Faculty & Staff
Esra Akcan
Associate Professor of Architecture
Esra Akcan's research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia. She is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University, and the director of Einaudi Center's Institute for European Studies (starting in July 2017). She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York City. She taught history-theory classes and architectural design studios at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York City, and METU in Ankara. Akcan received awards and fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, University of Illinois at Chicago, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Transregional Studies Forum), Graham Foundation, Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, Canadian Center for Architecture, CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD, and KRESS/ARIT. She is the author of the books Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012), Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan), Çeviride Modern Olan (YKY, 2009), and (Land)Fill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City (124/3, 2004). She has also authored more than a hundred articles in scholarly books and professional journals of multiple languages on contemporary theory (critical and postcolonial theory, globalization), modern and contemporary architecture in West Asia, Ottoman architectural photography, established Euro-American architects' engagement with the Gulf States, and the Middle Eastern diaspora in Europe. Her book Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg is forthcoming at the end of 2017.
Contact: (607) 254-8218
ea369@cornell.edu
Profile
Ellen Avril
Chief Curator, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
At the Johnson Museum, Ellen Avril has curated or cocurated more than 40 exhibitions on a broad range of topics in traditional and contemporary Asian art. Among the exhibition catalogs she has authored or contributed to are Nature Observed and Imagined: Five Hundred Years of Chinese Paintings; Ancient Artistry: Pre-Chinese Ceramics and Jades from the Shatzman Collection; and Heavenly Earth: Early Chinese Ceramics from the Shatzman Collection. She served as project director for the renovation and reinstallation of the Johnson Museum’s Asian art galleries in conjunction with the 2011 building expansion. She was formerly associate curator in charge of East Asian art at the Cincinnati Art Museum and earned her M.A. in art history from the University of Kansas.
Contact: (607) 254-4509
eba2@cornell.edu
Andrea Bachner
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Andrea Bachner's research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality. Her first book, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Cultures (Columbia University Press, 2014), analyzes how the Chinese script has been imagined in recent decades in literature and film, visual and performance art, design and architecture, both within Chinese cultural contexts and in different parts of the "West." She is the coeditor (with Carlos Rojas) of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (2016) and has published articles in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Concentric, German Quarterly, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Taller de Letras, as well as in several edited volumes. Her second book, The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories (forthcoming from Fordham University Press in 2017) provides a genealogy of the concept of inscription that probes the media imaginaries of poststructuralist theory. She is currently working on two projects: the first, Against Comparison? Latin America and the Sinophone World, reflects on the limits of comparison through an exploration of the rich history of cultural contact, exchange, and affinity between Latin American and Chinese cultures from the late 19th century to today; the second, Membranicity, constitutes a critique of the deployment of surface metaphors in contemporary theory.
Contact: asb76@cornell.edu
Profile
Anindita Banerjee
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Anindita Banerjee is a member of the Institute for European Studies, the South Asia Program, and the Visual Studies Program, and a fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell. Her research explores the interfaces between technoscientific, cultural, and social imaginations across Russia, Eurasia, and the Indian subcontinent. She is particularly interested in science fictional literature and media, which play a crucial role in negotiating translocal practices and global understandings of modernity. The subject is explored at length in her book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), which won the first Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book award. The comparative study of global modernity’s intersects with Banerjee’s broader interests in critical geography, migration and border studies, media studies, and cultures of energy. She has published articles on these topics in PMLA, Clio, Science Fiction Studies, Comparative American Studies, and other journals and scholarly collections.
Contact: (607) 255-7781
ab425@cornell.edu
Profile
Bruno Bosteels
Professor of Romance Studies
Bruno Bosteels previously held positions as an assistant professor at Harvard University and at Columbia University. He is the author of Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polémique (La Fabrique, 2009); Badiou and Politics (Duke University Press, 2011); The Actuality of Communism (Verso, 2011); Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror (Verso, 2012); Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso, 2016); and The Mexican Commune (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He has translated several books by Alain Badiou, including Theory of the Subject (Continuum, 2009); Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy (Verso, 2011); The Adventure of French Philosophy (Verso, 2012); Philosophy for Militants (Verso, 2013); Rhapsody for the Theatre (Verso, 2013); and The Age of the Poets (Verso, 2014). He is the author of more than one hundred articles on modern Latin American literature and culture, and on contemporary philosophy and political theory. Between 2005 and 2011 he served as general editor of Diacritics.
Contact: (607) 255-2518
bb228@cornell.edu
Profile
Thomas Campanella
Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning
Thomas J. Campanella is an urbanist whose work focuses on the design and planning history of cities and the urban built environment. A recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the James Marston Fitch Foundation. Campanella's books include The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (2008), Cities From the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America (2001), and Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (2003), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Campanella's essays on landscape and urbanism have been published in Orion, Obit, Wired, Salon, Metropolis and the Wall Street Journal. Campanella holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MLA from Cornell University, and BS from the State University of New York.
Contact: (607) 254-8934
tomcamp@cornell.edu
Profile
Madeleine Casad
Associate Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
As associate curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Madeleine Casad, Ph.D., has helped manage an expanding new media collection that spans 40 years of aesthetic experimentation with electronic communications media. These holdings have been at the center of some of Cornell University Library’s most complex media preservation initiatives, such as the creation of a new audiovisual preservation lab, a digital forensics lab, and a $300K National Endowment for the Humanities grant to develop archival preservation and access strategies for complex digital artworks. As curator for digital scholarship in Cornell University Library’s Division of Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services, Casad is involved in the development of many faculty-led digital humanities projects at Cornell. She has played a role in the creation of new programs for reaching out to graduate students in the arts and sciences, including a graduate summer fellowship in digital scholarship, the “Conversations in Digital Humanities” lecture series, and a program of informal drop-in discussions targeting graduate students in the arts and sciences. Her academic research interests include narrative and virtual technologies, theory and aesthetics of new media, feminist and minority art and literature, globalization, and questions of identity and contested public memory in 20th and 21st century media art. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Comparative Literature in 2012.
Lily Chi
Associate Professor of Architecture
Lily Chi’s teaching covers topics in contemporary design research, 18th to 21st-century theory and criticism, and architectural drawing/representation in western history. Her studios have investigated urban temporalities, 1:1 and the situational, film and formation, and questions of location/globalization in the contemporary city. She has conducted studios in and on a number of cities in south and southeast Asia, including a sponsored studio to Singapore, and a Rotch Traveling Studio to Hanoi. Chi served as design editor for the Journal of Architectural Education from 2000–04, and is completing a writing project on city-building, war, and propaganda in 20th-century Saigon. Chi received her B.Arch. with high distinction from Carleton University (Canada), her M.Phil. in architectural history and theory from Cambridge University, and her Ph.D. from McGill University. Her doctoral work examined the role of Enlightenment concepts of custom, nature, and history in the formation of a modern architectural discourse.
Contact: (607) 255-3797
lhc3@cornell.edu
Profile
Jeff Chusid
Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning
Jeffrey Chusid is an architect and planner with current research interests that include the fate of historic resources in areas of cultural exchange and conflict, the conservation of modernist architecture in India, historic cements, and sustainable development. His writings can be found in journals, museum catalogues, and several texts. Chusid has consulted on public policy, resource conservation, and urban design for diverse communities such as Shanghai, China; Sevastopol, Ukraine; Levuka, Fiji; and Bastrop, Texas. He has also consulted on building and landscape preservation for numerous museums including the Huntington and Hearst Castle. Chusid received his A.B. in environmental design and his M.Arch. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1978 and 1982.
Contact: (607) 254-8579
jmc286@cornell.edu Profile
Mark Cruvellier
Professor of Architecture
Mark Cruvellier's interests and areas of expertise include tall building structures, bridge design, and the development of pedagogical materials for structures in the context of architecture. He worked for several years in New York City analyzing some of that city's tallest and most slender buildings, and then in Vancouver on several unusual bridge designs. At Cornell since 1991, Cruvellier regularly teaches classes on fundamental structural concepts and the design of structural systems. He has recently co-authored the textbook The Structural Basis of Architecture (Routledge, 2011) together with colleagues Bjorn Sandaker and Arne Eggen of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Currently Cruvellier serves as the Chair of the Department of Architecture at Cornell; he was previously its Interim Chair from 1998–2001 and 2006–2009. He earned his Ph.D. at McGill University, specializing in the computer modeling of tall buildings.
Contact: (607) 255-7612
arch_chair@cornell.edu
http://aap.cornell.edu/arch/faculty/faculty-profile.cfm?customel_datapageid_7102=18214
Iftikhar Dadi
Associate Professor of History of Art
Iftikhar Dadi is an artist and art historian broadly interested in the relation between art practice in the contexts of modernity, globalization, urbanization, mediatization, and post-colonialism. He has authored numerous scholarly works, including Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Curatorial activities include Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and Lines of Control at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. As an artist, Dadi works collaboratively with Elizabeth Dadi. Their practice investigates popular media's construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization and creative resilience in urban informalities. Their work is frequently realized in large-scale installations and has been exhibited and published internationally. Dadi is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of History of Art. He received his Ph.D. in history of art from Cornell.
Contact: (607) 255-9861
mid1@cornell.edu
Profile
Ella Maria Diaz
Assistant Professor of English and Latina/o Studies
Ella Maria Diaz is an assistant professor of English and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. A lecturer for six years at the San Francisco Art Institute (2006–12), her book, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (University of Texas, 2017) explores the art and social history of a vanguard Chicano/a art collective founded in Northern California in the 1970s. She has published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana-Latina Studies Journal, and ASAP/Journal.
Contact: (607) 255-7434
emd233@cornell.edu
Kieran Donaghy
Professor of City and Regional Planning
Kieran Donaghy’s teaching and research has involved nonlinear dynamic systems modeling of issues in housing, transportation, land use, the physical environment, employment, public finance, climate change, migration, and neighborhood ecology. Donaghy has also maintained an active interest in environmental and development ethics. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the European Commission, and other international and state and federal agencies, and was the executive director of the Regional Science Association International from 1997 to 2003. Donaghy received a B.A. from the State University at Albany in sociology and philosophy prior to receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. in regional science from Cornell.
Contact: (607) 254-5378
kpd23@cornell.edu
Profile
Tao DuFour
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture
Tao DuFour is an architect and scholar whose work explores the overlaps between architecture, philosophy, and anthropology. His theoretical projects and writing address philosophical and anthropological interpretations of the natural life-world that inform conceptions of architecture, building on his doctoral research on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and study of the theoretical heredity of Claude Lévi-Strauss. DuFour is interested in exploring the historicity of notions such as wilderness — the "wild," the "feral," the "savage," and so forth — as these relate to the history of the production of social and natural scientific knowledge. DuFour relates these research interests to his design work, which investigates possibilities for mediating traditional and computational techniques, specifically in regards to the connectivity between synthetic and analytic approaches to geometry, and the mapping of historical and physical geographies. He holds a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of architecture from Cambridge University, and a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union.
Contact: (607) 254-8220
tns29@cornell.edu
Profile
Pedro Rabelo Erber
Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies
Pedro Erber is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Studies and director of the East Asia Program at Cornell University. He is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (University of California Press, 2015), Política e verdade no pensamento de Martin Heidegger (Loyola/PUC-Rio, 2004), and numerous articles on art and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, and political thought.
Contact: pre5@cornell.edu
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Jeremy Foster
Assistant Professor of Architecture
As an architect and landscape architect with a PhD in humanistic geography, Jeremy Foster is interested in the opportunities built environments — simultaneously, assemblages of material processes and practices, spaces of representation, and vehicles of discourse — offer for transdisciplinary study. He has worked professionally as both architect and landscape architect, and taught at several universities. At Cornell, in addition to design studios addressing the social, environmental, and infrastructural challenges of contemporary cities, he has taught courses on the history and theory of landscape and urban design; on the interplay between cultural representations and material practices in the shaping of cities, landscapes, and territories; and most recently, on the temporal, performative, and ‘more-than-representational’ aspects of place. His research focuses on the diverse ways landscapes are imaginatively mobilized to project emergent ideas of culture, nature, and citizenship during periods of social and political transition. In addition to his book Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh, 2008), Foster has published in Journal of Southern African Studies; Journal of Historical Geography; Cultural Geographies; Safundi; Gender Place and Culture; Journal of Landscape Architecture; and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Forthcoming pieces will appear in volumes of Architecture and its Geographical Horizons (ed. R. Quek), Women, Modernity and Landscape Architecture (ed. S. Duempelmann), and Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa (ed. J. Beardsley)
Contact: (607) 255-0809
jf252@cornell.edu
Arnika Fuhrmann
Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies
Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic and political modernities. Her book manuscript Ghostly Desires examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality, personhood, and notions of collectivity in contemporary Thai cinema. In a new research project, Fuhrmann focuses on new media and how the study of the digital allows for a perspective on the political public sphere that transcends commonplace distinctions of liberalism and illiberalism. This project intersects with her interests in the transformation of cities in contemporary South/east Asia. Fuhrmann’s recent writing has appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Oriens Extremus, and positions: asia critique. Complementing her academic work, she also engages in cultural programming and works in the curatorial team of the Asian Film Festival Berlin (www.asianfilmfestivalberlin.de).
Andrew Galloway
Professor of English
Andrew Galloway has been a member of Cornell University’s English Department since receiving his Ph.D. (U. C. Berkeley) in 1991. He has written numerous essays on medieval English, Latin, and French literature and culture from the tenth to the fifteenth century, especially Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s poetry, Gower’s poetry, and their fifteenth-century followers; as well as essays on textual criticism, London literature, and medieval historical writing such as a chapter in the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (2002) and entries for the Brill Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. For seven years he edited the annual volumes of The Yearbook of Langland Studies, and he provided the translations of the Latin verses and glosses for the new 3-volume edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis by Russell Peck (2000-2005). His monographs include The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume 1 (2006), and Medieval Literature and Culture (2006); his edited volumes include Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (co-ed. R. F. Yeager; 2009), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture (2011), Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (co-ed. Frank Grady; 2012), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: An Interlinear Translation (updating and expanding the version by Vincent Hopper; 2012), and The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (co-ed. Andrew Cole; 2013).
Contact: (607) 255-6800 to leave message for call back
asg6@cornell.edu
Profile
Bill Gaskins
Visiting Associate Professor of Art
From a professional base in photography and arts writing, and an academic foundation in fine art and the history of photography, the work of Bill Gaskins explores questions about photography and the portrait in the twenty-first century. An entry point for the viewer is his fascination with the myths of photography, American culture, and representations of African American people. As an artist, teacher, scholar, and essayist, Gaskins’ artwork, teaching, and writing examine race and representation, photography and the portrait, the history of photography, the politics of visual culture, art and the academy, and the artist as citizen. His approach to photography as a producer and critical spectator has garnered attention through commissions, residencies, grants, public lectures, exhibition catalogs and books, as well as solo and group exhibitions at major venues such as the Crocker Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Smithsonian Museum. He is the author of the breakthrough monograph Good & Bad Hair: Photographs by Bill Gaskins, and recently completed his first short film The Meaning of Hope, a reflection on the twenty-first century through the city of Detroit. Born in Philadelphia, Gaskins received his B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art, a M.A. from The Ohio State University, and a M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Contact: (607) 255-3558
gaskins@cornell.edu
Profile
Tao Leigh Goffe
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University. She is a writer and a sound designer specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, technology, and abolition. Her interdisciplinary research and practice examine the unfolding relationship between ecology, infrastructure, and the senses. Film production, sound design, digital cartography, and oral history are integral to her praxis. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Vice Munchies. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review. She is at work on books exploring the poetics and entanglements of indigenization in conversation with African and Asian diasporas in the Caribbean, as well as the geology of the archipelagic formation of the Caribbean.
Travis L. Gosa
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Travis Gosa holds a faculty appointment in the graduate field of education, and is affiliated with the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality. Since 2008, he has served on the advisory board of Cornell’s Hip Hop Collection, the largest archive on early hip hop culture in the United States. An interdisciplinary social scientist, he teaches twentieth and twenty-first century African American culture, education, and music. Gosa is editor of Remixing Change: Hip Hop & Obama (Oxford University Press, 2014; co-edited with Erik Nielson). His most recent academic work has been published with peer-reviewed journals Poetics, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Teacher’s College Record, Popular Music and Society, and the Journal of American Culture. In addition, he has contributed scholarly essays to many critical anthologies including The Cambridge Companion To Hip Hop (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Race still Matters: African American Lived Experiences in the Twenty-First Century (SUNY University Press, 2014), and Social Media: Impact & Usage (Lexington Books, 2012). He has written for various media outlets, including Ebony, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Black Commentator, FoxNews, and Hip Hop Republican. His book-in-progress examines the relationship between hip hop culture and black student achievement.
Sabine Haenni
Associate Professor of Film and American Studies
Haenni received her B.A. in English and Russian from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880-1920 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and coeditor (with John White) of Fifty Key American Films (Routledge, 2009). Much of her research involves questions of migration and urbanism. Current projects include a book-length study on cinema in the port city of Marseilles, and an edited anthology of world films. Her teaching areas include American, transnational and silent film; popular and mass culture; cinema in the context of other media (including fiction and theater); immigrant and ethnic film and culture; and the intersection between urbanism and media.
