Former Fellows and Visiting Scholars

2024-2025 Fellows

Richard Jankowsky

Professor, Music
Tufts University

he/him

Richard C. Jankowsky earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and is Professor of Music at Tufts. An anthropologist of music specializing in trance and ritual in North Africa, he focuses on music's capacity to heal, to maintain and narrate histories of minoritized populations, to create conditions for transcendent experiences, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. He received the Alan Merriam Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for his monograph Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (2021), which was also a Finalist for the American Academy of Religion Book Prize on Religion and the Arts and received Honorable Mention for the L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies. His previous book, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (2010), also received recognition for awards in African Music, Anthropology, and North African Studies. A two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, he has published on topics including music and ritual, methodologies for researching music and trance, rhythmic analysis in trance musics, the politics of staging Sufi music, and jazz diplomacy and the democratic imagination.

Heather Nathans

Faculty Fellow
Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor of Judaic Studies, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

she/hers

A former Jumbo who earned her doctorate from the department, Nathans's scholarly interests include representations of race, gender, and ethnicity on the U.S. American stage, African American theatre, Jewish American theatre, musical theatre, 17th and 18th century French theatre, theatre historiography, English Restoration drama, and directing.

Nathans is the Editor for the award-winning Studies in Theatre History and Culture series from the University of Iowa Press (https://uipress.uiowa.edu/series/studies-theatre-history-and-culture). She is the recipient of the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Betty Jean Jones Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society (https://www.atds.org/awards/), and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research (https://www.astr.org/page/BarnardHewittAward). She has received numerous fellowships, including ones from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nathans holds numerous professional affiliations. She is the past-president of the American Society for Theatre Research and the American Theatre and Drama Society. In addition, she is affiliated with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; the Society of Early Americanists; the Association for Jewish Studies; and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Nathans earned her Ph.D. in Theatre from Tufts University (1999) and her A.B. in Theatre from Dartmouth College (1990). In 2012 she was honored to receive the Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the Tufts Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Jessica Remedios

Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor of Psychology
Director of the Social Identity and Stigma (SIS) lab

she/hers

Dr. Jessica Remedios is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Identity and Stigma (SIS) lab at Tufts University. She received her BS in psychology from the University of Toronto in 2007, and her PhD in psychology from the University of Toronto in 2012. Her research draws on theories of intergroup relations and social cognition to understand the psychological effects of stigma. Because stigmas (caused by, for example, systems of racism and sexism) are experienced simultaneously, her research takes an intersectional approach. Understanding the emergent effects of stigmatization for individuals with multiple stigmatized identities (e.g., women of color or multiracial people) reveals often overlooked experiences that broaden our understanding of identity, stigma, prejudice, and discrimination.

Fern Thompsett

Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for the Humanities
University Ecologies Project

she/hers

Fern Thompsett is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is based in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Her book project, tentatively titled Civilization's Discontents: Building Worlds at the End of the World in Cascadia, takes up questions of how people endeavor to live together in alternative multispecies communities, motivated by the climate crisis and anti-colonial critique. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Society for Economic Anthropology. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2025.

Fern's previous publications focus on non-hierarchical and ecological pedagogies in the context of the free university movement. She is the co-author of Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good, published by Routledge in 2021.

Sam Norcross

Dissertation Fellow
Department of English

he/him

Sam Norcross is a PhD candidate in the English department at Tufts University, where he has also worked as a First Year Writing instructor, a Teaching Assistant, and a Graduate Writing Consultant for the Student Accessibility and Academic Resources Center. Before he began his graduate studies at Tufts, he was a Research Affiliate in a material sciences lab at MIT, and his recent scholarship explores intersections between the biological sciences, queer theory, and postmodern American literature.

As a CHAT Fellow, he is currently working on his dissertation "Signs of Life: Science, Literature, and the Code in Post/Modern American Discourse," which uses psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories of language to examine the emergence of the genetic code and its impact on our understanding of human life. He has previously presented at conferences such as MLA, NEMLA, and the Boston Graduate Humanities Consortium, has published his work as a contributor to the Mid Theory Collective, and has upcoming publications in Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies and a collection of scholarly essays on Japanese videogames.

