HArCS Dean’s Fellows

Sarah Ashford Hart is a socially-engaged performance practitioner and scholar from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American family background. She completed her BA in Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City and her MA in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, in Devon, England. Her PhD research in Performance Studies at UC Davis focuses on developing a participatory methodology for the self-representation of hemispheric migrant narratives in California and Chile. With the support of HARCS, her 2017 summer project takes a practice-as-research approach to facilitating spaces of creative expression for women, mainly from Peru and Bolivia, who have experiences of migration and are currently incarcerated in Santiago, Chile. The principal aims include intervening in conditions of isolation and invisibilization, as well as shifting representation away from hegemonic narratives that racialize and criminalize migrants. Mapping ethical guidelines for engaging participants with diverse perspectives on migration as protagonists in artistic/academic dialogues, this work traverses intersections between self and other, local and foreign, performer and audience, participant and facilitator.

Rebecca Kling • English
Transatlantic Literacies: The Formation of Race, Class, and Personhood in the Late Nineteenth Century
Rebecca Kling is a doctoral candidate at University of California, Davis. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century transatlantic literature and culture, crime and prison literature, and the rise of literacy and the mass media in the nineteenth century.

Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana • Spanish & Portuguese
DACAmented: DREAMs without Borders Digital Storytelling Project
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, is a first-year PhD student in the Spanish and Portuguese department in the University of California, Davis. De La Cruz is working toward a Designated Emphasis on Human Rights. Her research focuses on testimonial literature, border studies and digital studies. She is editor of Brújula: Revista interdisciplinaria sobre estudios latinoamericanos, she is a researcher for the digital narrative project “Humanizing deportation”, and is working on her own digital narrative project “DACAmented: DREAMs without Borders”. Similarly, her work focuses on enforced disappearances in Mexico, specifically the mass disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico on September 26, 2014. As a student activist, she has participated as a media director for Caravana 43 in Fresno, CA. She has also served as editor for several newspapers and magazines. She has an article that will be published in the memory of the II Congreso Cultura en América Latina for the Autonomous University of Baja California of Mexicali, Mexico, “DACAmentados: DREAMs sin fronteras – Proyecto de narración digital”.

Alicia Decker • Design
Cut From the Same Cloth
Alicia Decker has more than ten years of experience in the fashion industry working in an array of roles at major apparel labels. She has worked on a range of other projects such as creative community building and international fashion education for non-profits. Most recently, she was a Product Developer at Columbia Sportswear for the Mountain Hardwear label. She is interested in all things textiles, visual communication as a means of community building, and exhibition curating. She is currently exploring using pattern and textiles as a means of commentary or story telling.

Noah Greene • Art Studio
Persist and Say we Owe No One
Noah Greene is a visual artist currently pursuing his MFA in Art Studio. His practice is fundamentally concerned with material and space, with the function of objects and structures in an ever-shifting search for narrative. The perceptual slide of matter between symbol and its raw physicality is a focus in his work. Born and raised in rural stretches of the Pacific Northwest, spent a number of years traveling and living in various off-the-grid contexts throughout the United States and Canada before completing his BA at Whitman College in Washington.

Darcy Padilla • Art Studio
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
Darcy Padilla is a photographer. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Open Society Institute Fellowship, Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, Alexia Foundation Grant, Getty Images Grant, International Photo Reporter Grant, Canon Female Photojournalist Award, three World Press Photo Awards, and W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography. Exhibited and published internationally including The New York Times, Le Monde, The Atlantic, Granta, and The New Yorker. Padilla has lectured at the San Francisco Art Institute and led workshops at Rencontres d’Arles in France. Family Love, Padilla’s recent book, follows a family for 21 years — an intimate story of poverty, AIDS and social issues.