Contact: (607) 255-4506
sh322@cornell.edu
Profile
Oneka LaBennett
Associate Professor of Africana Studies
Medina Lasansky
Associate Professor of Architecture
Medina Lasansky has lectured widely and published extensively on the relationship between politics, popular culture, and the built environment. Her 2004 book The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (Penn State University Press) won the Henry Paolucci/Walter Bagehot Book Award in 2005 and was runner up for both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, given by the College Art Association for "an especially distinguished book in the history of art" and the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award. Her coedited volume, Architecture and Tourism. Perception, Performance, and Place (Berg, 2004) was translated into Spanish in 2006. Her essay on San Gimignano won the 2005 Founders' Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for the best article written by a junior scholar to appear in the previous two years in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Awards, grants, and fellowships include the 2005 Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship; a Visiting Scholar appointment at the Study Centre, Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2004; and research fellowships at both the Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach and the Centro Interuniversitario di Studi Americani ed Euro-americani, Studi Politici, Universita di Torino. She was a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, in 2003.
Contact: (607) 255-6416
dml34@cornell.edu
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Suzanne Lettieri
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture
Suzanne Lettieri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University and a licensed architect practicing as coprincipal of Jefferson Lettieri Office. Her work tackles a range of scales and links image-culture and related technologies to socially conscious design. At the University of Michigan, Lettieri was a Michigan Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis, where she was the lead instructor for ArcPrep, an immersive pre-college program in Detroit. Additionally, she served as an Assistant Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she initiated the pilot program Inclusive Recruitment Strategies. Her work has been published in Project, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, The Plan Journal, Plat, and Cartha. She has been awarded a MacDowell fellowship and a Graham Foundation grant. Most recently, she has been named a 2022-23 Faculty Fellow in Engaged Scholarship.
Leslie Lok
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Leslie Lok is a cofounder and principal at HANNAH, an interdisciplinary architectural practice based in the U.S. and Germany. HANNAH works on projects at various scales and collaborates on projects and competitions with other emerging young architectural practices in the U.S. and Asia. Allied with computational technology, digital fabrication, and data visualization, Lok's research explores the formation of hybrid architectural typology and of heterogeneous urban morphology. Lok previously taught design studios and digital representation classes at both the graduate and undergraduate level at McGill University. Prior to the founding of HANNAH, Lok practiced architecture at various offices, including Saucier + Perrotte Architectes in Montreal, Pei Partnership in New York City, Santos & Prescott in Boston, and MADA s.p.a.m in Shanghai, among others. Lok received her master of architecture from MIT and bachelor of arts in architecture and studio art from Wellesley College.
Contact: (607) 255-0809
wll36@cornell.edu
Profile
Tom McEnaney
Professor of Comparative Literature
Tom McEnaney received his Ph.D. in comparative literature (Spanish, French, and English) from UC Berkeley. His research interests include the history of media and technology, the novel in the Americas, sound studies, discourse theory, linguistic anthropology, and new media studies. He has published on digital photography’s role in the construction of divided global and national publics in Cuba (La Habana Elegante), and the poetics of play and historiography in Borges and Benjamin (VariacionesBorges). He is also an occasional contributor to the sound studies blog Sounding Out! He is collaborating with Hoyt Long and Richard So at the University of Chicago on a digital humanities project that examines the circulation of poetry and the formation of transnational social networks across the Americas and East Asia (“Literary Networks”). His current book project, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, investigates the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, charting how authors in these countries began to reconceive novel writing as an act of listening.
Contact: (607) 255-4155
tpm88@cornell.edu
Profile
Natalie Melas
Associate Professor of English
Natalie Melas holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature (English, French, Ancient Greek) from the University of California–Berkeley. Her interests range across Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature and thought; modern Greek, modern French, and modern English poetry; comparison, modernism, and colonialism; modern reconfigurations of antiquity, Homer, Césaire, Cavafy; philosophies of time, decadence, barbarism, and Alexandrianism; comparative modernities, world literature in world history, postcolonial or decolonial studies; aesthetics and politics; and critical theory.
Melas is the author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford University Pree, 2007) and coeditor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (Princeton University Press, 2009). Her current research centers on colonial poetics and the politics of time in Aimé Césaire and C. P. Cavafy.
Contact: (607) 255-4155
nam5@cornell.edu
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Liz Muller
Curator of Digital and Media Collections, Cornell Libraries
Liz Muller is curator of digital and media collections and head of archival technical services in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. She curates the Division’s architecture and planning archival collections, historical media, and digital material, and she coordinates the description of archival collections. She has written, presented, and taught on archival theory and visual media. She currently serves on the editorial committee for the Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive (SAHARA). She holds an A.B. in history from Princeton University, M.A. in the history of architecture and urbanism from Cornell University, and M.S. in library and information science from the University of Illinois.
Caroline O'Donnell
Edgar A. Tafel Professor of Architecture and director of the M.Arch. program
Caroline O'Donnell teaches a range of design and theory at both graduate and undergraduate levels in the Department of Architecture. She is the founding principal of CODA, an award-winning design office committed to the generation of form through analysis of context – visible and invisible, material, and energetic. Recent projects include the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program pavilion in New York City; a grill pavilion for Stuttgart, Germany; and a housing development in Dublin, Ireland. O'Donnell is the faculty editor of the Cornell Journal of Architecture and her writing has been published in several publications including Log, MAP, Thresholds, and Pidgin. O’Donnell received her B.Arch. from the Manchester School of Architecture, England, and her M.Arch II at Princeton University.
Contact: (607) 255-4579
cao53@cornell.edu
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Karen Pinkus
Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is author of numerous works on Italian culture, film, architecture, and literary theory. Beginning in 2005, she has been one of the pioneers in the field of environmental humanities/climate change. Among her publications are Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), "Crystalline Basement," (e-flux, with artist Hans Baumann), and the forthcoming book Subsurface. For the Mellon Design Justice Workshop, she is especially interested in guiding students to think critically and speculatively about the right to the city, the politics of the archive, and the scale of climate justice. Pinkus has been a mentor to students of literature, cinema and media, architecture, studio art, anthropology, and environmental studies.
Katherine Reagan
Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Cornell Libraries
Katherine Reagan is assistant director for collections and Ernest L. Stern Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Prior to her arrival at Cornell in 1996, she worked at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Her degrees are from U.C Berkeley (B.A., 1989) and from Columbia University (M.A., 1992). She is a past president of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association, and she teaches book history for Cornell’s Department of English and for Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
Contact: (607) 255-3530
kr33@cornell.edu
Riché Richardson
Professor, Africana Studies and Research Center
Riché Richardson is a professor of African American literature in Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center. In 2001, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her interviews have been highlighted in news media such as NBC's The Today Show and Nightly News, CNN, Al Jazeera's Newshour, and the New York Times. Her Op-Eds have appeared in the New York Times, Public Books, and Huff Post. She has published nearly 40 essays in journals and edited collections. Her first book, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), was highlighted by Choice Books among the "Outstanding Academic Titles of 2008." Her new book, Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body, was published in 2021 by Duke University Press. She is the editor of the New Southern Studies book series at the University of Georgia Press. She is also a visual artist.
Contact: rdr83@cornell.edu
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Oya Rieger
Associate University Librarian, Cornell Libraries
Oya Y. Rieger oversees the Library’s digitization, online repository, digital preservation, electronic publishing, and e-scholarship initiatives with a focus on needs assessment, requirements analysis, business modeling, web design, and information policy development. She has provided leadership in various digital collection and online publishing initiatives that explore and promote new models of scholarly communication. She is the coauthor of the award-winning Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives (Research Libraries Group 2000). She has served on several digital imaging and preservation working groups, and authored reports about the preservation and sustainability challenges associated with web-based scholarly content. Her doctoral research explored how information and communication technologies are being perceived as "productivity tools" and "objects of study" by the humanities scholars. She has a B.S. in economics, an M.P.A., and an M.S. in information systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University, Department of Communication, Human-Computer Interaction. Her research interests focus on sociocultural aspects of information and communication technologies.
Contact: (607) 254-5160
oyr1@cornell.edu
Noliwe Rooks
Associate Professor in Africana Studies
An interdisciplinary scholar, Rooks works on the racial implications of beauty, fashion, and adornment; racial inequality in education; race, migration, and urbanization; and Black women's studies. Her books include Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women, (19960; Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them, (20040; and White Money/Black Power: The History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education, (2006). She was associate editor of Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris, 1920-1975, and editor of Black Women's Studies: A Reader, (2005).
Contact: (607) 255-4625
nmr67@cornell.edu
Anette Schwarz
Associate Professor, German Studies
Michael Tomlan
Professor of City and Regional Planning
Michael Tomlan is a historic preservation educator who teaches the history of urban development, documentation techniques, problems in contemporary preservation planning practice, and museum planning and development. Tomlan directs the graduate program in Historic Preservation Planning. He assists students in archaeology, architecture, engineering, history, hotel administration, landscape architecture, public affairs, real estate, and urban studies. He works in Cambodia and India, as well as throughout the United States. Tomlan received his B.Arch. from the University of Tennessee, his M.S.H.P. from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Cornell.
Contact: (607) 255-7261
mat4@cornell.edu
Profile
Shawkat Toorawa
Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies
Shawkat M. Toorawa received his B.A., A.M., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His interests are classical and medieval Arabic literature, modern Arabic poetry, the Qur'an, and the Indian Ocean. He is the author of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A ninth-century bookman in Baghdad (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). He is at present preparing a book on the Qur'an's literary imaginary, and a critical edition of an 18th-century Arabic text from India. He has translated Adonis's A Time Between Ashes and Roses: Poems (Syracuse, 2004), and edited The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on islands and islanders (HTT, 2007). His anthology, The City that Never Sleeps: Poems of New York is forthcoming (SUNY, 2014). He is a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow; and an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, an initiative to edit and translate the premodern Arabic literary heritage.
Contact: (607) 255-1330
smt24@cornell.edu
Profile
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Associate Professor, Literatures in English
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. Her work for stage has been featured at National Theatre London.
Amy Villarejo
Professor and Chair of Performing and Media Arts
Amy Villarejo is professor and chair of the Department of Performing and Media Arts, and she also holds an appointment in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She has written widely in cinema and media studies, as well as queer and feminist theory. Her books include Queen Christina (1995), Keyframes: Popular Film and Cultural Studies (2001), Lesbian Rule (2003), Film Studies: The Basics (2007), and Ethereal Queer (2014). Turning her attention to questions of global cinema, she is coauthor of the forthcoming volume Film Studies: A Global Introduction and has written articles on Brazilian cinema and South Asian media culture.
Contact: (607) 254-2700
av45@cornell.edu
Andrew C. Weislogel
Curator of European Art before 1800, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Weislogel, who has been on at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art since 1999, holds a doctorate in Italian and French Renaissance Art from Cornell University. He has curated numerous exhibitions on a wide range of premodern topics, including Etchings by Rembrandt from the Collection of S. William Pelletier; The New and Unknown World: Art, Exploration and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age; and Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940. He also served for ten years as curatorial advisor to the Cornell History of Art Majors' Society, and as organizing curator for the Museum's 2009 presentation of Icons of the Desert: Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya. Weislogel has long experience partnering with faculty and teaching visiting classes, mining the Museum’s collection to enrich curricula in a variety of fields, and has served as an adjunct professor at Syracuse University. He has been a member of Print Council of America since 2004.
Contact: (607) 254-4640
aw27@cornell.edu
Mary N. Woods
Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, Department of Architecture
Both in her teaching and scholarship, Mary N. Woods, an architectural and urban historian, studies how film, photography, and other media shape and mediate our experience and understanding of space and the built environment as well as the design and making of cities and landscapes across time and cultures. Woods's Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment explores tradition and modernity in New York City, the American South, and Miami through different photographic genres. First published in 2009, Penn Press will bring out a paperback edition in spring 2014. Beyond the Architect's Eye received subventions from the Graham Foundation, Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publications, Clarence Stein Institute, AAP, and Cornell architecture. Woods is also the author of From Craft to Profession (1999) and other essays and articles. She has won fellowships from the Buell Center, Fulbright, ACLS, and Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center. Woods has just completed a manuscript on the history of women architects in Delhi and Mumbai from the independence struggle to the present day. And, she is at work on a film and book about cinema halls and the immigrant experience in India and beyond with Delhi film maker Vani Subramanian, a Fulbright fellow at Cornell for 2013-2014. Woods recently served as an advisor for the UNESCO nomination of south Mumbai's Victorian and Art Deco districts as a world heritage site. Her next project is a publication and exhibit on urban ruins in shrinking and exploding cities from the global north and south since the 1960s. Known for her teaching with colleagues from film, information science, Olin Library, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Woods led a seminar at the Johnson Museum with curator Andrew Weislogel where her students curated an exhibit, Projecting Cities, in dialogue with his show Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond. She has organized many other interdisciplinary conferences, lecture series, film programs, and exhibitions at Cornell.
Contact: (607) 255-6416
mnw5@cornell.edu
Steering Committee
Gerald Beasley
Cornell University Librarian
Gerald Beasley was appointed the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University, effective August 1, 2017. He formerly held leadership positions in Canada as vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta (2013–17) and university librarian at Concordia University, Montreal (2008–13). He has also led the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University (2004–08) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture Library (1999–2004). Born and educated in the United Kingdom, Beasley has master's degrees in library studies from University College, London, and in English language and literature from Oxford University.
Contact: (607) 255-3393
Profile
Jessica Levin Martinez
Director, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Jessica Levin Martinez is the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. She is a leading advocate for museum-based interdisciplinary teaching with global collections. Before joining Cornell in 2019, she directed academic and public programs at Harvard Art Museums and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Jessica has taught museum practice and art history at George Washington University, University of Chicago, and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her exhibition Clay—Modeling African Design, co-curated with Suzanne Preston Blier, is at Harvard Art Museums through 2022. She has investigated Nazi-looted artworks in Prague, Czech Republic, and Bratislava, Slovakia, and serves on the African Art Task Force of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University.
Contact: jlm585@cornell.edu
Tim Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Timothy Murray is director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, comoderator of the -empyre-new media listserv, and cocurator of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA. A curator of new media art, and theorist of the digital humanities and arts, he sits on the National Steering Committee of HASTAC, and is currently working on a book, Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008). His books include Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997); Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith; Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed; and Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997). His research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, twentieth-century Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, performance, and English and French early modern studies.
Contact: (607) 255-4086
tcm1@cornell.edu
J. Meejin Yoon
Dean, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
J. Meejin Yoon, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP, is an architect, designer, and educator, whose projects and research investigate the intersections between architecture, technology, and the public realm. Prior to joining the faculty at AAP, Yoon was at MIT for 17 years and served as the head of the Department of Architecture from 2014–18.
Yoon is cofounding principal of Höweler and Yoon Architecture, a studio recognized for design innovation and excellence. Among current projects are the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, the Coolidge Corner Theater expansion, and the MIT Museum. The studio has received numerous professional awards and honors.
Yoon's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the National Art Center in Japan. Publications by Yoon include Expanded Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), Public Works (MAP Book Publishers, 2008), and Absence (Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of Art, 2003).
She received a bachelor of architecture from Cornell AAP and a master of architecture in urban design from Harvard GSD.
Contact: (607) 255-9110
Students
Oliver Aas
Fall 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Born and raised in Estonia, Oliver Aas is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Comparative Literature. Aas has previously studied in the Netherlands, Hungary, and the U.S. An environmental humanist, his project is situated the intersection of anthropogenic climate change and critical theory, suggesting that theoretical interventions have as much to offer in understanding our epochal predicament as natural sciences. He has become especially interested in modes of representation that can help make visible and legible problems that, no matter how harmful and pervasive, unfold unbeknownst to us. For instance, how can we represent things like deep-drilling or complex processes of financialization that thus far have defied our imagination? And if these phenomena, then, were to find “uncovering” in a narrative (or pictorial) form, would it make a difference in our capacity to understand and mitigate climate change? His other thematic interests include theories of modernity and subjectivity, biopolitics, psychoanalysis (especially trauma and mourning), performance theory, infrastructure studies, space and temporality, media theories, critiques of capital, and post-45 literature. In his spare time, he practices yoga, Pilates, and, however poorly, surfing. He also maintains an interest in the Turkish language and studies it when the opportunity arises.
Rejoice Abutsa
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, performing and media arts
Rejoice Abutsa is a writer, curator, film producer, and Ph.D. student in the Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her research focuses on neo-Nollywood films, with attention to how digitality, gender, labor, and transnationality sculpt its industrial dynamics and contact with the global Black diaspora. Abutsa has worked on multiple Nollywood films currently streaming on global platforms and has interviewed some of its top filmmakers, as well as curated Nollywood across diverse regions.
Adrian Aguilera
Spring 2024 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative visual arts
Born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey, Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the US where he settled in Austin, Texas, in late 2000s. He received his B.F.A. in 2004 from The Autonomous University of Nuevo León, México. He is curious about place, presence and perception in affiliation with time, change, and the environment in which we coexist. His work has been exhibited internationally at Artpace San Antonio, The Blanton Museum of Art, The Contemporary Austin, Philbrook Museum of Art, The George Washington Carver Museum, and the Instituto Cultural de México in Paris, France. Aguilera is a founding member of Black Mountain Project, a contemporary art platform that rejects approaches of monolithic paradigms and embodies fugitive practices in pursuit of impossible freedoms. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, Artnet, Art in America, and Glasstire. He currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
Akhila Arakkal
Spring 2020 seminar: M.S.AAD candidate, architecture
Akhila Arakkal 's work prior to Cornell has revolved around studying the distortion caused by the cultural and political systems in cities. She addresses social injustice in the built context by analyzing the indelible imprint left behind by the spatial patterns of exclusion. Her research involved the study of informal settlements and affordable housing projects proliferated in the city of Mumbai. She studied the devastating effects that dilapidation, sprawl, and failed urban environments can have on society and well-being, bringing to light the economic and cultural attributions on architecture.