Jo Michael Rezes

Dissertation Fellow
Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

they/them

Jo Michael Rezes (they/them/theirs) is a theatremaker and educator in the Greater Boston Area. Their dissertation, “Tastes Like AIDS: Sweet Aesthetics, Bitter Humor, and Viral Performances of HIV/AIDS “ examines the sensorial and affective dimensions of HIV/AIDS representations through taste—exploring how sweetness and bitterness structure cultural responses to queerness, race, and illness across transnational media. Their work taste-tests theatre, visual art, and archival ephemera to critique the colonial residues and nationalistic anxieties embedded in "AIDS flavors." They have published writing in Polari Press, Refinery29, and Texas Theatre Journal with forthcoming chapters in Milestones in Queer US Theatre (Routledge), Visual Histories of Humour, Health, and the Body (Manchester University Press), Queers at the Table (Arsenal Pulp), and the Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (vol. 3). Online, Jo is a TED Official Speaker (“A Playful Exploration of Gender Performance”) and runs an online cooking show (Jiffy Mae's Sick Kitchen) with a cookbook in development featuring recipes found in queer, chronically ill (and online) food cultures.

Before joining CHAT, Jo was a Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellow with the Tufts Experimental College. There, Rezes has taught their course “Camp: Bad Taste, Humor, and Cult Classics” three times. As an instructor, they received the award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2022. Since then, Rezes has held positions as Lecturer in Theatre at Boston College, Affiliated Faculty in the MA/MFA Applied Theatre & Theatre Education program at Emerson College, and Teaching Fellow at Harvard University. Most recently, they serve as the Curriculum Developer for The Theater Offensive's nationally recognized True Colors programs for queer and trans youth. A proud Vassar College alum and Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre & Performance at Tufts University. Learn more: JMRezes.com

Claire Litt

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History

SHE/HER

Claire Litt is a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Tufts, where she is holding a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She will be a scholar at Tufts for the next two years. Her doctoral research investigated the uses of gemstones in women's health and beauty practices at the Medici court in Tuscany during the grand ducal period. Her postdoctoral project at Tufts will focus on women's medicine in early modern Italy.

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2024-2025

Melinda Latour

Faculty Fellow
Department of Music

SHE/HER

Melinda Latour earned a PhD in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016, an MA in Ethnomusicology from UC Riverside (2009), and a BA in Music from UC Berkeley (2002). Latour's research centers on music and Stoic philosophy in early modern France. She is also interested in music jurisprudence, tone and timbre in popular music, and Mexican music cultures. The common thread connecting these diverse interests is a fascination with music as a therapeutic and transformative communal practice, particularly in moments of social or political upheaval.

Mary McNeil

Faculty Fellow
Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora

SHE/HER

Mary Amanda McNeil is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Her research and teaching sit at the intersections of Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; Afro-Native studies; women, gender, and sexuality studies; social history; and geography. McNeil completed her PhD in American studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation, which examines the spatial imaginaries of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous political actors in Massachusetts, is entitled, “The Responsibility to Remain: Black Power and Red Power Claims to Massachusetts.”

Malcolm Turvey

Faculty Fellow
Department of the History of Art & Architecture

HE/HIM

Malcolm Turvey is the Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture. He joined Tufts in 2015 to launch the new Film & Media Studies Program, and was its founding Director from 2015 until 2021. Turvey received his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2002. He has been an editor of the journal October since 2001, and serves on the editorial board of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. He works primarily in the areas of film theory, the philosophy and aesthetics of film, avant-garde film, and film and modernism. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of three books: Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011), and Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is also co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (Routledge, 2001) and Camera Obscura/Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (University of Amsterdam Press, 2003).

Chance Bonnar

Postdoctoral Fellow

HE/HIM

Chance Bonar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University and Lecturer of Greek at Harvard Divinity School. His research and teaching primarily focus on religion, slavery, and the effects of colonialism in the ancient Mediterranean world, and he is affiliated with Tufts’s “Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies at Tufts and Beyond” project.

Chance recently completed my PhD at Harvard University in the Committee on the Study of Religion. Additionally, I have recently been a William R. Tyler Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and Instructor of Theology at Boston College.

Daniel Sunshine

Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for the Humanities
Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies at Tufts Initiative

HE/HIM

Daniel Sunshine is a historian of race and slavery in the early United States. As a postdoctoral fellow, he contributes to public humanities projects, teaching, and research related to the Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies at Tufts University initiative.

Currently, he is completing a book project entitled A Curse Upon Your Union: Crafting Black Freedom and Wartime Reconstruction in Appalachia. He is also involved with research and advocacy on behalf of an African American community group in Richmond, Virginia tied to the legacies of medical racism in the 19^th century. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Virginia.

Kyera Singleton

Postdoctoral Fellow

SHE/THEY

Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. She is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture Before joining the Warren Center as an American Democracy Fellow, she held prestigious academic fellowships from the Beinecke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

From 2018 through 2019, Kyera served as the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia. As a policy fellow, and under the mentorship of Andrea Young, she focused on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. She created the ACLU-GA’s first podcast series “Examining Justice” in order to highlight the voices of both community activists and policy makers in the fight for racial, gender, and transformative justice.