Diana Pardo Pedraza • Cultural Studies
When Landmines Do Not Explode: Peasant Life in the Colombian War
Diana Pardo Pedraza is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at the University of California Davis, with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her dissertation, tentatively titled When Landmines Do Not Explode: Peasant Life in the Colombian War, explores the ways in which Improvised Explosives Devices (IEDs) are involved in the configuration of particular worlding practices in rural areas described now as sites of peace-making and post-conflict as product of the recent peace accord between the Colombian government and the leftist guerrilla FARC-EP. She explores these issues through a multi-sited, multi-species ethnographic fieldwork conducted between January 2015 and September 2016 in Colombia, Cambodia, and Germany funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Anuj Vaidya • Performance Studies
Forest Tales: Ganga Satellite
Anuj Vaidya is a first-year doctoral student in Performance Studies. He received his BHA in English/Theater Arts from Carnegie Mellon University, and MFA in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work centers on issues of gender, sexuality and ecology, and addresses questions around the constructions of gender/sexuality and the human/non-human in relation to the nation-state. His practice-as-research project – Forest Tales – exists at the cusp of film and performance, and is a queer, eco-feminist, science-fiction adaptation of the Indian epic The Ramayana. Retold from the perspective of Sita – female protagonist of the tale, and daughter of the earth – the story acquires an ecological dimension. The project intends to unflatten process while paying due attention to collaboration and to the material ecologies of artistic practice. Since 2007, Anuj has been co-director for the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival in San Francisco. He has also previously worked as an archivist/librarian at the Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, and taught queer studies at Montclair State University, New Jersey.

Melissa Wills • English
Human-Bacterial Alliances in the Metagenomic Age
Melissa Wills is a PhD candidate in English. Her dissertation, “Human-Bacterial Alliances in the Metagenomic Age,” describes a variety of ways in which authors, artists, and scientists use media forms to capture the inevitable entanglements between humans and microorganisms. Her work focuses closely on science fiction and contemporary science discourses, and is influenced by science and technology studies, media studies, and history of science. She holds a BS in Microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University and an MA in English from North Carolina State University.

Anne O’Connor is a first year PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at UC Davis. She holds a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology, Political Science and Arabic language from Binghamton University, and a MSc from the London School of Economics in Law, Anthropology and Society. She is interested in the intersections of Anthropology, Law and Science and Technology Studies. Her current project is looking at regulations of transgenic mosquitoes in public health campaigns.

Ashley Sarpong • English The Land Speaks: Land Practice and the Early Modern Literary Imagination Ashley Sarpong is a fourth year PhD candidate in English studying Early Modern literature and ecocriticism. Her dissertation project examines the literary representation of “land” in literary texts and genres of the period in relation to emerging land practices, land rights, and dispossession. A baltimore native, Ashley enjoys dancing, cooking, and concert-going in her spare time.

Jeanelle Hope • Cultural Studies Afro-Asian Solidarity through Philosophy and Knowledge Production Jeanelle Hope is a doctoral student in Cultural Studies. Her current research centers on the intersection of Black and Asian American social and political movements and the ways in which Afro-Asian solidarity manifests. Her broader research interests include transnational feminism, Black queer theory, Blacks in the U.S. west, and African American women’s history.

Annette Hulbert • English Writing in the Storm: Britain’s Literary Weather, 1667-1790 Annette Hulbert is a Ph.D. candidate in English. Her dissertation, “Writing in the Storm: Britain’s Literary Weather, 1667-1790,” examines how eighteenth century literary forms and aesthetic categories are shaped by the discourse of storms as portentous signs of historical change. The conventional story is that the Enlightenment was responsible for systematizing, secularizing, and de-personifying the weather. By contrast, Hulbert argues that storms continue to harbor a larger interpretive burden throughout the eighteenth century, which is why storms figure prominently in genres as various as theatrical revisions of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, georgic poetry, and the realist novel. The HArCS Dean’s Fellowship will allow her to deepen the archive of the project and access meteorological treatises at the British Library that provide greater background detail about how weather writing influences literary methods of the period.

Kayce Davis • Critical Theory The Anxieties of Postmemory: Intergenerational Transmission of the Spanish Civil War in the Contemporary Spanish Novel Kayce S. Davis is a Ph.D. candidate with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation analyzes the Spanish Civil War through its intergenerational remembering, recollection, and restructuring in contemporary Spanish literature. Through an interdisciplinary approach involving History, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, Human Rights, and Literature, he argues that Spain is a failed jus post bellum nation still dominated by silence, forgetting, and injustice. He further emphasizes the need for creating alternative forms of non-official discourse within Spain to address the latent traumatic events of the Spanish Civil War and to produce a transitional justice for its victims, exiles, and forgotten.