Aishvarya Arora
Spring 2023 seminar: M.F.A Poetry Candidate
Aishvarya Arora is a poet and arts worker from Queens, New York. Arora is a graduate of Tufts University and spent a year in Delhi, India, on a Fulbright Fellowship studying participatory research methods and learning how to express their emotions in Hindi. From 2021–2022 they were the Poetry Coalition Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. They're currently an M.F.A. candidate in Poetry at Cornell University, where they write about grief, desire, and birds. You can read their work in harana poetry and in the zine To Us and Ours: An Asian American Feminist Collection.
Hannah Bahnmiller
Fall 2016 and spring 2016 seminars: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Hannah Bahnmiller is a first-year masters student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her multidisciplinary undergraduate background at the University of North Dakota in anthropology, geography, and philosophy was further enriched by studying abroad in India for two semesters. These experiences culminated in focus on the spatial elements of inequality and a drive to work with people towards community betterment, especially in an international context. At Cornell, Bahnmiller is pursuing her degree with a concentration in international studies in planning. Her interests focus on the confluence of the processes of institutional governance, citizen participation, and changing economic systems. She hopes to pursue a career in community-centered development which promotes economically viable and democratic communities.
Mackenzie Berry
Spring 2022 seminar: M.F.A. Poetry Candidate
Mackenzie Berry is from Louisville, Kentucky. She is a student in the Department of Literatures in English pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry. Her debut poetry collection Slack Tongue City is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in April 2022. Her poetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, and Blood Orange Review, among others. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Aparajita Bhandari
Spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, communication
Aparajita Bhandari is a third-year Ph.D. student in the department of communication. Her research is broadly focused on the intersections of communication technology, urban space and place, and social identity. Her work seeks to understand how the material, spatial, and infrastructural can be used to understand urban digital communication. She also is interested in questions around community and place-making and the ways that public space is transformed by private companies, especially technology companies.
Hallie Black
Spring 2019 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Hallie Black is a fifth-year B.Arch. thesis student minoring in the Department of German Studies. With a specialization in visual representation in architecture, her work critically engages various geopolitical contexts through drawing and negotiates the spatial implications of xenophobic violence. Digitally collaged drawings of her research on the Mexico-U.S. border are currently on view at Yale School of Architecture’s exhibition Two Sides of the Border and were selected as a finalist for the KRob delineation competition. Her internship with Common Accounts, specializing in postdigital media and representation, capstones her cartographical models of the bureaucratic procedures of military corpse retrieval as a funded Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholar. Under thesis professors Esra Akcan and Val Warke, her undergraduate thesis titled "Burning Up in Flames” analyzes the jingoistic arson attacks of post-1989 Germany and deconstructs the phenomenological and theoretical possibilities of architecture’s symbolic hijacking and innocuous misdirection beyond postmodernism’s topos.
I.T. Blair
Spring 2022 seminar: M.R.P. City and Regional Planning Candidate
I.T. Blair is a Master of Regional Planning candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Blair graduated with a B.A. in Religious Studies from Lewis & Clark College where they focused on religion in the Western United States. Prior to Cornell, they served in AmeriCorps and twice in the United States Peace Corps (Ukraine and Georgia). They have implemented numerous community development grants including projects for UNHCR and PEPFAR. They currently research climate change adaptation planning, concentrating on equitable flood mitigation and coastal climate adaptation.
Maame Boatemaa
Spring 2023 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, city and regional planning
Maame Boatemaa is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research broadly explores urban theory, African philosophy, environmental planning, and land use policies in African cities. As an Albert Gallatin Scholar at New York University, she critically interrogated how urban spaces transform in diverse social, economic, and political settings in Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal. Boatemaa completed her graduate studies at the London School of Economics before moving to Seoul as a Henry Luce Scholar. Boatemaa has a puppy named Arrow Kwesi Jnr and enjoys baking in her limited spare time.
Elie Boutros
Fall 2017 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Born and raised in Lebanon, Boutros is currently a fifth-year student in the B.Arch. program, pursuing a concentration in architecture, culture, and society. He has been focusing His studies on challenging architecture's obsession with being apolitical and neutral. Boutros hopes to use architecture as a tool to reveal conflict in all of its forms, enabling its resolution, rather than repressing it with the typical, impotent, "pacifist" approach of denial and unaccountability.
Patrick Braga
Fall 2016 seminar: B.S. URS/B.S./B.A. candidate, city and regional planning, economics, and music
Patrick Braga is a fifth-year undergraduate majoring in urban and regional studies, economics, and music. He was formerly a visiting student at St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford, where he read geography and music. Braga's research has focused on transportation and land use planning as well as histories of urbanism in thought and practice. He is currently working on a book examining bicycling in Boston through the lens of experience and nonprofit community-building. His honors thesis examines the changes in ideologies and practices of urban land use planning in Rio de Janeiro. Braga has managed to bring his interests in urban planning and music together in his forthcoming opera, Eyes That Do Not See, which tells the myth of Prometheus through the architectural theory of Le Corbusier.
Kimiyo Bremer
Spring 2023 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of art and visual studies
Kimiyo Bremer is an artist and scholar from Los Angeles, California. Her work typically explores North American visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, art history, and popular culture. Bremer received her M.A. in Arts Politics from New York University's Art and Public Policy Program and her B.A. in Theater and Performance from Bard College. Bremer has experience in areas including public programming, curation, and visual research.
Martina Broner
Spring 2016 seminar: Ph.D candidate, Hispanic literature and culture
Martina Broner holds a B.A. in visual imaging from the University of Minnesota and M.F.A. degrees from Columbia University (film) and New York University (creative writing in Spanish). She was born to Argentine parents in Caracas, Venezuela. Before coming to Cornell, she worked in the film and television industry. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Hispanic literature and cultures, where her research focuses on intersections between media theory and landscape urbanism in Latin America. She is particularly interested in the notion of nature as media, as well as in the possibility of creative collaboration between human beings and the environment. She is also exploring parallels between media archaeology and historical ecology. As a Mellon Fellow, she will investigate the mediated visuality of the Amazonian landscape to reflect on the ways in which symbolic cartographies interact with material geographies.
Amaris D. Brown
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D candidate, Africana studies
Amaris Brown is a second-year doctoral student in the Africana Studies and Research Center who is from Brooklyn, New York. A 2018 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, she earned her B.A. in African and Afro-American studies and sociology from Brandeis University, where she completed a thesis titled "A Taste of Blue Sky: Black Women Writing the Speculative in American Fiction." Her current research is situated at the intersection of narrative theory, literary and visual studies, and black feminism. Examining the relationships between and among the body, captivity, gender, sexuality, and time in African diasporic literary and visual culture, her work reads across textual performances of black queer life in the U.S. South and Spanish-speaking Caribbean throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Engaging the work of black feminist theorists of the body through the genres of speculative fiction and folklore, she addresses the erotic plurality of black life across time, methods of disciplining the body, and the significance of sensory data to study the social life of black pain and pleasure. Brown's seminar research investigates the sensory approaches through which fugitive bodies develop and utilize spatial knowledge for navigating familiar and unfamiliar geographies
María Bulla
Spring 2024 seminar: D.M.A. candidate, music
María Bulla is a music maker. She creates small handmade objects and oversized scores, makes sounds with a synthesizer, and combines them with texts and field recordings; all this with the hope of creating situations that become part of everyday life, that allow people to experience the extraordinary things of life in a personal way.
Ryan Buyco
Fall 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian literature, religion, and culture
Ryan Buyco is an interdisciplinary scholar and critic who focuses on transpacific imaginaries as they relate to Okinawa, Hawai'i, and the Philippines. His critical interests concern the conceptual possibilities of the ocean as a way of disrupting area studies "land-locked" orientations. His research project empirically and theoretically explores what he terms as the "Uchinanchu Pacific" to conceptualize Okinawan diasporic culture in Hawai’i and the Philippines. Before entering the Ph.D. field of Asian literature, religion, and culture at Cornell, Buyco was a graduate student at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa where he received his M.A. in Asian studies concentrating on Okinawa, Japan, and the Philippines.
Lydia Camel
Spring 2021 seminar: M.L.A. candidate, landscape architecture
Lydia Camel received her B.S. in geography from Michigan State University and worked as a sustainability and community development professional before pursuing an M.L.A. Her research interest is in the role of design and the designer in displacement, particularly through mechanisms of gentrification, exclusion, and erasure. Through historical, psychological, and cross-cultural examinations of gentrification occurrence and diverse analyses of gentrification experience, she hopes to investigate the extent to which the field of design can support and advocate for inclusive environments.
Kimberly J. Cárdenas
Fall 2016 seminar: B.A. candidate, government, Latin, and Latin American studies
Kimberly Cárdenas is a fourth-year undergraduate studying government, Latin, and Latin American studies. She is the daughter of Mexican migrants and grew up in La Puente, California. Cárdenas studied at Sciences Po, Paris, where she investigated issues of multiculturalism and nation in France. She is primarily interested in geographical terrains as sites of contestation and knowledge production that revolve around notions of race, gender, and sexuality — particularly with a focus on diasporic Latinos in the U.S. Cárdenas has worked in Chiapas, Mexico, alongside an indigenous women's rights collective, researching food insecurity and gender. She is currently working on a project launched this past summer in Tucson, on the racialization of Latino immigrant students from Mexico, while studying the historical trajectories of Mexican migrations to the U.S. As a Mellon Fellow, Cárdenas is interested in investigating the concept of Afro-Latinidad as it relates to space, and how race continues to inform the political transformation and foundation of Cuba.
Maria Camila Castro
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, philosophy
Maria Camila is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Philosophy Department. Before coming to Cornell in 2021, she received an M.A. and B.A. in Philosophy from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Currently, her main research interest lies at the intersection between sound and agency, particularly in terms of silence, attention, and listening.
Arpita Chakrabarty
Spring 2023 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative writing
Arpita Chakrabarty is a writer from Calcutta. She is interested in novels, short fiction, poetry, and essays. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a journalist for ten years for different publications including Al Jazeera. As a 2017 journalism fellow for People's Archive of Rural India, she documented trans Himalayan migration. Chakrabarty holds trainings and talks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and technology for women and gender-nonconforming people. She holds an M.A. from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and a B.A. from Calcutta University.
Amrita Chakraborty
Fall 2022 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Amrita Chakraborty is a third-year Ph.D. student in comparative literature. She earned her B.A. in English literature from Hunter College in New York City. In her research, she seeks to entwine transnational and decolonial feminist theories, utopian studies, and queer of color critique to consider alternative futurities within South Asian and Asian diasporic literatures and media. She is a poet and prose writer as well, and her scholarly and creative writing has been published by the Latin American Literary Review, Kajal Magazine, Shade Literary Arts, and others. You can find her work online at amritachakraborty.com.
Derek Chan
Spring 2023 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative writing
Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He holds a First Class Honours in Literary Studies from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. His writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, The Margins, Juked, and elsewhere. Chan has been a finalist for awards by Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. He is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Cornell University, where he is an Editorial Associate for EPOCH and a university fellow.
Akanksha Chauhan
Spring 2018 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Akanksha Chauhan is a graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Prior to moving to New York, she spent seven years training as a professional architect, working in award-winning architecture and urban design practices in New Delhi. This past summer she assisted the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in the production of "The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda" — a visionary new treatise on cities. Chauhan specializes in inclusive cities, foregrounding the role of architecture, planning, and public policy. Her ongoing research interest is in applying phenomenographic methods to rethink public space. She is a proponent of sustainable urban development with a strong emphasis on waterfront revitalization and coastal resilience.
Kate Chen
Spring 2015 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Kate Chen is a second year bachelor of architecture student at Cornell. She currently lives in Dallas, Texas, but has lived in many places during her life, including China, Sweden, and Canada. This spring, Chen will be working as an academic programs intern at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and serving as art director for Thread Magazine, Cornell's student-run fashion editorial.
Michele Cheng
Spring 2022, spring 2023, and spring 2024 seminars: D.M.A. candidate, music
Michele Cheng, a 1.5 generation Taiwanese American, is an interdisciplinary composer intertwining diverse media such as music, experimental theatre, and puppetry to engage with social issues and cultural identities. Her works have been performed at CCRMA (Stanford, U.S.), ICMC (Santiago, CL), ISSTA (IE), SICMF (Seoul, K.R.), Sonorities (Belfast, U.K.), SEAMUS (U.S.), NYCEMF (NYC, U.S.), eavesdropping (London, U.K.), New Music Gathering (Portland, U.S.), Casa Obscura (Montréal, CA), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (Dijon, FR), National Theater and Concert Hall (Taipei, TW), among others. She has received commissions from JACK Studio, National Sawdust, White Snake Project, and I Care If You Listen; grant from New Music USA; and a scholarship from Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is a co-founder of the experimental pop duet Meoark and fff, an interdisciplinary improv collective led by feminist media artists.
Jin Kyung Cho
Fall 2022 seminar: M.S.AAD. candidate, architecture
Jin Kyung Cho is a research-based curator and architect. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea, in 2014. Cho has worked on and organized numerous public projects involving art, architecture, and urbanism. She was a curatorial research and production assistant for the 4th Anyang Public Art Project, titled Public Story (2012-14). From 2016 to 2020, she worked on various projects at New York-based Obra Architects, including serving as lead architect on a multipronged project titled "Perpetual Spring" included in the exhibition Architecture and Heritage: Unearthing Future (2019-20). Cho's independent projects include participation in the exhibition Lotus Land (2017) at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju and Interlude (2017) at Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea in Seoul. She is a 2022 grantee of the Arts Council Korea International Exchange Program. Cho's current research is focused on the development of environmental and ecological art and architecture since the emergence of earth art in the 1960s. She is the inaugural Tony Smith Foundation research 2022 Spring fellow.
Ihwa Choi
Spring 2020 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
From Los Angeles, Ihwa Choi is a fifth-year thesis student in the B.Arch. program with a concentration in visual representation. She is currently exploring drawing methods as an architectural tool to destabilize and question hierarchical particularities by analyzing temporal and narrative confluence and multiplicity. Her interests range widely from illustration, graphic design, animation and more, and share a common exploration in the potentials of indeterminacy to induce experiences and imaginative aberrations to offer interpretive spaces for spectators.
Paige Chung
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, performing and media arts
Paige Chung is a writer and DJ. She is interested in a DJ's use of turntablism to uplift and unite communities. Their project analyzes hip-hop's entanglements with Blackness as a fixed ontological categorical position listening to Triple Edge and Rap Việt. They are writing an article about DJ corporeality, a play about a Vietnamese family during the pandemic, and a book based on Princess Nokia's 1992 album. Born and raised in Los Angeles, but she rolls everywhere. She currently trains at the Beat Junkie Institute of Sound and studies Performing and Media Arts at Cornell. For more: djxmiu.com.
Abram Coetsee
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Abram Coetsee is a South-African born and U.S. raised student in the English Ph.D. program at Cornell University. His research and teaching focus on aesthetics, political confrontation, and public space in early 20th century art. He uses questions of cultural legibility, assimilation and its resistances, and the materialist force of aesthetics to analyze artistic and revolutionary acts under a broader horizon of expressive events. Coetsee holds bachelors' degrees in English and religious studies from University of California–Berkeley, and is a junior fellow at the Berkeley Institute. As a 2015–16 fellow at the New York Council for the Humanities, he looks at methods of archivization and political community in a project on contemporary graffiti in New York City.
Hannah Cole
Fall 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Hannah Cole is a third-year Ph.D. student in comparative literature. Her research applies an environmental humanities approach to colonial Caribbean literature. She received her B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University.
Adriana Contarino
Fall 2021 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Adriana Contarino Henry is a thesis student investigating the role of architecture in promoting healthy, equitable public spaces that are accessible to all. Her research at Cornell AAP has focused on design that engages the community through public health and sensitive attention to diverse focus groups. Adriana's work includes the design of a vocational school for the Autism Spectrum Disorder community in New York City, an Alternative Health Hub in San Francisco, and a Community Center in South L.A. She has worked with MASS Design Group to practice these lessons on the ground in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and has coupled this with the knowledge gained from her Engaged Cornell certification.
Sean Cosgrove
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history
Sean Cosgrove is a cultural and urban historian of the modern United States in his second year of the history Ph.D. program at Cornell University. Before starting at Cornell, Cosgrove received his B.A. in English literature and history from the University of Sydney, and a M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago. His current research project seeks to understand the relationship between unusual forms of everyday violence that emerged in late 19th-century America and conceptions of the human body, gender and sexuality, and urban spaces.
Kevin Cruz
Spring 2018 seminar: B.F.A./B.A. candidate, fine arts and American studies
Kevin Cruz is a fifth-year, concurrent degree undergraduate studying fine arts and American studies, with a minor in Latina/o studies. Born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, Cruz was raised in Los Angeles, California. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Cruz studies Chicana/o poster production during the 1970s and 1980s, and the ways Chicana/o posters interrogate American mainstream perceptions of undocumented communities while proposing counter-narratives. In the spring of 2017, Cruz's senior thesis, "Driving Aztlán," received the history department's Bernard E. West award for most promising undergraduate research in American history. In his senior thesis, Cruz traces the mythopoetic concept of Aztlán in late 20th-century Chicana/o discourse, proposes the work of artist Chicano artist Gilbert "Magú" Luján as visually and theoretically mobilizing Aztlán, and concludes with an analysis of Aztlán invoked in the work of Chicagoan artist Francisco Mendoza. Cruz is interested in the role of Chicana/o artists as theoreticians, and the possibilities of artworks as discursive spaces. As an artist, Cruz uses silkscreening as a process to trouble Eurocentric notions of the singular work of art. His work is driven by the possibilities posters provide for consciousness-raising and empowerment.