As a public history scholar, Kyera recently served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission’s Recontextualization Subcommittee for the bronze Emancipation Group Statue. She is also a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brings together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut

Omid Bagherli

Dissertation Fellow
Department of English

HE/HIM

Omid Bagherli is a PhD Candidate in the department of English at Tufts University. His dissertation “Lost Histories: Contemporary Literature’s Dispute with the Archive” studies how, from the late-twentieth century to the present moment, writers and filmmakers have incorporated archival documents into their work to complicate narratives of social reclamation. More generally, he is interested in the literary dimension of historical transmission and recovery, as well as the use of psychoanalytic theory in social and cultural analysis. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ASAP/J, Chicago Review, Postmodern Culture, C21 Literature, and Annulet.

Manjari Mukherjee

Dissertation Fellow
Center for the Humanities
Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

SHE/HER

Manjari completed her multi-sited archival research and is writing her dissertation titled "Yahudi Ki Ladki (Daughter of a Jew): Jews on the Indian Stage and Screen from the 1920s to the 1950s." She has presented her work at the South Asia Madison Conference, International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and at the Association for Jewish Studies (2022) where part of the Scholars of Color Fellows (2024-25). She is co-convenor of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Performance Studies in/from the Global South Working Group. She was awarded the GIFT teaching fellowship (2021), Graduate Studies of Arts and Sciences Summer Fellow (2022), Tisch Library Fellowship (2023) and Graduate Student Research Competition (2023). She has published with the Jewish Women's Archive, Theatre Survey, Theatre Research International, and co-edited the 2024 summer volume of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre Gazette.

Manjari has designed and taught courses on the history of Bollywood Dance, Introduction to Acting Methods at Tufts; Introduction to Theatre History and Performance at Tufts and Boston University, Queer Nationhood Art and Performance at the Experimental College at Tufts. She performed in a staged reading of Punchnama (Tale of Five) by Fatima A. Maan at La MaMa, New York, centering queer, brown, and Muslim experiences. She is currently working as a dramaturg for Aeschylus's The Furies at Tufts.

Manjari continues to facilitate conversation as co-founder of the Graduate Humanities Circle (GHC) to create a network of artists and scholars of the Humanities within and beyond Tufts. Manjari has also worked as an academic mentor at the StAAR center and the TDPS faculty-grad liaison (AY2022-2023). Before starting her PhD at Tufts, Manjari completed her Masters' degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, and worked as a curator for Mojarto, an online Arts Aggregator. She is finding ways of bringing together her classical dance training and her scholarship and is actively building an archive of Baghdadi Jewish performers and cultural actors.

Claire Litt

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History

SHE/HER

2023-2024

Diego Luis

Faculty Fellow
Department of History, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora

HE/HIM

Diego Javier Luis studies the colonial histories of Latin America and the Pacific World, race-making, and Afro-Asian diasporic convergences. His first book, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, is available now from Harvard University Press. The book traces both free and enslaved Asian mobility from the Philippines to Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Spain, from the sixteenth to early-nineteenth centuries. In particular, it examines how Asian subjects encountered and responded to colonial-era racialization with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchanges, social mobility, and resistance to enslavement.

Luis’s second project, “Manila and Acapulco: A Tale of Two Cities in the Early Modern Black Pacific,” aims to uncover the early, hidden histories of African diaspora to and through the Spanish Pacific.

Luis conducts archival research in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, and the U.S.

Daanika Gordon

Faculty Fellow
Department of Sociology

SHE/HER

Daanika Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. Her research examines the institutional and interactional mechanisms that undergird contemporary racial inequality in the city. Specifically, she investigates the ties between segregation, urban governance, and policing, with a focus on how organizational processes intervene between structural inequalities and everyday experiences. Drawing on theories of race and racism, law in action, organizations, and the urban political economy, Dr. Gordon’s scholarship analyzes 1) policing as a tool of urban governance, 2) racial inequalities as outcomes of seemingly race-neutral organizational policies, and 3) segregation as a relational and dynamically produced social structure.

