2023-2024 Fellows
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
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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
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.
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
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.
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.
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