Ariel Dela Cruz
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, performing and media arts
Ariel Dela Cruz (they/he/siya) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Their doctoral research examines how Filipinx tomboys engage in and reimagine care work across the Filipinx labour diaspora. They are particularly interested in how tomboys utilize performance to negotiate, mess with, and refuse the violences of empire. They hold a BSc with Honours in Neuroscience and Psychology and a M.A. in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, and their doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship.
Travis Duprey
Spring 2015 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative writing
Travis Duprey received a Certificate of Completion in Journalism from Paradise Valley Community College in 2011 and a B.S. in Justice Studies from Arizona State University in 2012. His research interests include contemporary lyric poetry, digital and process-based poetics, the materiality of texts and surfaces, and poetics as critical exegesis/new critical methodologies.
Ehab Ebeid
Fall 2015 seminar: B.S. candidate, city and regional planning
Ehab Ebeid is a second-year student studying urban and regional studies. A native of Giza, Egypt, he has also lived and studied in Montreal and Hong Kong. Ebeid is interested in contemporary downtown Cairo, in the persistence of a ‘Paris along the Nile’ or 'Paris of the East' trope, and a narrative of social decline constructed around this colonial district. These, in turn, inform the quarter’s ongoing restoration efforts and nascent artistic scene.
Kaitlin Emmanuel
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, art history
Kaitlin Emmanuel holds a B.A. in art history from the University of California–Berkeley (2011) and aanM.A. in Asian studies from Cornell University (2017). Her work draws on postcolonial theory, cosmopolitanism, and comparative modernities to examine how socio-political legacies condition art making, particularly in studies of global modernism, nationalism, and the subaltern. As she enters the Ph.D. program in art history at Cornell, she extends this analysis to her experience working with and researching the Sri Lanka avant-garde, and her identity as a first-generation Sri Lankan-American. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked in various curatorial and editorial positions for cultural organizations, including Raking Leaves (Colombo), Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design (Jaffna), Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), and Musée du Louvre (Paris), among others.
Emily Celeste Vazquez Enriquez
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Romance studies
Emily Celeste Vazquez Enriquez holds a licenciatura in Hispanic literature from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico, and an M.A. in Spanish with specialization in Latin American literature from the University of Texas at El Paso. Focused on the fields of border and migration studies, in her research she analyzes the social and discursive intersections between speculation and environment. Particularly, she is interested in studying speculative border fiction depicting the built and natural environments of the Guatemala-Mexico and Mexico-U.S. borderlands.
Katryn Evinson
Spring 2016 seminar: Ph.D.candidate, romance studies
Katryn Evinson is a second-year Ph.D. student in romance studies at Cornell. She holds a licenciatura in humanities with a concentration in philosophy from Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, Spain (2009); and a M.A. in aesthetics and contemporary art theory from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2013), where she completed a thesis titled "Failure as an Aporia: The Politics of a 'Disobedient Structure.'" Evinson's interests revolve around questions found in the intersection between aesthetics and politics, mainly within debates raised in post-structural theory, autonomism, and feminist theory. More specifically, Evinson works on forms of political subjectivation in 20th- and 21st-century Latin American and Spanish peninsular literature; she is mostly drawn to forms that essay ways for challenging the logics of representation in thinking of subjectivity. Evinson's project as a Mellon Fellow will focus on the tension between hospitality and community in Horacio Quiroga's short stories set in the Amazon rainforest.
Xiaoyang Fang
Spring 2016 seminar: M.Arch.II candidate, architecture
After five years of architecture study in Zhejiang University, China; a semester's exchange study in ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; and an internship in the LYCS Architecture office, Fang continues his graduate study at Cornell AAP for a post-professional degree in architecture. With the fellowship awarded from Zhejiang University and MAD Architecture Office, Fang travelled around Europe and Japan, and discovered interests in amorphous agencies in oriental modernism; morphology evolution of rural settlements in China after globalization and capitalization; and ecological landscape urbanism in postindustrial time — rethinking of cities after the third front movement. As the founder of AMorphous Group and MON Magazine, a student-run magazine in Zhejiang University, Fang is exploring the possibilities in other territories with colleagues from Harvard and Columbia universities, extending his academic interests and thinkings.
Alia Fierro
Spring 2016 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Alia Fierro is a graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. In 2013 she received her B.A. in Latin American studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with three minors in urban planning, Latina/o studies, and Brazilian and Portuguese studies. Fierro explores issues of equity, resource allocation, bottom-up/grassroots planning, and community empowerment through economic initiatives that promote community self-sufficiency, especially in Latin America and communities of color in the U.S. Her work at Cornell has also taken her to Chiapas, Mexico, where she worked on climate change mitigation and disaster risk management in indigenous communities alongside nonprofit organizations and the United Nations Development Programme. This work sparked her interest in how modern urban processes are affecting indigenous communities and their livelihoods throughout Latin America.
Lara Fresko
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of art, archaeology, and visual studies
Lara Fresko's work considers contemporary art as a site of the sublime and spectral reverberations of national, ideological, violent, and traumatic histories. Particularly, her work focuses on contemporary art from Turkey produced between 1990–2015 and its source materials in the long 20th century. Drawing from heterodox art historians such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin and in dialogue with theories of aesthetics and representation, psychoanalytic theories, and memory studies, her project engages contemporary art in its mediation of socio-political and historical processes.
Federico Giordano Perla
Fall 2022 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, romance studies
Federico Giordano Perla is a Ph.D. candidate in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell. He received a B.A. in Literature from the Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), with an emphasis on English Literature and Classical Latin. He formed part of the organizing committees of several events in the literary community of his native Uruguay, including the festival Ya Te Conté: Narrativas recientes rioplatenses. Currently, his research focuses on shipwrecks and castaway narratives in conjunction with the apocalypse in Latin America and the world. In 2015, he published the collection of short-stories titled Señal/Ruido.
Gina Goico
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, performing and media arts
Gina Goico is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar. Their work navigates Dominican identity, rebellions, and resistance. They have a diverse body of work ranging from embroidery to installations, paintings, and performance. Goico was a Van Lier Fellow and artist-in-residence with Smack Mellon. They also participated in the AIM fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Laundromat Project, and were a CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Fellow. Goico holds an A.A.S. in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavon, a B.F.A. in Fine Arts from Parsons and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU.
Anamika Goyal
Fall 2014 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Anamika Goyal received her B.S. in biology from Duke University in 2011, and is currently working towards her master of architecture at Cornell University. Her interests include public interest design and studying issues of urbanism in Africa and Asia. She has experience with public installation art, with a focus in metals and mosaic tile. Most recently, she completed an internship in Sierra Leone looking at education and its relationship to other urban systems. From her background in the medical sciences, Goyal brings an interest in the intersection of networks to create larger systems. She uses her understanding of protein biology to better understand the relationships between urban, political, and economic systems across the globe. Her medical background has also put the user experience at the forefront of her design process. She is interested in combining this with more historical knowledge and design projects in new, sometimes challenging contexts to continue studying global systems and issues of urbanism at various scales.
Delilah Griswold
Spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, development sociology
Delilah Griswold is a Ph.D. Candidate in development sociology. She is broadly interested in the spatial reverberations of climate change politics as they occur through comingled processes of land occupation, state formation, and collective action. Her dissertation centers on multi-modal ethnography to understand how current practices of climate adaptation inflect historic patterns of struggle and present efforts for livelihood autonomy and access to urban space in Suva, Fiji. This work builds from her interdisciplinary training in social and environmental science, land use law and policy, and the anthropology of Oceania.
Xinyu Guan
Fall 2018 seminar: Ph.D candidate, anthropology
Xinyu Guan is a second-year Ph.D. student in anthropology. He is interested in discourses of middle-class homeownership, state-society relations, and anxieties about high-rise "killer litter" in postcolonial Asian cities, with a specific focus on Singapore and Hong Kong. As a Mellon Fellow, Guan wishes to explore opportunities for multimodal, collaborative ways of reformulating concepts of power, discipline, and politics in postsocialist and/or neoliberalizing Asian cities.
Prior to joining Cornell, Guan completed a master's degree in urban studies at University College London, where he wrote his thesis on the history of a radical housing project in 1970s Hamburg, seeking to challenge patriarchal nuclear-family norms by integrating families and single people in multi-family apartments. Guan also holds a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University.
Aslihan Gunhan
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, History of Architecture and Urban Development program
Aslihan Gunhan is a first year Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program. Prior to Cornell, Gunhan was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and worked at MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design. She received her B.Arch. with minor in city planning and M.Arch. from Middle East Technical University Department of Architecture in Turkey. Her studies focus on the narratives of modernity through museums. She aims to work on the term “museum landscape” as a means to understand and critically dismantle the narratives of identity, constructed during the formation of nation states along the coasts of the Aegean Sea. Her research projects aim to be situated at a critical juncture between architecture, political geography, and the postcolonial discourse. The Mellon Collaborative Seminar will provide a rich medium for her research project, and an interdisciplinary arena where architectural research will meet with museum studies and humanities discourse.
Lauren van Haaften-Schick
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of art
Lauren van Haaften-Schick's research considers the legal-juridical history of art, with a focus on philosophical and legal provocations in conceptual art and institutional critique. Current subjects include the work of Seth Siegelaub, artists' contracts, critical forms of circulation including artists' books and media interventions, and artists' labor, moral, and property rights. Recent exhibitions include Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures, at The Center for Book Arts, New York; Albright College, Pennsylvania; Smith College, Massachusetts; and others (2012-14): and Non-Participation, at The Luminary, Missouri; and The Art League Houston, Texas (2014-15). Recent presentations and publications include: "The Artists' Resale Right," at the Artists Space Books and Talks, New York; "What Now? The Politics of Listening," at Art in General and the Vera List Center, New York; a presentation at the Law, Culture, and the Humanities conference at Georgetown University Law Centre; "Gauging the Gray Area" (with Helena Keeffe) for "Valuing Labor in the Arts" at the Arts Research Center, University of California–Berkeley; "Seth Siegelaub's Agreement as Critical Circulation" for "Living Labor, Marxism and Performance Studies," at New York University; lectures at Bureau Publik and Rum46, Denmark, for the series "Making Social Realities with Books"; and "Cariou v. Prince: Toward a Theory of Aesthetic-Judicial Judgments" (with Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento) in the Texas A&M Law Review. In 2012 she was the curator in residence for the Art & Law Program, New York. She has worked as a curator, gallerist, archivist, researcher, and grantmaker since receiving her B.A. in studio arts and art history from Hampshire College in 2006.
Re’ee Hagay
Spring 2020 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Near Eastern studies
Re'ee Hagay is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Hagay is the grandson of immigrants from Baghdad, Beirut, and the Atlas Mountains. He received his B.A. in sociology and anthropology and M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Tel Aviv University. In the dissertation thesis he is shaping here at Cornell, he develops a critical perspective on modern nationalism through an ethnographic and archival inquiry into the connections between sound, memory, and exile in Mizrahi Jewish culture in Israel/Palestine. He is interested, moreover, in the political conditions of knowledge production as rooted in the tension between official and independent archives. Hagay has presented his work in academic conferences worldwide, and was awarded grants from Cornell Jewish Studies, The Jonathan Shapira Foundations, The Mellon Foundation, and more.
Joséphine Haillot
Fall 2022 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, romance studies
Joséphine Haillot is a second-year doctoral student in Romance Studies at Cornell University. Before beginning her Ph.D., she received an M.A. in Art History and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where her thesis focused on multi-media concepts in the oeuvre of filmmaker and editor Lauro Venturi. She was an invited researcher at the Cinémathèque française between 2019 and 2021. Her current research focuses on representations of working-class life and class consciousnesses in French film and literature after 1989 — drawing on intellectual history, media theory, and psychoanalysis to investigate the cultural residues of posthistoire from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the crisis of neoliberalism and the "end of the End of History."
Gabriel Halili
Fall 2014 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Gabriel Halili is a Filipino architect who received his B.S. in architecture at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines. He is interested in understanding cities through different lenses including architecture, urban planning, politics, social media, and technology and their application in the Southeast Asian context. His experiences in metro Manila as both a resident and an architect led him to pursue a master of regional planning degree at Cornell University. Coming into the program he brings with him questions related to informality and the role of planners and architects in the cities of the Global South. As a graduate student in the program, his interests broadened to include politics, social media, and technology as lenses to understand cities and their formation. Currently, Halili’s research is on the relationship between social media and placemaking. He is looking into how practitioners are using technology and social media as tools to create urban spaces that better reflect the needs of the public.
Juan Harmon
Spring 2022 seminar: M.F.A. Creative Writing Candidate
Juan Harmon holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is interested in revitalizing the Nanticoke language linguistically and/or creatively.
Olivia Haynie
Spring 2020 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Olivia Haynie is a fifth-year bachelor of architecture student currently focusing on the evolution and layering of the urban environment over time. With a specialization in visual representation merging digital and manual techniques, her current thesis explores the spatial evolution of cities with a focus on ground formation. She is interested in spatial theory and its implications beyond the realm of architecture, including fashion, exhibition, furniture design, and large-scale painting. Bridging disciplines, her work has focused on informality and adaptive architecture, mass customization in housing, movement and dance notation, utopian architectural visions, and anthropological studies into space, ritual, and vernacular logic.
Bryeson Henry
Fall 2021 seminar: B.A. candidate, Africana studies and English
Bryeson C. Henry is a a senior undergradute student double majoring in Africana Studies and English with a concentration in African American literature, and a minor in Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies. Born in Rochester, New York he first became interested in African American literature and Black Studies in middle school after reading Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Upon graduation, Bryeson intends to pursue a doctoral degree in English, researching decoloniality and postcolonialism theories present in 17th- and 18th-century African American literature. In his free time, he enjoys reading Audre Lorde poetry, practicing guitar and piano, and hiking.
Salvador Herrera
Spring 2018 seminar: B.A. candidate, English
Salvador Herrera is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English literature with a minor in Latina/o studies. Born and raised in Chicago, his research interests include depictions of violence in transnational Latina/o literature, and theories of consciousness, identity, and spatiality. He looks to literary representations as a medium for freezing time and critically exploring space, or, as an in-between space of cultural communication, negotiation, and enunciation through imagination. He is developing a theory of simulative reading for his honors thesis, in which the reading experience can be cognitively tailored to induce social change. He plans to prove this with the deployment of text world theory, geocriticism, and effective narratology as powerful analytical tools in contemporary literary studies.
Labib Hossain
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of architecture and urban development
Labib Hossain is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program. Prior to Cornell, Hossain graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with an M.S. in architecture under the supervision of Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur. He received his B.Arch. and M.Arch. from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in Bangladesh. His studies focus on the traditional practices (muslin weaving) in monsoon landscape that can offer an alternative reading of human habitation, one that challenges the dry/permanent ground and serves to open a new imagination that shifts us from a divided landscape of contained waters to a "ground of wetness." The idea of dwelling derived from weaving questions the rigid dichotomy, as it is detached and rooted at the same time. The Migration and Discrimination seminar will provide a rich medium for his research project, and give him an understanding of the complex phenomenon of displacement which will be essential for his Ph.D. research.
Junting Huang
Fall 2018 and fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Junting Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. His academic interests include literary studies, film/media studies, and sound studies. His dissertation project examines the “noise” practices in contemporary Chinese literature and new media — by conceptualizing “noise” as an unstructured, extraneous, and erroneous force that indexes the evolving social relations, it examines how the Chinese noise scene in the past two decades has developed into a countermovement to the North American and French concretism (concrete art, concrete poetry, and musique concrète). As a Mellon Fellow, he hopes to develop projects regarding the relationship between field recording, acoustic territory, and urban noise.
Leanna Humphrey
Spring 2020 seminar: M.S.AAD candidate, architecture
Leanna Humphrey is currently pursuing a post-professional master's of architecture degree at Cornell University, specializing in topics of representation. She is interested in rethinking current models of architectural practice and pedagogies, in particular through multi-disciplinary approaches and connections with emerging technologies. Her past experience ranges from roles as a project manager and architect to public interest research and design education. She received her bachelor of architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where her thesis work experimented with questions of spatial inhabitation through scenographic models and drawings.
Roberto Ibanez Ricouz
Spring 2022 seminar: Ph.D. Romance Studies Spanish Candidate
Before joining the Romance Studies Department at Cornell as a Ph.D. student, Roberto received a B.A. in Hispanic Linguistic and Literatures from Catholic University, Chile, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish from the New York University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, music, and performance in relation with the space and the city. He has published the poetry book Tres Historias (Three Stories, Cástor y Pólux Ediciones, 2020).
Khadija Jallow
Spring 2024 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, information science
Khadija Jallow is a first-year Information Science Ph.D student from Staten Island, New York. She earned her B.A. in Africana and Computer Science from Pomona College where she completed a thesis titled "Revolutionary Framings of Technology: Creating Techno Radical Futures." Her interdisciplinary undergraduate background has provided her with a unique perspective at the intersection of technology and the Black radical tradition. Her current research broadly seeks to critically analyze emerging technologies and explore ways of studying and creating liberatory/abolitionist technologies.
