Faculty Fellows

Javiela Evangelista
City Tech, African American Studies
Email: JEvangelista@citytech.cuny.ed
“Reshaping National Imaginations in the Midst of Civil Genocide: Denationalization in the Dominican Republic and Transnational Activism”

Bio: Javiela Marcelina Evangelista received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). As an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department, at New York City College of Technology – CUNY, Javiela leads instruction on the Caribbean. She has also developed and taught courses,such as The Heritage of Imperialism, that connect the Caribbean to other regions. Javiela’s research explores the intersections of governmentality, racialization and xenophobia, movements and consciousness for black lives, migration and citizenship, and human rights in the Dominican Republic. This year, Javiela presented research at The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico and The Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) in Antigua, Guatemala. She has a forthcoming review with the National Political Science Review.

Jesse Schwartz
Laguardia Community College, English
Email: jwschwartz@gmail.com
Serial Protest: The Bolshevik Revolution, Racial Socialisms, and US periodical Culture 1917-1924

Bio:Jesse W. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. In 2013, he received his PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and his interests include radical American literature, periodical studies, Marxism, critical race studies, and Russian-American cultural relations. His current work traces the literary and political responses to American socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on representations of the Russian Revolution in US print cultures.

Vartan Messier
Queensborough Community College, English,
Email: VMessier@qcc.cuny.edu
Consciousness, Resistance and Revolution in Ousman Sembene’s Cinema

Bio: Vartan Messier is an Assistant Professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY) and specializes in contemporary fiction, film and media studies, postcolonial studies, and continental philosophy.  His work examines interdisciplinary discourses pertaining to the formation of cultural and gender subjectivities across transnational networks of global interconnectivity. Engaging with theories of intertextuality and intermediality, his publications have focused on investigating the aesthetics and politics of media interaction and consumption across texts and contexts. His current book project is a transnational study of the interconnections between desire, gendered subjectivity, and notions of cultural specificity in 20th and 21st century works of film and literature from the U.S., Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. At CUNY, Professor Messier has taught freshman composition, introductory courses in literature and media studies, as well as upper-division courses on contemporary and postcolonial fiction, media criticism, literary theory, and film.

Megan Behrent
NYC College of Technology, English,
Email: MBehrent@citytech.cuny.edu
Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the Women’s Liberation

Bio: Megan Behrent is an Assistant Professor of English at NYC College of Technology, CUNY. She received a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Stony Brook in 2013. Her research focuses on literature and social movements, in particular texts associated with second-wave feminism, and the intersection between race, gender, sexuality and class in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. She has also written on educational policy and radical pedagogy and is a contributor to Inside Our Schools (Harvard Education Press) and Education and Capitalism (Haymarket Books). Her current project tentatively titled “Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the Women’s Liberation Movement” explores the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, the literary and political influence they had on each other and the evolution of their political thought in the context of political debates about race, class and sexuality within the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Leigh Binford
CSI, CUNY, Anthropology
Email: arthur.binford@csi.cuny.edu
Post-insurgent Subjectivity: Salvadoran Revolutionaries Twenty Years Later

Lara Saguisag
CSI, English
Email: lara.saguisag@csi.cuny.edu
Regimes and Revolutions: Fictions of Childhood and the Marcos Era

Bio:Lara Saguisag is Assistant Professor of English (Children’s and Young Adult Literature) at CUNY – College of Staten Island. Her forthcoming book, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Newspaper Comics, draws from and builds on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood. Her current project, tentatively titled “Regimes and Revolutions,” examines the ways Philippine children’s literature, comics, and cartoons were shaped by and responded to the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Sarah Ohmer 
Lehman College, Latin American, Latino and Puerto Rican Studies, and Africana Studies, 
Email: SARAH.OHMER@lehman.cuny.edu
Axe-ocracy and Empowerment by Black Brazilian Women Writers

Bio: Dr. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer joined the LALPRS department as Assistant Professor and Fulbright Scholar in Fall 2015. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Indianapolis (2011-2015). She received her Ph.D. in Latin American Culture and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, with a concentration in Cultural Studies and Doctoral Certificate in Latin American Studies (2012). Dr Ohmer specializes in gender and race in Latin American literature and society, cultural theory, postcolonialism, and trauma.  This year, she joined the Editorial Board of the Women’s Studies Quarterly Editorial Board. Dr Ohmer’s research focuses on the intersection of gender, race and trauma in literature by Black Women from Cuba, Brazil, and the US African American and Afro-Latino women. Her interdisciplinary training includes trauma studies, critical ethnic studies, literary analysis and cultural studies.Sarah Soanirina Ohmer is Franco-Malagasy, born in France with roots in Madagascar. She speaks French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. The Fulbright Fellowship enabled her to work on her book manuscript, Keloids of Modernity: Trauma, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. Dr. Ohmer dedicates her work to bridging the personal with the theoretical, in her research, classroom and in life!

Dissertation Writing Fellows

Morgan Buck
EES
Email: mbuck@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Domestic Landscapes: Housing and the Politics of Home in Johannesburg, 1930-1994

Ricardo Gabriel
Sociology
Email: rgabriel@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Somos Boricuas y Estamos Despertando: Decolonial Education and the Rise of Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York, 1965-1975

Brendan Beck
Sociology
Email: bbeck@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Uneven Policing: Economic Bubbles, Metropolitan Restructuring, and Law Enforcement

Bio: Brenden Beck is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is interested in how the carceral state responds to socio-spatial changes and economic restructuring. His dissertation analyzes low-level policing in the contexts of suburbanization, gentrification, and fiscal crises.

Shemon Salam
EES
Email: ssalam@gradcenter.cuny.edu
The Rise of the Fast Food Proletariat

Jeremy Randall
History
Email: jrandall@gradcenter.cuny.edu
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and The Production of Revolutionary Culture

Brendan Kibbee
Graduate Center, Music
Email: bkibbee@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Street Assemblies and Counterpublics in Postcolonial Dakar

Bio: Brendan Kibbee is a PhD Candidate in Music at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.  His dissertation, Street Assemblies and Counterpublics in Postcolonial Dakar, rethinks ways that music is integrated with economic life in a contemporary, post-colonial urban setting, generating forms of solidarity, community service, patronage, and political action.  Brendan’s research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 21^st Century Dissertation Fellowship.  He has taught at City College and John Jay, CUNY, as well as Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Visiting Scholars

Sarah Raymundo
University of Philippines-Diliman Quezon City, Center for International Studies
Email: sarahraymundo1976@gmail.com
Indigenous beliefs as science of resource management and political mobilization

Diane Wong
Cornell University, Government
Email: dw465@cornell.edu

Bio: Diane Wong is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University and visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, where she writes on race, gender and the gentrification of Chinatowns. As a scholar activist and educator, her research stems from a place of revolutionary praxis and love for community. As a first generation Chinese American woman born and raised in Flushing, Queens, her research is intimately tied to Chinese diaspora and the urban immigrant experience. Her current research explores how gentrification politically impacts the Chinese immigrant communities in San Francisco  New York City, and Boston. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, American Political Science Association, and Cornell University’s American Studies Program. Diane also works as a community organizer with groups like CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Chinatown Art Brigade, and National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.