Alexandrine Mailhé • French and Italian Les ‘Beurettes’ de la République: Between Engagement and Rejection of the French Concepts of Modernity and Feminism Alexandrine Mailhé was born and raised in the South of France where she received her BA and MA in British/ American Literature and Civilization at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail. Afterwards, she attended Texas Tech University where she graduated with a MA in Francophone Literature. After completing her coursework in French and pursuing a minor in Feminist Studies and research at UC Davis, Alexandrine is currently writing her dissertation on women’s literary engagements with paradoxes at the heart of representational categories of French Universalism in the 18th, 19th and 20th/21st centuries.

Samantha Snively • English Literature Absorbing Knowledge: Cultures of Incorporation in Early Modern England Samantha Snively is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of California Davis. Her dissertation project, which features manuscript recipe collections, traces incorporation as tool for knowledge-formation across a number of knowledge spheres in early modern England. This summer, she will be traveling to London to study manuscript recipes at the British and Wellcome Libraries, and welcomes suggestions for weird and wonderful recipes to look at.

Vanessa Esquivido • Native American Studies Nor Rel Muk Wintu Tribal History and Federal Recognition Hestum (greetings), I am an enrolled member of the Nor Rel Muk Wintu Nation, I am also Hupa, and Chicana. I am currently a graduate student (ABD) in Native American Studies at University of California, Davis. I received my BA in Anthropology and Ethnic Studies with an emphasis on Native American Studies at California State University Sacramento. Focusing my research on the first tribal history of the Nor Rel Muk Wintu and their struggles in seeking federal recognition. Other research conducted includes California Indian history, California Basketry, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Victoria White • Comparative Literature Il Petrarchista: English Translation Tori White, PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, specializes in the literary Renaissance, engaging questions of genre and Petrarchan imitation and focusing especially on literature on the borderline between “anti-” and “Petrarchan”: parody, satire, and burlesque. Her dissertation project engages with texts written in Italian, Spanish, and English in the genres of lyric, drama, and prose, aiming at a critical intervention in the scholarship of Petrarchan discourse. This poetic discourse—which most often takes the form of love poetry and which is justifiably infamous for treating the female as a silent and idealized object—is central to the literature and culture of the Renaissance. As White has argued, this love poetry and its representations of the female body continue to affect even artifacts of popular culture such as Game of Thrones. White’s project for the summer of 2016 is to complete a draft of a translation of Niccolò Franco’s satirical dialogue Il Petrarchista, a text which she analyzes in her dissertation, and for which she aims to create an anglophone readership.

Omar Abdullah is a Ph.D. student in the Cultural Studies Graduate Group here at UC Davis. His work lies in the intersection of Media Studies, Performance and Practice, and Critical Race Theory. He examines performances of comedy within the rhetoric of “post-racial” America. Abdullah explores ways in which comedians discuss race in an allegedly post-racial era. Abdullah has performed as an actor and comedian himself, having appeared in several SanFrancisco Bay Area productions, including being a main-stage performer at ComedySportz San Jose.

Ksenia Fedorova • Cultural Studies Feedback Interfaces in Media Arts and Technoculture  Ksenia Fedorova is a media art researcher and curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy/Aesthetics (Russia) and is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies. Her research interests include: aesthetics, philosophy, history, media, technocultural studies, curatorial studies, and media art theory. Fedorova is the co-editor of “Media: Between Magic and Technology” (2014). She has been an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Russia) and was a member of the Jury of PRIX Ars Electronica, 2012.

May Ee Wong • Cultural Studies The Global Sustainable City    May Ee Wong is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. Wong’s dissertation research examines the aesthetics, epistemologies, and ideologies behind the contemporary notion of the global sustainable city as mobilized through the operative metaphor of the city as laboratory from the 1960s onwards. The global sustainable city stands for an ideal urban condition that provides solutions to urgent problems such as climate change, mass urbanization, and fossil fuel depletion. Comparing architectural designs and operational urban laboratories manifested in global cities, Wong asks how architects, urbanists, and scientists mobilize the notion of the city as a metabolic organism in urban laboratory discourse and practice to envision the global sustainable city as our collective future in a time of global ecological risk. This summer, Wong will conduct field research of sustainable urbanism and future cities projects, visiting The Crystal, (the largest exhibition in the world on sustainability by Siemens), the Urban Innovation Centre in London, and the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore.