Lauren Jasper
Fall 2022 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Lauren Jasper is a rising fourth-year B.Arch. student minoring in Design and Environmental Analysis. She is excited to participate in the Design Justice workshop because it provides an aspect of design that she believes is missing from a lot of architecture courses at Cornell — human-centered solutions that are intended to enact change. She is interested in researching systemic oppression's relationship with architecture and how we, as designers, can create solutions. As one of the few Black students in the Department of Architecture, it's exciting to engage in a course that deals so heavily with topics that are important to her.
Marsha Jean-Charles
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Marsha Jean-Charles is interested in transnational literary studies of black women's bildungsroman and immigration novels. She endeavors to research the cosmologies and revolutionary politics aroused from forced migration and statelessness. A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her undergraduate thesis, titled "Of Griottes & Pantomimes," is a work elucidating the place of Black feminisms in the novels of Edwidge Danticat. In her master's thesis, titled "Embodying Goddesses: Edwidge Danticat's Literary Revolution," she mixes historical narratives and two of Danticat's short stories to include the voices of revolutionary women in Haiti's war for independence. An organizer at her core, she wishes to fuse her academic work with her activist work and expand understandings of the uses of literary and performance art as tools for activism. Jean-Charles has a B.A. from Wesleyan University (2011), and an M.A. from Columbia University (2014).
Lauryn Jones
Spring 2023 and spring 2024 seminars: Ph.D. candidate, literatures in english
Lauryn Jones is a second-year Ph.D. student in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Southern California with a minor in songwriting. Her research sits at the intersection of literary studies, Black studies, and musicology, though her research interests include affect theory and sound studies. Currently, she works on critically analyzing how Black affect, particularly Black joy, is represented in the contemporary American literary tradition and American popular music. While she has a background in hip-hop studies, Jones's current focus is on the folk/country renaissance emerging in the contemporary American popular music scene.
Jabari Jordan-Walker
Fall 2016 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Jabari Jordan-Walker is a first-year master's student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Jordan-Walker's academic background began within the framework of art criticism and theory. He holds a B.F.A. in critical and cultural studies from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. Jordan-Walker's focus on public art and architecture cumulated into a meditation on institutional critique and mutations of public/private space through the 21st century. In the face of the economic boom stimulated by the 2010 Winter Olympics, his artwork and writing took on the city's increasing lack of affordable housing. During his residence in Vancouver — a city that acknowledges it sits on unceded Coast Salish land — Jordan-Walker was exposed to the disproportionate challenges First Nations people face while attempting to invest in Vancouver's ever-changing urban identity. This experience has him questioning the differences in how governments are addressing the refugee and internal houselessness crisis', respectively. His research interests at Cornell University revolve around an interaction with native urban populations of the Arctic (Inuit) region. More specifically, understanding how strides in self-governance have played a major role in developing holistic and fairer urban societies. Focusing on architecture, vernacularism, and urban geographic research tools, Jordan-Walker asks how to better solidify the infrastructural position of urban aboriginal populations in vulnerable cities such as Nuuk, Greenland.
Aristotelis Kaleris
Fall 2022 seminar: M.S. AAD candidate, architecture
Aristotelis Kaleris was born and raised in Patras, Greece. He has an integrated Master of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens and is currently in the post-professional Master of Advanced Architectural Design at Cornell AAP with scholarships from Cornell AAP and the Fulbright Foundation. His research interest is focused on the interdependence of theory and design and the understanding of architecture as a cultural product. He has taken part in Panhellenic and international competitions in collaboration with fellow architects or offices in Greece and abroad and twice his projects were among the finalists of competitions. He has more than two years of professional experience in Greece. His projects have been published on several sites/e-magazines such as Archisearch, Kataskeves Ktirion GR, and Grad Review.
Nusaibah Khan
Spring 2021 seminar: M.S.AAD candidate, architecture
Nusaibah Khan is a first-year student in the M.S.AAD program, with a focus on urbanism. She holds a bachelor’s in architecture from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT University), India, and has studied at ETH Zurich as an exchange student. She is interested in exploring the role of design as a social and political agent. Her experience of growing up in Kashmir, a contested region, led her to study the impact of politics and urban restructuring on image, identity, and meaning in the public realm in vulnerable areas. Her research interests include exploring the possibilities of alternative design practices, through a participatory approach, to make cities sustainable, resilient, and just.
Shacoya Kidwell
Spring 2022 seminar: Ph.D. Literatures in English
Shacoya Kidwell is a second-year Ph.D. student in Literatures in English, a creative theorist, and a Fulbright alumna researching literature as cultural manifestations at the intersection of Black feminism and environmental thought. She endeavors to study the relationship between adverse atmospheric conditions and oppressive ideologies with specific attention to how Black people inhabit, subvert colonial conceptions of time and space. Her projects, including The Rememory Library, a digital repository of revolutionary materials, examine the entanglements between narrative, the land, flora, and fauna. Her work seeks to remember what has happened here as well as the hidden genealogies and cosmologies that will aid in our collective imagining of just, sustainable futures.
Eun-Jeong Kim
Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of architecture and urban development
Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, one of the key metropolitan cities around the world, Eun-Jeong Kim is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program at Cornell AAP. Her research interests revolve around the histories of postwar architecture and urbanism in East Asia developed through the growing exchanges of people, information, images, technologies, etc., as well as through the relationships and rivalries among Japan, Korea, and China. Exploring the vicissitudes of change in the last half of the 20th century, her research also examines direct or indirect relations between ideas and their representations ingrained in the built environment, which would help uncover the intertwined history of the architectural production and circulation in postwar societies outside of Europe and North America. Eun-Jeong earned a bachelor of architecture from Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea; a master of science in built environment from the Bartlett, University College London; and a master of arts in preservation studies from Boston University with a focus on the history of architecture. Prior to Cornell, she participated in a construction project in Laki Épületszobász ZRt., Hungary, and worked as an assistant researcher in the Architecture and Urban Research Institute (AURI), South Korea.
Marc Kohlbry
Fall 2016 seminar: Ph.D candidate, comparative literature
Marc Kohlbry is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature. Prior to Cornell, he received his M.A. in French from New York University in Paris and his B.A. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. His current research project investigates the notion of literary production, specifically by analyzing the linguistic and communicative relationships between forms of experimental fiction and 20th-century capitalism. As a Mellon Fellow, he will consider the particularities of cultural and economic production in 20th-century Cuba, and by extension, the literary production of Cuban authors living and writing in exile during that time.
Esther Kondo Heller
Spring 2022 seminar: M.F.A. Poetry Candidate
Esther Kondo Heller (they/she) is a poet, writer, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, and Ledbury Critic. Her films have been screened at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Visible Poetry Project, and her latest film MU/T/T/ER has been selected as part of the Forum Expanded programme at the Berlinale 2022. She is currently doing an M.F.A. in Poetry at Cornell University.
Minjae Koo
Spring 2022 seminar: M.S.AAD Candidate
Minjae Koo is a first-year student in the M.S.AAD program focusing on discourse. Before joining the master's program at Cornell AAP, he received his Bachelor of Architecture from Korea National University of Arts and worked as an architect in Seoul, South Korea. His research interest lies in exploring ecological architecture and urbanism in forms of design and writing. The topic includes issues on climate change, material logistics, and building and urban systems. He believes writing about architecture is constructing an active form of narratives that expose architects' role towards current societal issues.
Anna Koshcheeva
Spring 2020 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian studies
Anna Koshcheeva researches the visual culture of Laos. Her focus stems from a fascination with the image and global history of the Cold War, and the production of the world-order on the margin. She engages with cultural theories, ideas of temporality, and Buddhist studies. Anna holds an M.A. in Asian Art Histories from Goldsmiths’ College, the University of London, and an M.A. in World Economics from Udmurt State University, Russia. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University.
Eleanor Krause
Fall 2019 seminar: M.S. AAD candidate, architecture
Eleanor Krause carries a bachelor of arts from Middlebury College where she studied architecture and public health. As a graduate student in Cornell’s professional architecture program, her studies have largely focused on the physical, psychological, and phenomenological impacts and potentials of climate change across projective futures. She believes that architecture, being a primary mediator between people and their surroundings, carries an opportunity and responsibility to not only respond to climate change "sustainably" but to radically reconsider the lines we draw between ourselves and the planet. Her master's thesis proposes an architecture that will register, catalyze, and amplify shifting natural systems to bring environmental change to visibility.
Samuel Lagasse
Fall 2017 seminars: Ph.D. candidate, English
Samuel Lagasse is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University. Lagasse earned his B.A. from Kenyon College, where he double-majored in English and religious studies. He works in the interdisciplinary field of diaspora studies, with a focus on Anglophone literature and critical theory. His interests include formations of modernity and modernist aesthetic practices, especially as they relate to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and to the queer intimacies between African, Caribbean, and Asian subjects in diaspora. He is a member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities 2017–18 reading group, Queering the Archive. As a Mellon Urbanism Fellow, Lagasse is interested in tracing the emergence and transformation of critical modernities that cut across the discursive economies of migration and discrimination. His project will undertake a consideration of the ways in which in which formations of modernity "travel" in relation to the symbolic and representational frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as these frameworks concern the figuration and interpellation of South Asian and African subjects in diaspora.
Cedric Lalanne
Fall 2022 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Cedric Lalanne is from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and is currently pursuing a professional Master of Architecture degree. Prior to attending Cornell, he worked at various architecture practices. His motivation to pursue architecture was fueled by the idea that it would allow him to critically think about the spaces we use daily. He has had the opportunity to pursue fashion studies during his time at Cornell, and his current work primarily focuses on the interaction between bodies and architectural space with fashion through an architectural lens.
Angel Langumas
Fall 2022 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Angel Langumas, from Queens, New York, is a fifth-year student studying architecture at Cornell University as the Hunter Rawlings III Presidential Research Scholar. Langumas' research is interdisciplinary, and he was recently named recipient of the 2022 Norman Foster Foundation Award for Shelter Workshop, where he designed shelter solutions alongside international relations for newly impacted Ukrainian refugees. The first in his family to attend university, he has harnessed a passion for enhancing opportunities and spaces that are equitable for underrepresented beings. His education and experience have helped him to be open to learning from others to have impactful designs.
Andy Li
Spring 2024 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative visual arts
Andy N Li is an artist and educator from Chicago, Illinois. Li’s work has been featured at ACRE Projects, the Granoff Center, and the Hyde Park Art Center, among others, and collaborative projects have appeared at places such as AS220, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Li holds a B.A. from Brown University and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in Art at Cornell University.
Astara Light
Fall 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of art and visual studies
Astara Light is a Ph.D. student in the history of art and visual studies department. Her research centers on modern and contemporary Balinese and Indonesian art forms including painting, sculpture, and performance from primarily the 20th and 21st centuries. She looks broadly at curatorial methods and Southeast Asian art. Her research examines religious practices and identities in Bali, as well as the representation of physical movement and dance in visual media. She received an M.A. in art history and visual studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, an M.A. in Southeast Asian studies from the University of California, Riverside, and her B.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Her most recent work includes a focus on how art practices in Bali intersect with national political issues as well as Balinese artists who are exhibiting internationally and in Japan. Light is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays and Foreign Language Area Studies award for language training, and a Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts award for arts education. Light has done several curatorial projects, including at the Legacy Art Gallery in British Columbia and an exhibition titled Posing Japan: Photographs of Kusakabe Kimbei at the California Museum of Photography in 2015.
Mengyao Dina Lin
Spring 2023 seminar: M.S. AAD canddiate, architecture
Mengyao Dina Lin is currently an M.S. AAD candidate at Cornell University, with a focus on representation. She received her B.Arch. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with two minors: Sustainability Studies and Electronic Arts. Despite the architectural design, Lin is also an awarded screenwriter and production designer. Through the lens, Lin's concentration falls on the "rules," philosophy, and life. In between films and architecture, she pursues her unique position in narratives and perspectives.
Victoria Long
Spring 2014 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Victoria Long holds a B.A. in criminology and peace and conflict studies from the University of Toronto. Her academic interests include urban resiliency, communication and visual representation methods in the field of planning, gender and equity, and the broadening of civic engagement across scales and sectors. Long’s passion for urban planning and design stems from prior work experience, which includes policy analysis in the Ontario government where she contributed to efforts with First Nations and government representatives to develop a land use strategy in the far north of Ontario. At the local level, Long collaborated with Toronto residents to launch the Church-Wellesley Neighbourhood Association and increase public engagement in development processes. Most recently, she conducted research for the New York Academy of Medicine’s Older Adults Disaster Preparedness and Response Initiative, which aims to provide better emergency support systems for older adults following Hurricane Sandy. Building upon a personal interest in photography, Long is currently exploring photography’s potential to reveal local, regional, and global processes of identity formation. As a Mellon Fellow, she aims to investigate how the construction of diverse visual narratives can inform and enhance planning methods.
Afifa Ltifi
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Afifa Ltifi is a second year Ph.D. student in Africana studies. She received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in cross-cultural studies from the Higher Institute of Languages of Tunis. She is interested in studying the diasporic condition of Afro-Maghrebeans and the complex processes of their identity formation and "indigenization" in North Africa. In addition to her academic research, she was an occasional writer and a contributor for the OpenDemocracy and Urban Africa's joint project, Cities in Conflict. She also worked as a fixer in the Ghost Boat open investigation project, tracking the disappearance of 243 refugees from Somalia and Eritrea in the Mediterranean. Ghost Boat was ranked as a finalist for the 2016 National Magazine award in the reporting category and 2016 Kurt Schork Memorial Award.
Han Lu
Spring 2022 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Department of Romance Studies (Spanish Track)
Han Lu is a second-year Ph.D. student in Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from Peking University, China. Before coming to Cornell, she worked as Assistant Curator at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, as well as a coordinator at the Shanghai Biennale. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and art, with special interests in the city, space, landscape, and technology.
Jason Ludwig
Spring 2020 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, science and technology
Jason Ludwig is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. His research interests converge around race, slow disaster, and possibilities for a radical politics of science and technology.
Bryan Luu
Spring 2022 seminar: M.R.P. City and Regional Planning Candidate
Bryan is a second-year candidate in the Masters of Regional Planning program at Cornell University. His passion concentrates on promoting housing as a human right, which hones his research on the topics of affordable housing, green design, and resilience planning. Luu is enthusiastic to be involved with future urban acupuncture projects promoting sustainability and equity in underserved communities and to optimize his career and research development as an urban planner.
Mohammed Mansoor
Spring 2019 seminar: M.S. AAD candidate, architecture
An architect with four years’ experience who maintains dual interest in architectural practice and research, Mansoor is currently doing his post-professional master of advanced architectural design at Cornell University and holds a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Mysore in India. After completing his undergraduate degree, he worked under Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA based in Tokyo, Japan, as an architectural designer. While there, he was part of the core team to design the Sydney Modern Project as well as the winning team to design the National Gallery of Budapest in Hungary. He has worked on projects based in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.
Along with his current architectural practice, Mohammed Mansoor and Architects/ MoMa, Mansoor has been actively involved in academia at Studio Sejima / IoA Institut für Architektur in Vienna, Austria; as visiting faculty at the Mysore School of Architecture; and as an assistant professor at Wadiyar Centre for Architecture, Mysore.
Mikail Maqsood
Spring 2020 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Born and raised in Karachi, Mikail Maqsood is a fourth-year student in the B.Arch. program at Cornell. Through this course, he hopes to better understand how globally pervasive urban imaginaries have been constructed and transmitted, and how these learnings can be translated to places that have yet to construct their own in a post-colonial climate. Having exhibited in several group shows in Pakistan, his drawing, painting and music production absorb his academic interests.
Liam Martin
Fall 2016 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Liam Martin is currently a fifth-year B.Arch. student at Cornell University. Martin is interested in public interest design, phenomenology, and the study of soft architectures. He is a cofounder and collaborator at MONK, a student-run design and research initiative based in Ithaca and Paris, dedicated to fostering an intersectional approach within the design process, as well as the investigation and development of architecture's role in geopolitical intervention. He has been involved in the master-planning and construction of not-for-profit education projects in Honduras, collaborated with RICA*studio on the design of a play-therapy garden in Valencia, Spain, and continues to be personally and professionally invested in benevolent design projects at all scales.
Paloma Vianey Martínez
Spring 2020 seminar: M.F.A. candidate
Paloma Vianey Martínez is an artist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She graduated from UT El Paso with a B.A. in art history and minor in painting. As an artist, her focus is on the U.S.-Mexico Border and the abrupt waves of violence in Ciudad Juárez. In 2018, she installed a panoramic painting at one of the U.S.-Mexico International bridges that speaks about the strength of the citizens of Ciudad Juárez. She also has a mural at the General Consulate of Mexico in El Paso. Currently, her goal is to become a public artist with a focus on Ciudad Juárez.
Luis A. Martinez
Spring 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, city and regional planning
Luis A. Martinez's work uses action research and ethnographic methods to understand how and why the brown body has been subjected to an ordering in social space in relation to street-level planning bureaucracies and institutions in New York City. As a Mellon Fellow, Luis will explore representations of the brown body and the aesthetics of displacement, erasure, and resistance in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
Martinez is director of LDR-Lab (Latino Design and Research Lab) and editor in chief of the journal Práctica. Before coming to Cornell, Martinez worked as a practicing architect, designer, and organizer in the city of Chicago. He earned a bachelor of science in architectural studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure D'Architecture de Versailles, France. During his summers, he enjoys visiting his parent’s hometown of Rioverde, San Luis Potosí Mexico.
