landscape and, more specifically, explores the way that religion has figured into black aesthetic debates. In support of his research, Josef has received fellowships from the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, The Fund for Theological Education, Harvard's Charles Warren Center for American History and Princeton University 's Center for African American Studies. He is also affiliated with the Hiphop Archive at Harvard University . Josef has taught at Harvard, Tufts, Princeton and Medgar Evers College (City University of New York). He lives his wife and son in New York City . You can learn more about Josef on his personal website: www.josefsorett.com .

Email: sorett@fas.

Grete Viddal

Grete Viddal is fascinated by the impact of the African diaspora on the spiritual and artistic traditions of the Americas, and the role of dance in Afro-Atlantic societies. She has traveled to Cuba and Haiti to study folkloric dance and ritual belief systems, and is interested in the interpretation and analysis of these forms.

Her research is based in the eastern provinces of Cuba, which were host to several waves of migration from Haiti. Grete’s dissertation will explore how folkloric performance groups, religious practitioners, government programs, academic institutes, and transnational contacts interface with Haitiano Cubano identity.

Grete has published in the Journal of Haitian Studies and in the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies magazine, ReVista, and is also contributing to a book on Caribbean dance to be published by University Press of Florida. She has served as a Teaching Fellow for classes such as “African Religion in Africa and the Diaspora,” “Other African Americans,” and “Slavery and Slave Trade in Africa and the Americas.”

Email: gviddal@fas.

Omar Wasow

Omar Wasow is a third-year doctoral student pursuing an M.A. in Government and a Ph.D. in African and African American studies. His research focuses on race and American political development. He is particularly interested in the effects of lawlessness and state power on minority welfare, such as occurs with urban riots, red-light districts and drug prohibition. In support of his research, he has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Humane Studies Fellowship. Prior to enrolling in graduate school he helped co-found the web site BlackPlanet.com and the K-8 charter school Brooklyn Excelsior. He was a member of the class of
1992 at Stanford University and received his B.A. in Race and Ethnic Relations.

Email: owasow@fas.