In 2012, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, with the support of the Tedder Family Endowed Research Award in the Humanities, began a program to award summer fellowships to doctoral candidates working on humanities topics who have passed their qualifying exams by the application deadline. This fellowship may be used to cover research expenses, including travel, related to their dissertation project. Work on projects with interdisciplinary appeal is particularly encouraged. Additional awards may be granted with funds from the Rothman endowment. The most recent recipients are below:
2024-2025 Tedder Doctoral Fellows
Joseph Angelillo (History)
The Lost Promise of Purposeful Inclusion: Movements for Racially Representative Juries During Reconstruction
This dissertation examines Black-led, Reconstruction-era efforts to achieve purposeful inclusion of Black citizens on juries. It advances two arguments about these efforts. First, demands for racially representative juries reshaped the meaning of “a jury of one’s peer” and “an impartial jury.” In doing so, these demands reconciled these previously conflicting concepts, advancing the notion that proper governance requires race-based inclusion. Second, demands for racially representative juries often stressed that purposeful inclusion could occur under non-exclusionary law (what we today may call “colorblind”). Thus, these demands tested the wisdom of inclusion and the limits of the reconstructed constitutional order.
Sayantika Chakraborty (English)
Displacement and Emplacement: Studying Female Climate Refugee Experiences in Contemporary India
In my dissertation, I analyze the nuanced experiences of female climate refugees in the indigenous and tribal communities of contemporary India, a topic that has received scant scholarly attention in mainstream academic, public, and political discourses. I primarily look at the idea of female resilience, as documented by these women in the literary endeavors, artwork, stories, and myths. To elaborate on the plurality of such experiences, I utilize a cross-disciplinary approach by drawing upon methodologies from environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, migration and refugee studies, oral history, and public and digital humanities, in their local and global context.
2024-2025 Rothman Doctoral Fellows
Mosunmola Ogunmolaji (History)
Beyond Borders: The Migration, Labor, and Everyday Lives of Nigerian Nurses in the United Kingdom, 1937-2000
This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between the professionalization of nursing in Nigeria and the migration, labor, and domestic intricacies of Nigerian nurses in the United Kingdom. Through a blend of immigration and nursing records, personal archives, manuscripts, and oral interviews, I explore these nurses’ motivations, struggles, and resilience, shaped by the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. By examining the dynamic exchange and complexity of their departure and return, I aim to shed light on the affective in African migration, nursing, and gender and labor history. This research offers insights into the rich nuances of global migration and healthcare.
Danielle Sensabaugh (Art History)
Coming of Age in the Era of Enlightenment: Envisioning Girlhood and Feminine Virtue, c. 1750 – 1815
During the 18th-19th century, childrearing and early education acquired new social and cultural significance in France. Both childhood and adolescence were recognized as separate “life stages” during which significant physical and moral development occurred. Due to France’s patriarchal system, however, girls experienced vastly different developmental expectations and standards of behavior, shaped by gender-based notions of virtue. The growing recognition of childhood’s value led to its increased portrayal in art, evident in the rising number of youthful subjects across genres. This dissertation examines the cultural and social meaning(s) of girlhood in France (c. 1750 – 1815) by analyzing its visual representations and exploring how women artists, in particular, challenged and reshaped the narratives and artistic paradigms that defined girlhood and female virtue.
Allison Westerfield (Art History)
Queen of Pentacles: Women Surrealists & The Tarot of Pamela Coleman Smith
A renewed interest in the occult, specifically tarot cards, influenced avant-garde visual artists of the twentieth century, in particular, women Surrealists. Pamela Colman Smith fundamentally changed the iconography of the tarot through her illustrations. I argue that Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Remedios Varo developed their visual iconographic expression as a result of occult teachings. These women Surrealists pursued a particular interest in feminine archetypes, androgynous characters, and iconography in their paintings that developed from the legacy of Colman Smith’s tarot. I assert that the language of the tarot is key to unlocking the painting practices of these artists.
Chris Lause (History)
Treat’em Tough”: The Militarization of the New York Police Department, 1926-1962
This study examines the linkage between the professionalization and militarization of the New York Police Department between the mid-1920s and the early 1960s. In doing so, it joins a growing body of scholarship examining the rapid expansion of the American carceral system and the vast growth in police power undergirding it over the past sixty years. Scholars treat these twin developments as products of national policies such as Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime. This dissertation will challenge that dominant narrative by linking earlier shifts in municipal policing to the subsequent explosion of national ‘tough-on-crime’ policies that fueled mass incarceration.
