2015-2016 Public Humanities Fellows
The New York Council for the Humanities, in partnership with seven humanities centers across the
state, is pleased to announce the third cohort of Public Humanities Fellows.
The year-long fellowship includes training in the methods and approaches of public scholarship. Fellows will also have the
opportunity to develop public programs in collaboration with local community-based organizations.
Paul Arras
Syracuse University
Liane Carlson
Columbia University
Valeria Castelli
New York University
Paul Arras is a Ph.D. candidate in American cultural history at Syracuse
University. He researches community fragmentation in late 20th century America
– the decline of civic participation, the culture wars, and other problems and
barriers impeding social interaction. His dissertation, The Lonely Nineties:
Visions of Community on Television from the End of the Cold War to 9/11,
examines how television grappled with fragmentation, reimagining traditional
community structures and values to produce new visions of social interaction.
During the Fellowship, Paul will be working with the Near Westside
Initiative in Syracuse to develop a public history project for the
neighborhood.
Liane Carlson is completing her Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion at
Columbia University, where she received her M.A. (2010) and M.Phil (2012)
after graduating summa cum laude from Washington and Lee University (2007).
Her research interests include Continental philosophy, with emphases on
German Romanticism, the history of the passions, and the intersection of religion
and literature. Her dissertation explores how 19th and 20th-century literary,
scientific, and theological debates shaped a philosophical tradition that
understood touch as the most primal way of experiencing finitude and
contingency. Liane’s studies have been supported by a Fulbright Grant, a Jacob
K. Javits Fellowship, an AAUW American Fellowship, and a Mellon
Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. As her public humanities Fellowship
project, Liane will create a philosophy curriculum for GED students.
Valeria G. Castelli is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Italian Studies
at New York University. She received her Laurea in Lettere Moderne from
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and her M.A. in Italian Studies
from the University College of London. Her research interests include
documentary film theory and history, modern and contemporary Italian
literature, Italian cultural studies, and the relationship between cinema and social
movements. Valeria is an Assistant Editor for the peer-reviewed on-line Journal
gender/sexuality/italy. Her dissertation, Ethics, Performativity and Action in
Contemporary Italian Documentary Film (2001-2014), examines how, since the
beginning of the new millennium, contemporary Italian filmmakers have
reaffirmed through their artistic work the predominance of the ethical role of
documentary film. Valeria’s Fellowship project involves bringing together
activists, filmmakers, and academics for a series of events exploring the
power of documentary films.
www.nyhumanities.org
Abram Coetsee
Cornell University
Abram Coetsee is a South-African born and U.S. raised, student in the English
Ph.D. program at Cornell University. His research and teaching focuses on
aesthetics and political confrontation in public space in early 20th century art
and contemporary graffiti. He uses questions of cultural legibility, assimilation
and its resistances, and the materialist force of aesthetics to analyze artistic and
revolutionary acts under a broader horizon of expressive events. Abram holds
bachelors degrees in English and Religious studies from U.C. Berkeley, and is a
junior fellow at the Berkeley Institute. With the Fellowship, he will work with
graffiti artists from New York City to question techniques of artistic
memorialization, developing alternative techniques for those heritages
which have not been accepted as part of the public archive.
Honey Crawford
Cornell University
Honey Crawford is a doctoral student in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell
University. She earned her M.F.A. in Writing from California Institute of the
Arts and her B.F.A. in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul
University/The Goodman School of Drama. Her scholarly interests include
feminist performance practices, public spectacle, protest, cultural theory, and
critical race theory. Her current research traces contemporary acts of public
spectacle and street performance in Brazil’s urban centers to legacies of
resistance and identity making. She pulls from a repertoire that includes public
protests, riots, carnival, Candomblé, samba, hip hop, and capoeira. Honey’s
work has been published in Black Camera Journal and the forthcoming La
Verdad: The Reader of Hip Hop Latinidades. Her Fellowship project involves
planning a “road show” of protest performances at specific sites in Ithaca.
Cristina Perez Diaz
City University of New York
Cristina Pérez Díaz is currently a Ph.D. student in the Classics program at The
Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She specializes in ancient
drama, performance theory, and reception studies. She completed a Masters in
Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in Mexico City.
She has taken many theatre workshops with performers and companies from
Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Perú. Her play Western was developed
from in the playwright workshop hosted by the theatre company Caborca, based
in Brooklyn, as well as in a summer workshop given in 2014 by the Peruvian
theatre company Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, in Lima. Cristina’s Fellowship
project involves staging performances of an updated version of Antigone to
introduce audiences to ancient theater and demonstrating its relevance to
contemporary debates around migration.