Anna Mascorella
Spring 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, History of Architecture and Urban Development program
Anna Mascorella received her M.A. in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.A. in art history and philosophy (double major) from Colorado State University. Her work, focused primarily on modern Italy, investigates the relationship between politics, visual culture, and the built environment. As a Mellon Fellow, Mascorella plans to explore representations of the Italian-American communities historically located in Harlem and the South Bronx, as well as their labor and housing histories. This fellowship thus offers her a means to delve into Italian migration and the construction and mediation of Italian-American spaces and places over time, and to consider the political and cultural elements embedded in these processes. The seminar will provide a dynamic approach for her research into these communities and their representations through its comparative, cross-disciplinary lens and collaborative methodological training.
Dyese Matthews
Fall 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, fiber science and apparel design
Dyese Matthews is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design. In her research, Dyese aims to explore embodied experiences of the dressed body, the intersections of dress practices and identity negotiations, Black history and empowerment within the fashion system, and consumer behavior practices related to textiles and apparel.
Dyese earned an M.S. from Iowa State University where her research explored Black women student experiences using fashion to negotiate their Black and activist identities. In relation to this research, she co-curated the Collegiate Fashion and Activism: Black Women’s Styles on the College Campus fashion museum exhibition. Dyese hopes to continually gain knowledge that she can bring back into the Black-owned garment and textile industry to initiate conversations and initiatives on representation and opportunity.
Thom May
Spring 2016 seminar: Ph.D.candidate, English
Thom May was raised and educated in the U.K. He received his undergraduate degree in English and theatre from the University of Warwick, and a master's from the University of Cambridge in 2014 for his thesis on "Hysterical Fiction" written during the transition from the Cold War to the War on Terror. He works on late 20th-century and contemporary literature and drama in the English graduate program at Cornell, and teaches writing in the department. His project as a Mellon Urbanism Fellow will consider colonial figurations of the Amazon in literature and film.
Alexander McGrath
Fall 2014 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
McGrath holds a B.A. in international studies from Loyola University Chicago. A background in international topics and engineering has developed into academic interests around issues of rapidly urbanizing cities in the Global South. In particular, McGrath focuses on Southeast Asia, Vietnamese language, and rural-urban linkages within the food systems of growing cities. Prior to coming to Cornell to pursue a master of regional planning, McGrath gained exposure to nonprofit organizations as a student in Chicago. During that time, McGrath studied at the Loyola Center in Ho Chi Minh City, studying general issues around development in Vietnam, as well as topical courses such as Vietnamese literature and contemporary gender in Vietnamese society. During his stay in Ho Chi Minh City he worked with LIN Center for Community Development to help design new fundraising strategies based on previous nonprofit experience in the U.S. and Haiti. McGrath's current research focuses on peri-urban agriculture in Hanoi around rapidly expanding urban development. He hopes to draw on visual and verbal storytelling as a way to access collective memory and historical context around the individual and community experience of development in Southeast Asia.
Jill Miller
Spring 2018 seminar: M.A. candidate, historic preservation planning
Jill Miller is a first-year M.A. candidate in historic preservation planning. Preservation, to Miller, encompasses her passion for cultural landscapes, eras past, and historic infrastructure. Her recent studies have led her to consider the ways in which society perpetuates our heritage and history within the spaces we create. She graduated from Virginia Tech's Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program in 2017, where she also studied horticulture and urban forestry. Internships with the National Park Service and Forest Service shaped the way she sees the field of preservation and conservation. Miller incorporates aspects of poetry, personal narratives, and storytelling in her approach to design and representation. Upon graduation, she intends to enter public service — with a regional or state agency — and contribute to the future stewardship of community cultural resources. She grew up in the small town of Canton, Connecticut, along the Farmington River.
Joseph Miranda
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Joseph Miranda is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Cornell University. He earned his B.A. in English from George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latinx literature and culture and queer studies. With broader interests in questions of how space constructs and orients identity, his work traverses different theoretical, genre, and physical geographies, to ask what does a decolonial, queer, and Latinx form look like in the novel, film, comics, and performance? As a Mellon fellow, Miranda is hoping to engage with representations of the built environment to question how we conceive of public space as a place of possibility in a moment where the city is being straightened and whitened out due to neoliberal policies that erase and cordon off queer and people of color. Prior to Cornell, Miranda taught high school English in Newark, New Jersey, and was a Teach for America corps member.
Jamie Mitchell
Fall 2018 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Jamie Yun Mitchell received his bachelor of landscape architecture from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2015, and is in his final semester working towards his master of architecture at Cornell University. His multidisciplinary background has become a foundation for his interests in designing architecture that negotiates between the built and natural environment. Specifically, his thesis is focused on creating novel cohabitational architecture that would allow for other species to live amongst humans within the same structures and spaces and redefine the anthropocentric era into one that is biocentric and inclusive for all life.
Recently Mitchell competed on a multidisciplinary team of five Cornell students in the international ULI Hines Student Competition against 130 teams from the best schools in North America. His team won first prize and $50,000 — theirs was the first Cornell team to become a finalist or win in the 16-year history of the competition.
Amir Mohamed
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Amir Mohamed is a Ph.D. student and sociocultural anthropologist interested in urban citizenship, transgression, and the intersection of politics, space, and aesthetics. Before studying at Cornell, Mohamed received his M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago and his dual B.A. in history and anthropology from Monmouth University. His current research, situated in urban Guatemala, investigates how and to what effect residents transform the built environment into a medium for sociopolitical deliberation and critique.
Michael Moynihan
Spring 2018 and fall 2017 seminars: Ph.D. candidate, history of architecture and urban development
Michael Moynihan is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of architecture and urban development. Prior to coming to Cornell, Moynihan worked with the British Council of Architecture, Design, and Fashion; assisted on several projects with a research and educational trust named Bukka; and was an intern at the Denver Art Museum in the Department of Architecture, Design, and Graphics. He received a master's degree in architectural history from University College London and bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. His research explores the forces and dynamics that deny many individuals the right to participate in dictating the quality and organization of everyday life.
Hafsa Noor Muhammad
Fall 2017 and Spring 2019 seminars: M.S. AAD candidate, architecture
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Hafsa Noor Muhammad holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Hunter College of CUNY. Currently in the graduating year of her master of architecture professional degree program at Cornell AAP, she reassesses her education with the vantage point of her personal and professional exposure to cities and their sociopolitical contexts. Her work draws upon urban networks and temporalities as they relate to informality in globalized cities of the developing world. Deeply invested in the politics of urban representation and regeneration, her research centers on urban cartographies of inequality on the global scale.
Christina Nagel
Spring 2023 seminar: M.A. candidate, historic preservation planning
Christina Nagel is a first-year graduate master's student in historic preservation planning at Cornell University. Nagel is Bolivian with a Quechua/Aymara indigenous background which greatly informs her praxis. Nagel is a critical spatial practitioner (preservationist) focused on critical historic preservation and the questions of values, heritage, materiality, architecture, and the built environment intertwined with the politics of spaces and the subaltern subject within those spaces. She is interested in critical and architectural theory, focused on indigenous cosmologies and anti-colonial epistemologies, and is ontologically abolitonist within her practice - using Andean oral histories, storytelling, and philosophy within thinking about conceptions of space, architecture, and preservation. She creates connections and rhizomes to reimagine urban possibilities and vernacular realities that are indigenous and Black futurist, intertwined with the voices of ancestral traditions. Preserved architectural buildings are imbued with collective memories, histories, and politics, and in using cartography, topography, geography, oral history, Nagel looks at decolonizing heritage and preservation. Nagel has a bachelor's degree from SUNY Binghamton University in History focused on Andean Latin America and a master's degree from Syracuse University–Newhouse in Arts Criticism/Journalism focused on Architecture and its intersection with politics.
André Nascimento
Fall 2022 and spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Spanish
André Nascimento is a Ph.D. student of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell. His research interests include radical democracy, populism, political leadership, political philosophy, solidary economy, and protest literature.
Cameron Neuhoff
Spring 2016 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Cameron Neuhoff is currently studying architecture in preparation for life as a practitioner, physically involved in his architectural work. He is the cofounder and president of Building Community, a Cornell student organization that engages the Ithaca community and develops knowledge of craft through building projects at various scales. Underlying this broad agenda of physical participation is a keen interest in understanding the human's relationship with his surrounding environment, natural and artificial.
Sheila Novak
Spring 2024 seminar: M.F.A. candidate, creative visual arts
Sheila Novak (she/they, b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator currently living and working on Gayog̱hó:nǫ́ (New York), Massachusett (Massachusett), and Dakota (Minnesota) land. Currently enrolled at Cornell University, Novak is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Creative Arts. Novak has held the Creative Community Fellowship with National Art Strategies (2018) and has been an artist-in-residence at the Urbano Project (2020), Hennepin County Medical Center (2015–17), and Holden Village (2014). Novak received her B.A. in Studio Art and Environmental Science from St. Olaf College (2012).
Kanyinsola Obayan
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Kányinsọ́lá Ọbáyàn holds dual bachelor's degrees in international relations and global studies, as well as African and African diaspora studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Student at Cornell University, where she is investigating gender, femininity, and sexual politics in southwestern Nigeria. She hopes to use these dynamic conceptualizations as a way to read meaning into the sociopolitical environment of post-independence Nigeria, and imagine alternative possibilities for its future.
Rachel Odhner
Fall 2016 and spring 2016 seminars: Ph.D.candidate, anthropology
Rachel Odhner is a second-year Ph.D. student in the anthropology department at Cornell University. Broadly speaking, she is interested in environmental anthropology, agricultural change and livelihoods, water resource use and management, human-environment relationships, and Latin America. Prior to beginning graduate school, she received her B.A. in cultural anthropology and Latin American studies at the University of Rochester. Experiences living and working in Ecuador and Nicaragua on projects related to food security and rural development left her with many questions about such interventions. These questions led her to graduate school. Her dissertation research explores changing agricultural and water management practices among smallholder farmers in Nicaragua, in the context of climate change adaptation interventions and plans for a major waterway infrastructure project. She will examine how both farmers and development actors negotiate knowledge, value, and notions of place amid a changing environment and sociopolitical landscape. As a Mellon Fellow, Odhner looks forward to further exploring a critical question that lies at the heart of her own research: how competing ontological assumptions about the meaning and significance of the natural world play out in processes of development.
Chijioke Onah
Spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Chijioke Onah holds a combined honors bachelor’s degree in English literature and history from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Before coming to Cornell, he studied at Goethe University of Frankfurt; Utrecht University, Netherlands; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in postcolonial and world literatures in the Department of English. His ongoing research focuses on the emergence of #BringBackOurGirls as global activism that bears witness to Boko Haram terrorism worldwide. He is currently exploring the (bio)politics of waste and disposability in the African diaspora.
Félix Miguel Rosario Ortiz
Fall 2016 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, romance studies
Félix Miguel Rosario Ortiz is a second-year Ph.D. student in romance studies. Prior to Cornell, he received his bachelor's degree in Hispanic studies from the University of Puerto Rico (2013), where he focused on the notion of spectacle in Caribbean literature. His research interests include Latin American existentialism and the poetics of poets who assert the verse — especially the prose to discourse about literary creation. His project as a Mellon Fellow will consider the symbolic metabolization of insularism as an existentialist element along with the triumph of urbanity in Cuban fiction.
Whitten Overby
Spring 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, architecture
Whitten Overby is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture. His dissertation is titled "Dollyscapes," and provides an ethnographic architectural history and theory of spaces owned and inhabited by American country music icon and Christian feminist Dolly Parton. His other research interests include diagrams, televisual feminisms, slasher films, set designs for both aforementioned genres, prisons, affect, and the anthropology of Christianity.
Matías Borg Oviedo
Spring 2016 seminar: Ph.D.candidate, romance studies
Matías Borg Oviedo is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell. He holds a bachelor's degree in modern literature from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, where he focused on contemporary literature from the southern cone. His research interests include the links between aesthetics and politics, modernity, critical theory, and biopolitics in contemporary Latin American literature and film. His current research deals with problems regarding poetics and politics in 20th century art. As part of his Mellon Fellowship, Borg Oviedo intends to explore the industrial exploitation of rubber and forms of resistance and commonality within the context of the Amazon rainforest.
Ana Ozaki
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of architecture and urban development
Ana Ozaki is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Architecture. Her research interests include Brazilian modern architecture; housing; historic preservation; Latin American, postcolonial, and feminist studies; as well as the intersections between architecture and the fields of urban sociology, human geography, and anthropology. Besides writing, Ozaki is interested in the public discussion of social issues central to architecture historiography in the form of exhibitions and public events. Broadly speaking, she is currently working on 20th-century vernacular modernisms, processes of socio-spatial segregation, insurgency, and avant-garde in Latin America.
Marialuisa Palumbo
Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Architect and senior fellow of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of Toronto University, Marialuisa Palumbo has been a member of the Italian National Institute of Architecture (INARCH) in Rome since 2003 where, for more than a decade, she led the institute's programs in advanced studies in architecture, new technologies, and urban ecology. The study of human evolution and footprint, the nexus between nature and technique, and the role of technology to shape the private and public sphere are at the background of her research interests, which focus on architectural theory as a practice of social engagement to question and promote notions of justice, ecology, and democracy. She is the author of New Wombs. Electronic bodies and architectural disorder (Birkhauser, 2000) and Paesaggi Sensibili. Architetture a sostegno della vita (Duepunti, 2012); and the editor of Architettura Produttiva. Principi di progettazione ecologica (Maggioli, 2012) and Fare città nella città(Aracne, 2017). In 2012, she curated reMade in Italy, a final section of the Italian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Through her books, essays, and articles, and curating exhibitions, debates, and workshops, she explores issues related to the urban condition; climate change and ecological footprint; soil sealing and urban renewal strategies; public housing and community building; migrations and citizenship. Overall, the social impact of design and the nexus between polis and politics are at the core of her present research interests. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the History of Architecture and Urban Development program at Cornell.
Ximeng Pan
Spring 2019 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Ximeng Pan is a third-year master of architecture student in Cornell AAP. He lived in Shenzhen, China for nearly 18 years and earned his bachelor of architecture degree at Hunan University. With interest in visual narrative including architectural illustration, film, and paintings, he attended a narrative architecture workshop and started to explore the relationship between text and imaginary, literature, and visual representation. After getting his B.Arch. degree, he continued to study architecture design in the M.Arch. program at Cornell. He was an intern at the Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates New York City office from Jun, 2018 to August 2018, where he worked on the schematic design phase of the Changi Airport Terminal 5 project in Singapore. As a Mellon fellow, he wants to explore the intersection between narration and architectural language.
James Parker
Spring 2024 seminar: D.M.A. candidate, music
James Parker is a sound artist, improviser, and composer based in Ithaca, New York. Parker's work seeks to find small moments of wonder and expand them into evening-length experiences accompanied by light, sound, interaction between humans and technology, and movement, blurring the lines between installation, performance, and composition. He has been a OneBeat Fellow, a Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Can Serrat, and an ASCAP Fellow at the So Percussion Summer Institute. Parker has performed in softball fields, public parks, living rooms, and Carnegie Hall. He is a D.M.A. candidate at Cornell University.
Alex Nik Pasqualini
Spring 2023 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, music and sound studies
Alex Nik Pasqualini is a Ph.D. candidate in Music & Sound Studies, previously earning their bachelor's degree in music at the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Arts at the University of Toronto. Pasqualini's research examines the intersections of popular music, play, activism, humor, and queer community building. Their passion for fostering queer belonging is reflected in the role of Copresident of the LGBTQ Graduate Student Union "QGrads," the Community Engagement Coordinator of Trans Empowerment Programming at Cornell's LGBT Resource Center, a graduate facilitator for the Intergroup Dialogue Project, and as the event coordinator for the Music Graduate Association.
Vinh P. Pham
Fall 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Vinh P. Pham is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish literature from Florida Atlantic University and focuses primarily on postcolonial literature from Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Currently, his project deals with treatments of temporality in novels from both the Spanish 98th generation and French Indochina.
Vinh Pham
Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Vinh Pham is a first-year Ph.D. student in the department of Comparative Literature at Cornell. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish from Florida Atlantic University, where he focused on literary works from the late 19th and early 20th century Spain and Latin America. His interests include; trans-pacific literature, post-colonial theory, comparative colonialism, colonial race-politics, and gender identity in former Asian colonies. His current work deals with the intersections of race and power relations in colonial Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on vernacular texts from French Indochina and the Spanish Philippines. His body of work is seeking to outline the commonalities between these political entities in terms of their geographical nature, as well as similar relations with Western powers, and theorize about how these processes have informed the formation of their national identities and perceptions of modernity.
Rewa Phansalkar
Spring 2021 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Rewa Phansalkar attained a bachelor of architecture in 2017 from the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai, and worked as a project architect and researcher for two years before pursuing a master of regional planning at Cornell AAP. Her undergraduate thesis, Storytelling through Architecture, won the Ethos NASA India Student of the Year trophy for academic excellence, and she later received the John Reps Pioneer award for her master's exit project. Interested in sustainable urban design for climate change and policy and governance for community resilience, her past internships include working with the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell, School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), and Urbz Research Collective based in Dharavi, Mumbai. Having contributed to publications such as Indian Architect and Builder and the Council of Architecture newsletter, she is interested in architectural writing, graphic communication, and spatial and inferential statistics. She believes that contextual research, along with a deep understanding of the place that one plans for, are key components of planning, policy, and design, and aims to pursue a career in international development with focus on coastal adaptation and planning in the wake of climate change.