Michael Martel • English Governing Victorians: Localist Writing and the State, 1850-1914  Michael Martel’s dissertation, “Governing Victorians: Localist Writing and the State,” explores the forms, circulation, and reception of localist writing in order to write the cultural history of the British local state, the model of rule wherein central state powers are deferred to local authorities. Ranging from postal directories to local government handbooks, series novels to specialist periodicals, nineteenth-century localist writing was analogous to the local state–centrally produced, locally implemented–and bolstered the locally-situated practices of governance in an otherwise libertarian political culture. Through chapters on Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Robert Tressell, Martel, and English Ph.D. candidate, demonstrates how narrative literature drew upon the forms of localist writing in order to imagine alternative orders of local rule. The HArCS fellowship will enable Martel to conduct archival research in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Xan Sarah Chacko • Cultural Studies Pivoting the Imperative to Collect: An Institutional History of the Millennium Seed Bank A Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies, Xan Sarah Chacko’s work aims to examine collaboration that develop among different professionals through the science of seeds as a shared object of knowledge for the purposes of agricultural innovation, food security, biodiversity preservation, and challenging frontiers on basic genetic science. Through archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the United States and England, Chacko will research the relationship cryogenic seed banks have with the historical movement of plant bodies, agricultural applications, and debates around biodiversity Chacko will begin her archival research in England at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the Millennium Seed Bank.

Elizabeth Crachiolo • English Sensitive Plants and Natural History in Early Modern England  Elizabeth Crachiolo is a Ph.D. candidate in English. Her dissertation examines the role of sentient plants in shaping ideas about bodies and emotions in the early modern period, at the dawn of empirical science. The HArCS Dean’s Fellowship will allow her to conduct necessary archival research for her first chapter, which focuses on specific plants, both real and imaginary, suspected of having sentience, such as Mimosa pudica, a member of the legume family whose leaves and branches move in response to touch. Because their sentience (and, at times, their existence) was not universally accepted, naturalists debated about the truth of the legends and how we know what we know.

David Tenorio • Spanish and Portuguese Sex after the Revolution: Queer Futurity, Sexual Politics, and the Poetics of Hope in Mexican and Cuban Cultural Production  David Tenorio is interested in the representation of queer futurity as portrayed by contemporary artists, performers, writers, and filmmakers in Cuba and Mexico. Drawing on theories of queer temporality and affect, his main research questions a) tease out the relation between time and queerness, b) examine the depiction of time in queer Cuban and Mexican contemporary cultural texts, such as digital storytelling, performance videos, films, literature, and visual art, and c) trace how these depictions tantalize a queer poetics of hope from which to articulate a critical vision of the future. By employing participatory video, digital ethnography, visual studies, and literary analysis, Tenorio surveys the contradictory sites which allow queer artists to produce cultural texts within a normative structure, creating networks of dissidence that oppose a social binary of homo/heterosexuality. He argues that queer renditions of utopia propose alternative forms of establishing intimacy, fostering belonging and creating inclusive spaces for citizenship to those dictated by normative heterosexual logics of imagining the future.

Scott Tsuchitani • Cultural Studies Art and Social Change in Japan: Initial Field Research  Scott Tsuchitani is a visual artist and Cultural Studies Ph.D. student who interdisciplinary work takes place at the intersection of art, activism, and pedagogy. His research brings together multiple modes of creative practice (visual, relational, performance, digital networks, and broadcast media) to activate academic and cultural discourses in “Japaneseness” in a transnational context, thereby engaging diverse constituencies in informed public dialogue as a participatory form of knowledge production.

Cordelia Ross • English Enclosing History: 12th to 16th Century Subterranean English Narratives  Cordelia Ross, Ph.D. candidate in the English department, specializes in medieval literature and ecocriticism. Her dissertation project evolves from emerging ecocritical and postcolonial approaches to Western European medieval literature. Often considered a period shaped exclusively by humans’ interactions with one another, more uncommonly known is the the Middle Ages also produced texts about human experiences within their natural environment. Rather than prioritizing the human social experience and treating the space as a passive entity to be filled, Ross emphasizes how natural space actively participates in shaping the narrative experience. Ross turns to subterranean spaces in the 12th century, tackling the concern with geographic and ethnic instability with its renewed interest in naturalism and its relation to truth. Ross argues that recognizing the agency of natural space in these medieval texts is a crucial but overlooked approach to this scholarship.