Nicole Gervasio
Columbia University
Nicole Gervasio is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her work explores the politics
of representing traumatic absence and mass violence in literatures of the Global
South, particularly questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, gender, resistance,
sexuality, race, and terrorism. In addition, she is a poet and volunteer mentor
with Girls Write Now, the only arts nonprofit dedicated to girls’ writing in New
York City. She also has a B.A. in English and Growth & Structure of Cities from
Bryn Mawr College and has been the recipient of Mellon Mays, Beinecke, and
Javits Fellowships. During the Fellowship, Nicole will bring together high
school students from diverse backgrounds for reading and writing
workshops aimed at bridging divides between them.
www.nyhumanities.org
Sarah Handley-Cousins
State University of New York
at Buffalo
Abigail Lapin
City University of New York
Allison Locke
State University of New York
at Stony Brook
Jesse Miller
State University of New York
at Buffalo
Sarah Handley-Cousins is a doctoral candidate in American History at the
University at Buffalo. Sarah’s work focuses on the Civil War era, veterans,
disability, medicine, and gender. Her dissertation work explores the experiences
of disabled Union veterans after the American Civil War. Sarah has written
about Civil War veterans for The New York Times Disunion series, and serves as
an editor and writer for the history blog Nursing Clio. Sarah, a native of
Northern New York, holds a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Wells
College and a master’s degree in Social Studies Education from Niagara
University. Her plan for the Fellowship is to create a symposium and exhibit
on the experiences of disabled veterans throughout U.S. history.
Abigail Lapin is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center
and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at City College, CUNY. Her research focuses
on ethno-religious and racial identity formations in twentieth century art of the
Americas, with a concentration on the Dominican Republic and Brazil.
Recently, she received a fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to
study the work of contemporary Dominican American artists who re-evaluate
Dominican blackness from a U.S. post-civil rights perspective. As a Public
Humanities Fellow, she will organize an exhibition and public programming
exploring the cultural and historical links between the Dominican Republic
and Haiti in New York-based contemporary art.
Allison Tyndall Locke is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Stony
Brook University. Her dissertation examines the political role of the common
people in 16th- and 17th-century history plays. She holds a B.A. from the
University of Toledo and an M.A. from DePaul University. Allison returned to
school to pursue her Ph.D. after working for six years in service-learning
programs in Chicago and Ohio, including a year of service with AmeriCorps
VISTA. As a Public Humanities Fellow, she will engage university students
in developing ESL resources to supplement Shakespearean plays for a high
school in the Bronx.
Jesse Miller is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at the University
at Buffalo, SUNY, where he studies literary modernism and the history of
science and medicine. His dissertation examines the aesthetic, ethical, and
biopolitical implications of the practice of bibliotherapy, in which reading is
used to produce or maintain states of mental health, and locates its origins in
middlebrow and modernist culture of the U.S. inter-war period. He is also
reviews editor for the online literature and cultural magazine Full Stop
(www.full-stop.net). Jesse’s Fellowship project will be to partner with
medical institutions around Buffalo to hold bibliotherapy workshops for
patients.
www.nyhumanities.org
Lana Povitz
New York University
Scarlett Rebman
Syracuse University
Alena Sauzade
State University of New York
at Stony Brook
Lana Dee Povitz is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history at NYU. Her
dissertation, A Taste of What It Takes: Food Activism in New York City, 1960s1990s, explores the central role food has played in building and sustaining
community across the city, whether through mothers monitoring school lunch
programs in the South Bronx, volunteers in church kitchens turning out meals for
people with AIDS, or young New Leftists establishing the Park Slope Food
Coop. She is engaged in an array of contemporary social struggles, including
those for peace, food justice, prison abolition, and queer and feminist movement.
During her Fellowship, Lana aims to revive the practice of communities
monitoring free summer meals for children in New York City.
Scarlett Rebman is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Syracuse
University where she is specializing in modern American social and political
history. She received her bachelor’s degree in history and education from Ohio
Wesleyan University. Her research interests include the history of social
movements; federal anti-poverty and civil rights policies; and the construction of
race, gender, and citizenship. Her dissertation explores the intersection of
grassroots activism and federal policies in Syracuse, New York between 1935
and 1970. With the Public Humanities Fellowship, she plans to design a
curriculum on Syracuse civil rights history for high school students.
Alena Sauzade is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University specializing in
public art and commemoration. Her research focuses on government and
community sponsored monuments as well as intentional and unintentional
memorials in order to interrogate the various ways that memory functions in the
public sphere. Her dissertation Witnesses to Terror: Nationhood and Trauma in
Memorials to Victims of Terrorism focuses on memorials to victims of the
September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States and worldwide. It considers
September 11th as a cultural trauma, and explores how the artifacts of the
attacks, including World Trade Center steel and Pentagon limestone, have
become important symbolic components in the composition of official and
vernacular memorials. Alena’s public humanities project will generate an
archived community dialogue on 9/11 memorials.
The Fellowship has been generously supported by grants from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation.
Contact
Program Officer Adam Capitanio
212-233-1131
acapitanio@nyhumanities.org
www.nyhumanities.org