PhD Alumni Listing

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• Research Interests: Whiteness, Masculinities, Black Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory
• Education: MA - Sociology, Stanford 2014; BA - African & African American Studies and Political Science w/Honors, Stanford 2013

Bio

Milton Achelpohl is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on developing theory that critically engages with and interrogates the construction, development and maintenance of white masculinity, primarily in the United States Context. He is interested in the need to look to other theoretical and intellectual traditions, namely Black Feminist Theory, in order to approach white masculinity with radical methodological, epistemological and ontological interventions.

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• Research Interests: Critical race and ethnic studies; political economy of disability; history of psychiatry; social organization of mental health services; institutional ethnography; mental health evidence in Canadian immigration law; Canadian settler colonialism, multiculturalism, and public health.
• Education: B.A., Women's and Gender Studies, University of Toronto, 2010 M.A., Sociology in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto (OISE/UT), 2012

Bio

Louise Tam is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include the social organization of mental health services, the institutionalization of anti-oppressive practice, and the political economy of disability/disablement in settler colonial contexts. Her dissertation, “Palliative States,” maps racialized migrants' navigation of the Canadian mental health, immigration, and criminal justice systems. In particular, she interrogates the uses of psychiatric evidence in immigration proceedings for securing legal status and safety.

Louise has published journal articles and book chapters in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Disability Studies, and American Studies on Asian American counseling psychology, mental patients’ rights movements, and psychiatry behind bars. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. Most recently, she taught a seminar on intersectionality, disability, and health in the School of Health Policy and Management at York University.

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• Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Black feminist theory, Disability Studies, American studies, Literary and cultural studies
• Education: B.A., Program for the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College, 2016
• Job Placement: University of Virginia, Department of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
• Webpage: https://virginia.academia.edu/SarahOrsak
• Committee: Kyla Schuller (chair), Ed Cohen, Marisa Fuentes, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer (external examiner)
• Dissertation: "Making Disability White: Blackness and White Disability from Hollywood to Academia"
• Abstract URL: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2679657855/82E441257D6D4603PQ/

• Research Interests: Migration, Prisons, Queer and Trans Studies, Religion
• Education: B.A. Anthropology - UT San Antonio
• Committee: Sylvia Chan-Malik (Chair), Deborah Vargas, Kyla Schuller, Nicole Fleetwood, Dylan Rodriguez (External Examiner)
• Dissertation: "Abolition and Faith: Embodying the Sacred in Migrant Liberation Narratives"

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• Research Interests: Autonomist theories of the common and current debates about matter, nature and life developed in the fields of feminist theory, science and technology studies and decolonial thought.

Bio

Miriam Tola's dissertation project, titled "Ecologies of the Commons", places Autonomist theories of the common in conversation with current debates about matter, nature and life developed in the fields of feminist theory, science and technology studies and decolonial thought. While many thinkers emphasize either "natural" or "artificial" commons, Miriam focuses instead on "ecologies of the commons" by considering how a multiplicity of being and forces, human and more-than-human, are both products and producers of actions and thoughts that shape modes of being-in-common. Her hope is that this project will contribute to unsettle Western notions of the political as an exclusively human affair.

Before coming to Rutgers, Miriam worked as a journalist, documentary producer and film festival curator in Italy and the United States. She has been a contributor for the Italian newspaper "Il manifesto" and the magazine "D. La Repubblica delle Donne". She graduated in Communication Sciences and Film Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome with a research project on the monstrous figurations of sexual difference in post-modern science-fiction cinema. At Rutgers she has been teaching foundational courses in women's and gender studies and upper level classes in critical sexuality studies, and feminist practices. She is a graduate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis for the academic year 2013-2014.

• Research Interests: "Third World" feminist and queer theories and movements, cultural theory, critical theory, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies.

Bio

Anel Méndez Velázquez was born in Puerto Rico, and grew up San Sebastián, a town in the western-central region of the island. She considers herself to live simultaneously in Puerto Rico and the United States. She holds a B.S. in biology from the University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras, where she worked in enzymatic research to develop bioremediation methods for removing toxic compounds from industrial waste. During her time at the UPR, she also did independent studies in art and gender, which introduced her to feminist theory and cultural studies. In 2002, she moved to the U.S., working in Chicago for a year to then move to New York to work on an interdisciplinary Master’s in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University’s Draper Program. Her thesis, “Cultural Nationalism and the Policing of Gender and Sexuality in Puerto Rico, 1930s -1970s,” discussed ways in which official cultural-nationalist discourses on puertorriqueñidad in the mid 20th century invested in heteronormative gender and sexuality constructs and implicated them in the construction of Puerto Rican identity and the Puerto Rican nation. Her interests include: ‘third world’ feminist and queer theories and movements, cultural, and critical theory, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies, trans-cultural/trans-national gender and sexuality studies, race/ethnicity/nationality discourses in relation to gender and sexuality politics, and gender and sexuality in visual representation and arts, and performance culture.