These themes are reflected in Dr. Gordon’s first book, Policing the Racial Divide: Urban Growth Politics and the Remaking of Segregation (NYU Press 2022). Drawing on a case study of the police department in “River City,” a post-industrial metropolis, the book illustrates the role of the police in rearticulating the racialized experiences attached to segregated neighborhoods. Moreover, it traces racially disparate policing strategies back to an underexplored source—the participation of the police in a broader politics of urban redevelopment and growth. In many post-industrial cities, growth coalitions have pursued uneven development, justifying the infusion of resources in gentrifying neighborhoods and aspirational downtowns, while framing historically marginalized communities as sources of criminal and civic threat. Police executives in River City aligned their strategies and resources with this vision of the city, amplifying the protection of predominantly white, middle-class neighborhoods, on the one hand, and the criminalization of predominantly Black and economically depressed communities on the other. Policing the Racial Divide was the 2023 winner of the Edwin H. Sutherland Book Award, presented by the Law and Society Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Dr. Gordon’s work has appeared in journals including Social Problems, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Policy, Socius: Sociological Perspectives for a Dynamic World, and Sociological Perspectives, among other outlets. At Tufts, her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Bernstein Faculty Fellowship, the Neubauer Faculty Fellowship, and the Faculty Research Awards Committee. Prior, her work was supported by the Center for Engaged Scholarship and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Gordon teaches courses including the sociology of race and ethnicity, race and the criminal justice system, deviance and conformity, and research design and interpretation. She also teaches courses and sits on the faculty advisory committee for the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College (TUPIT). Dr. Gordon was the 2023 recipient of the Recognition of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence (ROUTE) Award, which is awarded annually to a junior faculty member who has displayed exceptional teaching and advising, concern for students’ academic and personal growth, and the ability to convey passion and enthusiasm for their field of study.

Dr. Gordon is the co-chair of the Tufts sociology department’s DEIJ committee. She is currently a board member for the Law & Society Association, an editorial advisory board member for Social Problems, and an editorial board member for Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.

Simon Han

Faculty Fellow
Department of English

Simon Han is the author of the novel Nights When Nothing Happened (Riverhead Books, 2020), which was named a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and Texas Monthly. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Iowa Review, Texas Observer, Fence, and elsewhere. A recipient of an MFA from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Northwestern University, he has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, Jentel, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Born in Tianjin, China and raised in various cities in Texas, Han is a professor of the practice of fiction at Tufts University.

Nicholas Andersen

Postdoctoral Fellow

HE/HIM

Nick Andersen is a scholar of race and religion, with expertise in African American and Africana religions and religious ethics. He specializes in the study of how key nineteenth- and twentieth-century anglophone Black thinkers drew upon religious resources as they engaged projects of racial formation and self-fashioning. His current book project, Ethiopia of the Outstretched Arm: Ethiopianism and Redemption in Black Religious Thought, attends to the ways a loose network of African Atlantic intellectuals and activists advanced projects of African redemption and self-determination by appealing to the language and imagery of Psalm 68:31 (KJV): “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” Nick earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Brown University in August 2022.

Chance Bonar

Postdoctoral Fellow

HE/HIM

Mia Levenson

Dissertation Fellow
Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

SHE/HER

Mia Levenson is a PhD candidate and dramaturge whose research explores the intersections of biomedical science, race, and theatre. Her research interests include the history of science and medicine, representations of epidemics and disease, as well as performances and presentations of scientific racism in theatre and in popular culture. Her dissertation explores the proliferation of eugenic science in early 20th century American popular performances. Mia’s research has been supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She currently serves as the 2021-2023 Graduate Representative for the American Theatre and Drama Society. She has presented at the Comparative Drama Conference, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the American Society for Theatre Research. You can find her work in Theatre Journal and Journal of American Drama and Theatre as well as the edited collections, Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (eds. Michael Chemers and Analola Santana, Routledge, 2022) and Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets (eds. Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti, Bloomsbury, 2022). She holds a BA in Theatre and a B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park as well as an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University.

Kyera Singleton

Dissertation Fellow

SHE/HER

Rebekah Waalkes

Dissertation Fellow
Department of English

SHE/HER

Bekah Waalkes is a writer, researcher, and graduate instructor in the Tufts University First Year Writing Program. Her dissertation project, “Simultaneous Fictions: Reading Form and Attention in the Contemporary Novel,” examines the limits of contemporary discourse on focus and distraction, considering how these concerns about readerly immersion come to work on the form of contemporary novels. Following the models of contemporary novels she examines in her dissertation, Bekah suggests we might instead see the experience of distraction as one of simultaneity, of overlapping bids for our attention and presence, a hyperconnection made possible by the technological advances of the internet age. Bekah’s work has been published by public and academic venues alike, including recent book reviews in The Washington Post, Cleveland Review of Books, and The Brooklyn Rail, and essays in Avidly, Post45, and Electric Literature, where she served as an editorial intern in 2022. As a Dissertation Fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year, Bekah is looking forward to collaborating across disciplines part of the Center’s intellectual community.

2022-2023