Jonathan Plass
Fall 2021 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Jonathan Plass is a fifth-year B.Arch. student minoring in the Department of Comparative Literature while competing in the 800m for Cornell's Varsity track and field team. Since 2013, Plass has been working playfully in architecture, design, photography, and English. Plass is an architect, artist, designer, and student who aspires to combine these disciplines to create truly holistic and ecological solutions to the many problems we face today. Plass has worked at architecture firms of all sizes including Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Atkin Olshin Schade, Skidmore, Owings & Merril as well as for the Cornell Journal of Architecture and as a freelance graphic designer. All of Plass's work critically engages context holistically and ecologically, attempting to find the future best fit for the whole. On the track, Plass won an Ivy League title in the 4x800m and has scored at various Ivy League championships.
Chairat Polmuk
Fall 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian literature, religion, and culture
Chairat Polmuk received his B.A. (with honors) and M.A. in Thai literature from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. In 2013, he completed his M.A. in southeast asian studies from Cornell University, writing a thesis on Lao literary modernity and its political implications in the wake of cultural nationalism and anticolonial movements in Southeast Asia. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell with special interests in critical ethnic studies, affect theory, and film studies. As a Mellon Fellow, he proposes to explore emergent counterpublic aesthetics in contemporary Thailand in relation to the country's current political impasse. The project aims to unravel how Thailand's political conflicts during the past decade have paradoxically constituted "the intimate public sphere" in which marginalized subjects are bound to the state through narratives of care, reparation, and, more recently, happiness, and how artists and activists alike have critically responded to such affective politics.
Gilda Posada
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, art history
Gilda Posada is a Xicana cultural worker from southeast Los Angeles. Posada received her A.B. from the University of California–Davis in Chicana/o studies and comparative literature. In 2017, she graduated with a dual M.F.A./M.A. degree from California College of the Arts in the Social Practice program and the Visual and Critical Studies program. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art program at Cornell University. Prior to her graduate work, she served as the curator for Galería de la Raza in San Francisco and assistant director for Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer in Woodland, California. Posada's work explores decolonial theory and its formation through Xicanx Studies, the evolution of Xicanx identity and its visualization through art, and Xicanx art social/public art engagement. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in working from, with, and by the Xicanx community. Posada's projects are invested in decolonial practices that challenge settler-colonial hegemonic patriarchal and heteronormative oppressive structures.
Zachary Price
Spring 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Zachary Price received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and is a Ph.D. student in the English department at Cornell. He is currently the graduate assistant for LGBT Studies, and has been involved in developing a LGBT film series at Cornell with the goal of engaging students on issues surrounding queer cinema. Price focuses on contemporary horror films, with a particular interest in the aesthetics of contagion. His approach to horror is oriented by debates in affect and queer theory. As a Mellon Fellow, he hopes to further explore the link between affect and cinema by looking at the ways urban landscapes are figured in fiction films, asking how cinema can disrupt our affective attachments to "known" spaces.
Ryan Purcell
Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history
Ryan Purcell is a student in the history Ph.D. program at Cornell University. His research is focused on the politics and culture of urban decay in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. This includes issues such as the transformation of urban crime policy, privatization of public services, and urban decay as a catalyst for cultural production. His work on cities and popular culture has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the College Art Association, and Hyperallergic, among other places.
Waishan Qiu
Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, regional science
Trained as an interdisciplinary urban designer and researcher, Waishan Qiu is now pursuing a Ph.D. in regional science at Cornell University. His research interests lie in developing informatics and analytics tools to investigate the dynamic interaction between people and space. Being interested in cybernetics, sensing technology, spatial analysis, and data visualization, he has been involved with various data-driven research projects across the world in places such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the U.S., and China. His research explores the mobility, accessibility, shareability, resilience, and sustainability issues in urban context. Prior to joining Cornell, he worked as a research associate at MIT. He has received several degrees from top universities in China, the UK, and the U.S., including a master of city planning from MIT in 2017, a master of architecture in urban design with distinction from Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London in 2015, and a bachelor of engineering in urban planning from Tongji University in 2013. His previous lab experience includes MIT SENSEable City Lab, MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, MIT Civic Data Design Lab, MIT Samuel Tak Lee Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab, and Evidence for Policy Design at Harvard Kennedy School.
Kevin C. Quin
Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Kevin C. Quin is a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. He holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from DePaul University in journalism, communication, and media; and African and Black diaspora studies. His research interests include African American and LGBT history, political imagination, cultural production, and transnationalism. In 2018, he was awarded the O.N.E. National Gay and Lesbian Archives LGBTQ Research Fellowship at the University of Southern California Libraries. He is the co-coordinator of the Department of English’s Comparative Black Studies Reading Group for the 2018–19 academic year. He previously served as an editorial assistant for Black Perspectives, the leading online platform for public scholarship on global black thought, history, and culture published by the African American Intellectual History Society.
Addison Reine
Spring 2022 seminar: M. Arch. Candidate
"Addie" is a third-year M.Arch. candidate at Cornell AAP. Prior to Cornell, Addie received her B.A. in Biology from Smith College and danced professionally in Minneapolis, MN. Informed by these experiences, her research explores the relationships between the built environment, performance, and community space building through memory and spatial histories. Other interests include understanding architecture as a medium that reflects the social and ecological changes we hope to manifest in our built environments along with how the spaces we create, and the narratives inherent to them, generate and reinforce themselves.
Sushmitta Renganathan
Fall 2022 and spring 2022 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Sushmitta Renganathan is a second-year M.R.P. student with a background in architecture and urban design. The tutelage of eminent architects in cities like Kochi, New York City, Berkeley, Paris, Venice, and Tokyo kindled her passion for socially engaged architecture as a force that could foster sustainability across diverse scales and regions. The nuances of this fact that remain rooted in social and spatial inclusion motivated her to pursue the Regional Planning program. Through her graduate studies, she aspires to reach diverse groups of people and environments. The Design Justice Workshop of 2022 is the second Mellon Fellowship that Renganathan has participated in at Cornell University. Through this opportunity, she hopes to advance her current research on internal displacement in cities.
Jehan L. Roberson
Fall 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, english language and literatures
Jehan L. Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan's work explores text as a site of liberation, place making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her writing has been published in Public Books, Women & Performance, Apogee, ZORA, VICE, and Autostraddle, among other publications. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.
Sonora Rodríguez
Spring 2018 seminar: master of regional planning candidate, city and regional planning
Sonora Rodríguez is a first-year master's student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she has served her community as a local organizer, high school teacher, and a board member for several grassroots nonprofits. In 2016, she received two B.A.s from the University of New Mexico in Chicana and Chicano studies and international studies, and two minors in Spanish and sustainability studies. Her future goals are to pursue a Ph.D. in urban planning and return home to engage in the complex issues that face the Southwest. As a Mellon Fellow, Rodríguez is interested in investigating the historical intersections of race, ethnicity, and class as it relates to the development of urban centers.
Erin Routon
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Erin Routon is a Ph.D. candidate in the anthropology department at Cornell. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Hawaii, Hilo in 2006 and her M.A. in religious studies at the University of California–Riverside in 2013. Her master's research concentrated on migrant material culture and religious aid and activist organizations in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, principally in Southern California and Arizona. Her dissertation research focuses on humanitarian legal aid in immigrant "family" detention facilities, primarily in south Texas. Through this ethnographic project, she is interested in addressing questions concerning gender, emotional labor, on-the-ground counter-conducts, and the management of the complex relationship between the state, for-profit carceral entities, and humanitarian legal aid within the current climate of immigrant detention.
Taru Ruchi
Fall 2014 and spring 2015 seminars: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Taru is an architect from Delhi and holds a B.Arch. from Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics, Jamia Millia Islamia. While working for her undergraduate thesis on the current slum rehabilitation policies in Delhi, Taru became interested in the nature of informal spatial settlement patterns, informality and socioeconomic behavior. Her B.Arch. thesis looked at a slum rehabilitation project based in Delhi. Kathputli Colony, known amongst connoisseurs of folk art for its vibrant culture and artists across the world, was to be rehabilitated to livable towers as a part of a public-private partnership. While exploring the nuances of this project, the injustice and politics of the story left her with multiple questions. She further went on to work with Anangpur Building Centre, exploring sustainable city strategies in the Global South and issues around inclusive decision-making and access to resources. She joined CRP to seek answers to these layered questions. She is currently working on her thesis which looks at pushback mechanisms and the role of civil society against structural violence in the tribal areas of Jharkhand. In spring 2014, she had the opportunity to participate in research which explored planning through a gender lens, looking at structural barriers that privilege or harm certain genders over others. She is also exploring various media, like film and web design, where such issues may be addressed and discussed in a public realm.
India Sada
Spring 2022 seminar: M.F.A. Poetry Candidate
India Sada (she/her), native to Cincinnati, is a second-year M.F.A. in Poetry student and first-year writing instructor. Her current research follows the movements of traditional religious beliefs (such as the Kalunga line, cross, and cosmology) from Africa's Congolese to South Carolina's Gullah. At the nucleus of her coming thesis is the embodiment, memory of, and communion with water. She seeks to braid Audre Lorde's term biomythography into her poetry and other inventions. Her writing is constantly disassembling "missing" and "time" to tell stories on how the erotic (Lorde) and fractured selves (Emezi), of African-Black diasporic folk, traverse parallel and intersecting realms.
Petra Salamah
Fall 2022 seminar: M.S.AAD candidate, architecture
Being a Palestinian who grew up in Jakarta and Amman and is now living in the U.S., Petra Salamah has been exposed to a wide set of perspectives that have shaped who she is as a person. Before coming to Cornell, she studied and worked in Houston, Texas. Since graduation, she has been directly involved in designing affordable housing in Houston. During this time, she has participated in community-centered design charettes that place community leaders in the center of the proposals being presented to investors. Outside of architecture, she is interested in always trying out different cuisines.
Ecem Saricayir
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history of architecture and urban development
Ecem Sarıçayır is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program. She graduated in architecture from Istanbul Technical University and participated in a one- year exchange program at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg. Drawing on methods developed in contemporary artistic practices, she has completed a master's degree in design at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. Proposing a methodology that stems from architectural and artistic practices for reading in between spaces, her thesis examined border spaces of geographies with ongoing conflict through a series of transnational case studies. Working on the intersections of politics, architecture, urban planning, and history, her research interests revolve around urban and public spaces that are marked by conflictual and political claims. By studying these spaces she attempts to read the contemporary city and its struggles, searching for traces of its history in the city-space of today and exploring propositions for its future. The Mellon Seminar provides her with varied transnational case studies in which different cities and conflictual claims intermingle.
Nadia Sasso
Fall 2015 and spring 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Nadia Sasso has a dual B.A. degree in English and sociology from Bucknell University, and an M.A. in American studies with a certification in documentary film from Lehigh University. Her master’s project was a documentary film, Am I: Too African to be American or Too American to be African?, which explores the complex identity formations of young African women living in America and West Africa who identify bi-culturally. It specifically looks at how they wrestle with concepts of race, complexion, gender, and heritage among other issues. Sasso is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University where she will continue to use film and new media to generate qualitative insights into the fusion of U.S. and African experiences, as well as identify the contours of new identity formations among immigrants beyond the first generation. Born in America to parents who emigrated from Sierra Leone, Sasso believes in the potential for collaboration to inspire innovation. She spearheaded the corporate social responsibility initiative at Royal Dynamite so that the company donates an educational care package to children around the world when a t-shirt is purchased from the company. The initiative has led to collaboration with more than 300 organizations in countries across the globe. In 2010 she cofounded Yehri Wi Cry (YWC), an organization that distributes birthing kits in Sierra Leone to increase the successful birth and delivery rates for women. Named among Katie Couric's "Next Generation of Female Leaders," Sasso received the Young African Committed to Excellence Award by Face2Face Africa magazine. She is also the 2013 recipient of the Posse Foundation's Ainslie Alumni Achievement Award where she was honored for her commitment to social responsibility.
Annie Schentag
Spring 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, History of Architecture and Urban Development program
Annie Schentag received a B.A. in art history from Smith College, a master of urban planning from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and an M.A. in the history of architecture and urban development from Cornell University. Her research areas include American urban photography during the industrial era, the depiction of the American Rust Belt through film and popular culture, and contemporary ‘ruin porn’ photography. Schentag is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on a century of industrial images in Buffalo, New York, as well as their distribution, circulation, and appropriations by local, national, and global audiences over time. As a Mellon Fellow, she is looking to delve into research on artist interventions located in Harlem and the South Bronx, drawing comparisons with similar projects occurring in Buffalo’s industrial spaces. She is interested in gaining new digital research techniques and methodologies in this seminar in order to apply them to her interpretation of industrial soundscapes, installations, and events for her dissertation.
Maiko Sein
Fall 2022 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Maiko Sein is a fifth-year Bachelor of Architecture student. She has always had an interest in telling stories through art and writing. As an immigrant, she has noticed how spaces/places can be carried and unpacked. She pursued her study of architecture to understand how the built environment can be a vehicle for storytelling. She is currently exploring the intersections of oral history and architecture.
Blanche Shao
Fall 2018 seminar: B.S. URS candidate, city and regional planning
Blanche Shao is a senior pursuing a degree in urban and regional studies. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to her undergraduate study, she also minors in anthropology, gender studies, and international relations. Her research interests focus on spatial politics and urban informality in cities of the Global South. She is currently doing her honors thesis on land expropriation and home eviction in China. Engaging in both genealogical and intersectional approach, her thesis explores how tensions between the government and the plebeian are manifested through urban space, and investigates the role that informal bureaucratic practices play in the consolidation of state power.
Lama Shehadeh
Spring 2019 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Lama Shehadeh is a Fulbright scholar from Palestine and is currently a second-year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Shehadeh is an architect, studied at the Technion in Haifa, practiced architecture and planning, and recently interned at the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. She is interested in spaces of conflict; in how politics, wars, and colonialism shape the living space; and in how formal and informal planning clash and meet in our private and public spheres. Through her studies, Shehadeh has explored the informal growth of Palestinian localities in Israel under the threat of destruction and the absence of public space, and is currently studying the Israeli water planning system and its environmental and social effects. Also, she likes to sculpt.
Bojan Srbinovski
Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Born and raised in the Republic of Macedonia, Bojan Srbinovski is a graduate student in Cornell’s English department. He also holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University. He writes about 18th- and 19th-century British literature, with a focus on Romanticism. His interests include the novel, the ballad, the urban broadside, aesthetic theory, 19th-century photography, trauma, and the Frankfurt School. His dissertation coordinates a number of central works of Romantic and Victorian literature around the term catastrophe, which belongs both to the language of traumatic collapse and to the language of dramatic upheaval. Srbinovski's project for the Urban Representation Lab absorbs his thinking about catastrophe to make an argument about a different historical and political phenomenon — the renovation of the city of Skopje, Macedonia, under the name “Skopje 2014.” The project traces the emergence of an aesthetic of anticomania as a central tactic of authoritarian nation-building in Macedonia, and the resultant radical transformation of the landscape of the city of Skopje.
Duncan Steele
Fall 2017 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Duncan Steele is currently a third-year B.Arch. student at Cornell University. His work concentrates on the intersection between social policy and architectural design. He believes in drawing as an analytical tool for exposing and unpacking injustices imposed on the subjugated by their environments and is currently researching public space typologies designed to inflict suffering. His background with Ithaca's Building Community and Maximum City, a Toronto organization dedicated to connecting youth with the agency to affect planning policy and development, led to a lifelong investment in design as catalyst for social progress. If architecture is the built form of a society's values, Steele aspires to further one through practice that communicates a popular desire to equitably serve the disadvantaged.
Emiko Stock
Spring 2015 and fall 2014 Seminars: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Before coming to Cornell, Emiko Stock worked as an interpreter-fixer and an anthropologist in Cambodia. She studied at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, and completed a masters in Khmer language and civilization (INALCO, Paris) and in anthropology (Nanterre, Paris X). Her ongoing research questions the notion of elusive identities, with a particular attention to Cham Muslims in Cambodia, using historical and visual anthropology in a multi-sited ethnography. As a Mellon Fellow, Stock wants to pursue her interest in the deconstruction of binarisms, as applied to urban life, and focus on the in-betweens. Looking at interstitial spaces defining the city through their very own absence, she proposes a visual approach (un)settled somewhere between still and motion, between what is there and what is gone, what appears and what is invisible, rendering the very elusiveness of the city itself.
Marsha Taichman
Spring 2021 seminar: Staff, Visual Resources & Public Services Librarian
Marsha Taichman has an MLIS in library science from McGill University, an M.A. in art history from Concordia University, and a B.A. in English literature and literary non-fiction from Hampshire College. She has worked at the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library since 2012, and predominantly with the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning on reference and library instruction. Her research interests include collecting artists’ books and exploring the intersections between libraries, archives, and museums, as well as the information-seeking behaviors of artists in these settings. She has worked on exhibitions in the college and the library and co-organizes Cornell's Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon.