Karen Libby (English)
Literary Community Building: Twentieth-Century Lesbian Publishing
Literary Community Building
Twentieth-Century Lesbian Publishing seeks to piece together the community-building work of mid- to-late twentieth-century lesbian publishing. I argue that literature, in its varied and interconnected forms, was a guiding force in creating, critiquing, and expanding the concept of lesbian identity and community in the United States during the 1950s through 1980s. This dissertation analyzes pulp fiction, comics, lesbian-feminist press paperbacks, and mini-magazines called “zines.” My attention on the mid-to-late twentieth century and wide array of primary sources highlights how popular culture and innovations in publishing technologies allowed for wide, nontraditional, and diverse constructions of lesbian identity and community.
Karen Lorena Romero Leal (Anthropology)
Embodied extractivism: how women in Amazonia experience and resist the extractive desires of capitalism in times of war and peace in Colombian Amazonia
The persistent cycles of predatory natural resource extraction and several forms of violence have affected women in the Colombian Amazon despite being in a post-conflict period. In the Guaviare River basin, economic activities linked to war, such as coca crops, have started to be replaced by “legal” industries associated in local discourses with times of peace, such as extensive monocrops and cattle ranching. Each of these distinct extractive activities fosters certain gender relations, which notoriously transform women’s lives but in ways that are neither clear nor predictable. My dissertation examines the impacts of transitions between extractive economies, some linked to war, others to peace, on the lives and bodies of mestizo and indigenous women in Guaviare, a recent settler-colonist zone.
Daniela Núñez de Álvarez Stransky (Spanish and Portuguese Studies)
Using Social Network Analysis to Examine Dynamic Changes in Returnees’ Spanish grammar
This interdisciplinary dissertation investigates the use of Personal Network Analysis developed in Sociology to elucidate how dynamic social interactions and disparate language exposure during forced migration affects language development and representation. Specifically, this dissertation concentrates on the experiences of diverse and vulnerable populations, especially Mexican American migrants subjected to deportation to Mexico following substantial periods of residence and formal education in the United States. The examination of the language patterns within this unique population provides invaluable insights into the extraordinary adaptability and dynamism of the human cognitive processes, considering the limited existing linguistic research on this community.
Gerard Spicer (Music)
Anthem Diplomacy in Brazil: The New York Philharmonic’s 1958 Latin America Tour
This dissertation examines the network of Brazilian politicians and concert organizers who exercised unprecedented control over the New York Philharmonic’s 1958 Cold War cultural diplomacy concerts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It intervenes in U.S.- Soviet competition narratives to provide a case study of how Brazil performed modernity during the coincidence of controversial Brazil-U.S. trade relations and the Philharmonic’s visit. The Brazil-subsidized concert at Maracanãzinho sports stadium, with 18,000 spectators and top diplomats in attendance, saw an unprecedented exchange of national anthems by an American and Brazilian conductor, performing international goodwill that was broadcast across Brazilian radio and television.
Long Xiao (Political Science)
Securitizing China: Exploring the Construction of Threat Perception in U.S. – China Relations
My dissertation explores American lawmakers’ attempts to depict China as a threat to U.S. security over the past decade. This process is known as securitization. My research aims to identify the main actors and how/why securitization happens over time. The first phase of my study involves conducting a qualitative discourse analysis of policymaking dialogue on national security issues relating to China in formal U.S. congressional settings between 2013 and 2022. The second phase of my dissertation involves testing hypotheses to explore the rationalistic motivations for securitizing U.S.–China relations from political, economic, and social perspectives.
Faith Barringer (Art History)
French Atlantic Portraiture, Creolization, and the Construction of Race, c. 1715 – 1815
In eighteenth century France there was a pervasive belief that the Caribbean islands had the ability to deteriorate and change the European body to the point that became distinct and distanced from its “original” form. This dissertation examines how this idea impacted portraits of influential families that had familial and/or economic ties to French Caribbean colonies. Importantly, this era is considered a moment of flux within understandings of race and racial differences. Here, I examine how categories of whiteness are constructed/defined within portraits of individuals whose status was integrally linked to a system/hierarchy of white superiority.