Riana Tan
Fall 2019 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
Riana Tan is a second-year graduate student in the Master of Architecture program at Cornell AAP. Raised in Manila, Philippines, she witnessed firsthand the impact urban design and architecture have in alleviating problems of poverty, informality, and density in developing countries. Prior to pursuing her graduate degree in architecture, she obtained her bachelor of arts in urban design and architecture studies with minors in business and French from New York University (NYU). During her time at NYU, she had the opportunity to study in four of the university’s many academic centers around the world — Paris, Shanghai, London, and New York City — exposing herself to a diverse medley of cultures that influence the way she sees cities today. As part of her undergraduate studies, she conducted researches on various subjects, including the phenomenon of super-tall residential buildings in New York City, urban sprawl and satellite towns in Shanghai, and the adaptive reuse of abandoned churches in London. In her graduate studies in architecture, she is interested in the social and cultural implications that climate, postcolonialism, and economic inequality have on architecture and urban design and how an intersection of these two can create tangible solutions to better the built environment.
Judith Tauber
Fall 2022 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, romance studies
Judith Tauber is a doctoral student in Romance Studies. She has worked on the Red Brigades' interpretation of consensus, the representation of the Other in 1960s-1970s Italian protest music, and Siegfried Kracauer's political considerations behind Theory of Film as revealed by a close reading of his comments on neorealist films. In addition to the 1960s and 1970s, she focuses on social change, memory, the meanings of consensus and violence, and literary and cinematic representations of society. Thanks to her competency in six languages, her work tends to cross linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.
CoCo Tin
Spring 2019 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
CoCo Tin is a fifth-year bachelor of architecture student also minoring in art history. She was born in Hong Kong and has lived in the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and now the U.S. Her passion lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and theory, specifically regarding how works at this intersection can be created and curated for a larger audience outside of academia. Fascinated by the psychological, cultural, and political repercussions of art and architecture on the built environment, her studies at Cornell have been focused on redirecting such reactions for social change. Synthesizing parallels between the art world and the highly political architecture world, Tin’s architectural focus is one that merges art and activism in the public sphere, forming a bottom-up, interdisciplinary approach to architecture.
CoCo Tin
Fall 2019 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
CoCo Tin is a current fifth-year bachelor of architecture student also minoring in art history. She was born in Hong Kong and has lived in the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and now the U.S. Her passion lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and theory, specifically regarding how works at this intersection can be created and curated for a larger audience outside of academia. Fascinated by the psychological, cultural, and political repercussions of art and architecture on the built environment, her studies at Cornell have been focused on redirecting such reactions for social change. Synthesizing parallels between the art world and the highly political architecture world, Tin’s architectural focus is one that merges art and activism in the public sphere, forming a bottom-up, interdisciplinary approach to architecture.
CoCo Tin
Spring 2018 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
CoCo Tin is a fourth-year bachelor of architecture student also minoring in art history. She was born in Hong Kong and has lived in the United Kingdom, Italy, and now the U.S. Her passion lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and theory, specifically regarding how works at this intersection can be created and curated for a larger audience outside of academia. Fascinated by the psychological, cultural, and political repercussions of art and architecture on the built environment, her studies at Cornell have been focused on redirecting such reactions for social change. Synthesizing parallels between the art world and the highly political architecture world, Tin's architectural focus is one that merges art and activism in the public sphere. In an age where even the natural environment has been curated by mankind, she believes that the lack of sensitivity for the impact of our own constructions is thus the notion for (re)evaluation.
Chloe Tsui
Spring 2021 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Chloe Tsui is a fourth-year B.Arch. student pursuing a concentration in visual representation and minoring in Asian American Studies. She is currently researching the development of ethnic communities in relation to public health scares of the late 19th century, and the ways in which physical barriers and intangible borders were built at a critical point in modernity that enabled race to become an indicator for universal stereotypes.
Kelsey Utne
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, history
Kelsey Utne is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Cornell. She received a dual B.A./B.S. in history and political science from Salem State University and an M.A. in South Asian studies from the University of Washington. Her current research examines commemoration and the role of the dead in colonial and nationalist politics of 19th- and 20th-century South Asia, especially in relation to conceptions of place in urban Muslim communities. Outside of Cornell she serves as the Community Welcoming Team Leader for Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, a local nonprofit that supports immigrant and refugee communities in Tompkins County.
Valeria Vilanova
Fall 2022 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Valerie Vilanova is a fourth-year B.Arch. student from Caracas, Venezuela. She previously studied at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University where she engaged with the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee and the Reuse & Recycle Subcommittee. As she now proceeds to complete her undergraduate career at Cornell AAP with an unbounded spirit of experimentation, her works juxtapose the discipline's history and tradition as poetic, rule-based practice with modern-day controversies. By conjugating dichotomies, her work sets the stage for debate to expose the sensibilities that populate the built environment and question the possibilities and drawbacks that infrastructures project into the future.
Nguyet Vo
Fall 2021 seminar: B.Arch. candidate, architecture
Nguyet Vo is a fourth-year B.Arch. student from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is currently pursuing a concentration in Architecture, Culture, and Society, alongside a minor in Design and Environmental Analysis. She is particularly interested in historic preservation, the adaptive reuse of architectural heritage buildings and the interaction between urban culture and public spaces. Nguyet's current research with the Circular Construction Lab analyses the material culture and flow within Tompkins County's demolition and construction industry to produce a published report for the region. With her research, she hopes to promote material circularity through proposals of reuse and inevitably reduce embodied carbon.
Katherine Lonsdale Waller
Spring 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Katherine Lonsdale Waller is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Cornell University. She received her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.A. in English from McGill University. Her master's research concentrated on the mutually-informing relationship between the theatre and the epistolary novel in Restoration and the early eighteenth century. Waller's research interests include cross-media-platform narration and representation, reality and realism in contemporary popular culture and especially in television, and self-conscious authorship and media use.
Theadora Walsh
Spring 2015 seminar: B.A. candidate, government
Walsh is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences pursuing a degree in government. Her focuses include political theory, comparative literature, and everyday politics. She is interested in considering political problems and disparities as narratives and ordinary stories as a way to dissolve institutional oppression. She spent last summer in Hungary researching youth radical politics and narratives of nationalism. She is excited to participate in this seminar and hope to use the study of film in cities as a way to explicitly look at perspective and narration in space.
Hanxue Wei
Spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, regional science
Hanxue Wei is a Ph.D. student in the Regional Science program at Cornell University. Before coming to Cornell, she worked as an urban designer in Shanghai. She has a bachelor's degree in urban planning, a master's degree in urban design, and a master's degree in urban planning. She is interested in studying the socio-economic issues in the spatial context, such as the economic value of environmental amenities and the policy implications.
Nia Whitmal
Fall 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Nia Whitmal is a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. She completed her bachelor's degree in sociocultural anthropology at Yale College in 2021. Nia's research interests stem from her studies and experiences of Blackness in East Asia. Nia's work focuses specifically on Afro-Japanese encounters and their manifestations in visual and material cultural productions from the 20th and 21st century. Nia studies instances of racial mimesis within the fluid, ever-changing socio-historical contexts of Japanese national identity formation and Black liberation movements. She asks: As the focus and forms of Black liberation movements shift and Japan's aspirational national identity evolves, how do these forces answer one another? In what ways and why do these two narratives reference one another? In combination, what impact do such phenomena wield upon Black Americans, Black hafu, and additional ethnic minorities (e.g. Zainichi Koreans) living in Japan? Nia hopes to answer these and many other thought and unthought questions in her graduate studies.
Elizabeth Wijaya
Spring 2015 and fall 2014 seminars: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Elizabeth Wijaya earned her B.A. in English literature and M.A. in literary arts at the National University of Singapore under the ASEAN Scholarship and the Research Scholarship, respectively. Her areas of interest include trauma theory, media theory, and critical theory (particularly hauntology and deconstructive thought); Southeast Asian and East Asian cinema (especially Taiwan cinema); and ethics and aesthetics. She has been published on Derrida and Levinas in Derrida Today. While pursuing her M.A., Wijaya was also preparing for her first feature-length codirectorial film, I Have Loved, shot on location in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The film was nominated for the Best Cinematography award in the 24th Singapore International Film Festival and represented Singapore at the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards 2012. It also competed in various international film festivals including the Asian New Talent Awards at the 15th Shanghai International Film Festival. Wijaya is part of a collective of Southeast Asian filmmakers, 13 Little Pictures (13littlepictures.com). With the collective, she co-organized a film workshop held during December 2012 in Luang Prabang, Laos, for Southeast Asian independent filmmakers. The forging of communities and collaborative efforts interest her both theoretically and practically. Wijaya is also actively involved in Cornell Cinema's Student Advisory Board.
Mayowa Willoughby
Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Mayowa Willoughby is a third-year Ph.D. student in Africana studies at Cornell University. In 2014, Willoughby received their B.A. in comparative literature from Dartmouth College where she completed a thesis titled "But the Color Stayed," an interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences of Turks of African descent in contemporary Turkey. Willoughby's current scholastic interests concern the ways the plant world has been used by people of African descent in the Mediterranean to intervene in physical, spiritual, and psychic traumas. Willoughby's research asks how plants in particular and (sub)terranean ecologies in general can be used to index histories of that which might be called "blackness" within the Turkish Republic.
Waylon Wilson
Spring 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, performing and media arts
Waylon Wilson is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation who is focused on re-storying Indigenous history and issues in multiple media platforms. As a digital media artist, he relocates Indigenous place-based knowledge as mobile, virtual environments, laser-cut fabrications, and quirky animations. He builds interactive, intergenerational digital spaces for elder and youth play. As a Ph.D. student, his current research interests examine the intersections of Indigenous storytelling, documentary filmmaking, cinema techniques, and video game strategies.
Diane Wong
Spring 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, government
Diane Wong is currently a doctoral student in Cornell University's Department of Government. Her research interests include American politics, Asian American politics, race and ethnicity, urban politics, women of color feminism, and youth activism. As a scholar activist and organizer, her research stems from a passion for community-building. After receiving her bachelor's degree at Binghamton University, Wong spent time at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) based in New York City. She worked closely with local residents and small businesses to piece together a walking tour titled “Voices from Ground One: Post-9/11 Chinatown” that documents the profound changes and hardships that the effects of 9/11 and post-9/11 policies have had on the residential area. Her current research explores how the process of gentrification impacts the lives of communities of color living in urban spaces. As the director of advocacy for the East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU), Wong works with students, faculty, and administrators from various college campuses to establish Asian-American studies programs across the country. Recently, she helped launch an inaugural High School Ambassadors Leadership Program for Washington, DC and New York City metro area high school students interested in discussing Asian-American identity and political activism.
Gretchen Worth
Spring 2018 seminar: M.A. candidate, historic preservation planning
Gretchen Worth is a second-year master's student in historic preservation planning. She has returned to academia after many years working in the media industry in China and Southeast Asia. While there, she became involved with an organization working with communities to restore their important historic sites and volunteered on restoration projects in Mongolia, Nepal, and Armenia. It is these experiences that have brought her to Cornell and its city and regional planning program. She is most interested in the community aspects of restoration and preservation planning: how the community is defined, how to ensure disparate voices can be heard, people's sensorial memories of their important places, and the social and economic benefits that can be realized locally through the restoration of buildings and sites. Her thesis examines how the merging of site-specific art with historic structures can encourage community engagement in the process and participation, and, as a result, increase that community's (and the broader public's) recognition of the power of preservation.
Xuan Wu
Spring 2023 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Xuan Wu is a first-year graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Wu received a bachelor of urban and rural planning in China. Her internship experiences in villages of Northern China inspired her to focus on the gap between urban and rural area development. Her research interests revolve around media and art's effect on urban and rural planning. Wu's goal is to search cultural and social media methods and tools to resolve inequality in community and urban areas. In her free time, she likes yoga and meditation.
Winniebell Xinyu Zong
Spring 2022 seminar: M.F.A. Creative Writing Candidate
Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet and chapbook editor at Newfound Press. She was the 2020 Frontier Poetry editorial fellow and a spring 2021 publishing intern at Copper Canyon Press. Her recent poems have appeared in Barren Magazine, Meridian, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. Zong holds an M.A. in English and a graduate certificate in women, gender, & sexuality studies from Kansas State University. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of Net, and AWP's Intro Journals Project, Zong is an M.F.A. poetry candidate at Cornell University.
Ziyan Xu
Fall 2021 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Ziyan Xu is a second-year graduate student in City and Regional Planning at Cornell. Ziyan received a bachelor's degree in urban planning from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China and became interested in the use of space for urban disadvantaged groups. In an exchange semester at UC Berkeley, Ziyan conducted a preliminary study on the fairness of transportation infrastructure in the metropolis. At Cornell, Ziyan has studied the accessibility of vulnerable groups to transportation infrastructure in Chicago and is currently interested in transportation planning and social equity issues.
Yicong Yang
Spring 2016 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, city and regional planning
Yicong Yang holds a B.Eng. in urban planning and a M.Res. in urban design. With a strong interest in world geography, she possesses study and project experiences in various countries including China, the U.S., England, Lebanon, and New Zealand. Her previous research thesis on urban informality in a Chinese megacity explored spatiality of informality in the context of urbanization process. Since joining Cornell in the fall of 2015, she has developed an interest in discovering interactions and communications between agents in the urban and natural environment on the basis of her previous exploratory approach to understanding the concrete spatial form and urbanization. As a Mellon Fellow, she is currently pursuing her interest in mapping urbanities (especially in the Brazilian Amazon) through integrating theoretical foundations of human geography and critical philosophy with scientific methods of spatial dynamic modeling and complexity.
Jiayi Yi
Spring 2019 seminar: M.S. AAD candidate, architecture
Jiayi Yi is currently an M.S. AAD student at Cornell University with a specialization in architecture and urbanism. She received her undergraduate education at the University of Notre Dame. The classical education with a focus on contextualized architecture anchors her to community-conscious design based on the notion of beauty and proportion. With an expanded interest in city and environment, she pursued a minor in sustainability, with extensive research on natural energy for building use. During the summer of 2018 at Cornell AAP NYC, Yi started to investigate the city as the medium to shape our built environment. Her design work features an integrated approach with a dynamic connection to urban space and authentic care towards people with the community.
Nari Yoon
Fall 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian literature, religion, and culture
Nari Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, and spent her childhood in Teheran and Mumbai. She received a master of international studies from Seoul National University in 2012 and a M.A. in Asian studies from Cornell in 2014. She briefly worked as an international news researcher at MBC Broadcasting Network in Seoul, and interned for NGOs in East Timor before coming to Cornell. Yoon is interested in investigating how political and economic policies affect human lives and she is particularly interested in the process of constructing modern national subjectivity in East Asia. She has recently finished her M.A. thesis comparing the political aesthetics of romantic love in Meiji Japan and colonial Korea. Her study explores the texts of Ozaki Koyo’s Kongjiki Yasha (The Gold Demon, 1897-1903) and Yi Kwangsu’s Mujông (The Heartless, 1917) to reveal how the modern idea of “romantic love” was utilized as an ideological apparatus in both Meiji Japan and colonial Korea. Through her analysis, she tried to show how romantic love, a particular mode of feeling or perception, of this era can impart a valuable insight in understanding larger economic and political structures of the time. As a Mellon Fellow, she would like to study more on the political unconscious manifested through architectures, films, and other visual, material, and literary texts of Asia.
San Yoon
Fall 2021 seminar: M.Arch. candidate, architecture
San Yoon is from South Korea and received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul. He has worked in several architecture/interior design firms as an intern for ten years, and now focuses on simple and direct making such as structure and modular design. Along his path, San has developed other interests such as film, VFX, visualization/rendering, comics, illustration, while trying to imbibe as much diverse cultural knowledge as possible for a future dedicated to architecture education.
Yi Zhang
Fall 2016 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Yi Zhang is a second-year graduate student in city and regional planning. Her studies and experience began during a five-year undergraduate program in urban planning at Zhejiang University, China. Her undergraduate work included a one-semester exchange program at University College in Dublin, and a summer exchange program at Hong Kong University. Zhang's dedicated interest in urban transformation and the urbanization process lead her to conduct diverse projects including urban transportation connection, urban open space accessibility, and urban creative space evolvement in Chinese megacities. After arriving at Cornell in fall 2015, she has continued to research urban space renewal by interacting with local people and applying spatial models. For her Mellon fellowship, she plans to use the urbanization process in Cuba as an example to understand how isolated islands flourish with urbanized farms, as well as how the farming behavior has transitioned both spatially and institutionally in recent years.
Grace Zhou
Fall 2018 seminar: M.R.P. candidate, city and regional planning
Grace Zhou is a second-year master’s student in city and regional planning. Originally from China, she did her undergrad at the University of Hong Kong, majoring in economics, with extensive interests in landscape studies, cultural geography, sociology, art history, and political philosophy. Before coming to Cornell, she did quite a few research assistantships in landscape architecture and cultural geography, carrying out mapping and field research on various villages in Guangzhou, China, in the face of ever-shifting urbanization, as well as archival research and site mapping of gold mining in Johannesburg, South Africa. In doing cultural geography, she conducted her own independent study on the waterfront in Hong Kong and the symbolic meanings behind a politicized space. At Cornell, she carried on with research assistantships in city and regional planning and government. Last summer, she did some field research as part of a summer program in Shangri-la, Yunnan, China. For future goals, she looks forward to doing research on Chinese urbanism, possibly into topics including urban regeneration (including gentrification), urban political economy, neoliberal urbanism, and public space. She hopes to pay attention to larger frameworks and macro conditions, as well as smaller-scale processes and individual lived experiences.