Graduate Student Profiles

Michio Arimitsu

Michio Arimitsu is a first-year doctoral student in African and African American Studies, with a primary field in English. He received his B.A. from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2002) and his A.M. from Keio University (2005), both located in Tokyo, Japan. His recent publications include "The Realm of an Empire and the Reach of Empathy: Reconsideration of Humanism in Mark Twain ' s 'The War-Prayer' " in Mark Twain Studies (2006) and "A Counter-Sign in the Punch Line: The Tragi-Comic Blending of Identities in Ralph Ellison ' s Invisible Man " in The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan (2006). He is interested in the use of body language and the representation of corporeality in American literature in general and African American literature in particular. His current research focuses on the political and aesthetic implications of the presence of African American boxers in the writings of such authors as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Email: michioari@gmail.com

Mia L. Bagneris

Mia L. Bagneris is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University specializing in the history of art and visual culture. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Women's Studies and African American Studies in 1999. As an undergraduate she participated in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program and was winner of the African American Studies Department's Alain Locke Prize. As a graduate student, she has taught for a number of courses in both African American Studies and the History of Art including a course in interracial literature and, with Deborah Willis , a course analyzing race and gender in photography and film for which she won a Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Her dissertation, Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800, contributes to the growing body of scholarship related to circum-Atlantic visual production and the relationship of images to the joint projects of slavery and colonialism. The project also reflects the interest in the construction of race in Western art and the particular focus on images of interracial sexuality and the mixed-race body that have been the hallmark of her graduate scholarship. This year Mia was honored to be one of the five recipients of a Mellon Mays University Fellows Dissertation Grant and to spend time as a fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. She will spend the 2007-2008 academic year as a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research.

Mia, a proud New Orleanian, makes excellent vegan gumbo and is the mother of a fabulous four-year old named Izzie.

Email: bagneris@fas.harvard.edu

Linda Chavers

Linda Chavers is a PhD Candidate with a field in English Literature. A Washington, D.C native, she received her B.A. in Cultural Studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2003 and worked for a few years at The Nation and The New York Times magazines before coming to Harvard. Her work is in themes of violence and interracialism.

Email: lchavers@fas.harvard.edu

Ashley Farmer

Ashley Farmer is a fourth year doctoral student in the AAAS program with a primary field in American History. She received her B.A. in French at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and an A.M. in History from Harvard in 2008.  Ashley's research interests include 20th century African American history, African American Women's history, and Black Feminism. Her current research focuses on Black women’s radical political activism in the United States.

Email: adfarmer@fas.harvard.edu

Charita Gainey-O'Toole

Charita Gainey-O’Toole is a second-year doctoral student in the department of African and African American Studies. She received her B.A. in English and Africana Studies from Cornell University in 2004. Before entering graduate school, she served as a middle and high school teacher under the New York City Teaching Fellowship. Charita’s scholarly interests include African American poetry, intertexuality, and memory studies. Her most recent research examines representations of Phillis Wheatley in the Anglo-American literary imagination.

Email: cegainey@fas.harvard.edu

Peter Geller

Peter Geller is a doctoral student in African American Studies, having earned a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University. His research interests include black political thought, theories of justice, conceptions of race and racism, and the role of race and class in American public policy.

Email: geller@fas.harvard.edu

Lyndon Gill

Lyndon K. Gill holds a B.A. with honors and distinction in African and African American Studies from Stanford University (2003) and an A.M. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University (2005). His scholarly interests include racial formation and diaspora, the socio-scientific construction of sex and gender, sexuality as a category of cultural analysis, queer cultural production, ritual and corporality within performance genres, desire and the erotic, and post-coloniality. His research currently focuses on the Caribbean and Latin American region in general and Trinidad and Tobago, W.I. in particular. He has been known to write and perform poetry at whim.

Email: gill@fas.harvard.edu

Meghan Healy

I am a Ph.D. candidate in African Studies, training as a social historian of modern southern Africa.  My research interests center on comparative and transnational history, with a focus on American-South African connections; history of colonial and post-colonial African social institutions and public culture; history of the family; and gender, sexuality, and colonialism.  I am currently completing my dissertation, “‘A World of Their Own’:  Education for Exemplary Womanhood in South Africa, 1869 to Recent Times,” which examines the endurance and social significance of an influential American-founded high school for African women.  With support from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, I spent the 2008-2009 academic year conducting archival and oral research for this project in KwaZulu-Natal.  At Harvard, I have served as Head Teaching Fellow for Caroline Elkins' core course in modern African history, and as Tutor for History Department research seminars on international society and on African-Asian connections.  I received an A.B. in History from the University of Chicago in 2005 and my A.M. in History from Harvard in 2007.

Email: mehealy@fas.harvard.edu

Christina Knight

Christina Knight is a third year doctoral student in AAAS with a secondary field in History of Art and Architecture. She received her BA with honors from Stanford University in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities in 2005. She is interested in the connection between embodied practices and identity.  Her current research focuses on representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance.

Email: cknight@fas.harvard.edu

Carla Martin

Carla Martin is a fifth year graduate student in the Department of African and African American Studies in the discipline of Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Ethnomusicology. Having worked with Cape Verdean communities in Africa, Europe, and the United States for seven years, she is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork on the intersection of sociolinguistic and musical practices of Cape Verdeans in Cape Verde and the diaspora. Carla's regional interests include Africa, especially Cape Verde and formerly Portuguese Africa, the African Diaspora, North America, and South Asia, and her academic interests center on the study of music, linguistic anthropology, "Creole" studies, popular culture, race and gender, education, and development.

Carla has served as a Teaching Fellow for AAAS 175: Introduction to African Music; AAAS 140z: The Other African Americans; AAAS 20: African Languages and Cultures; AAAS 97: Race and Humanism, Sophomore Tutorial; AAAS 10: Introduction to African American Studies; LAB-78: Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World; and the Harvard African Language Program. She also works closely with a variety of nonprofit organizations and individuals dedicated to community development and cultural exchange in New England. She received an AM in Anthropology in 2007 and an AB in Anthropology in 2003, both from Harvard University.

Email: cdmartin@fas.harvard.edu

 

Adam Michael McGee

Adam McGee is a first year doctoral student in African and African American Studies, in the discipline of Religious Studies.  He holds degrees from the University of Delaware (B.A., literature and creative writing) and Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.).  Adam studies Haitian Vodou, with a particular focus on the religion’s growing importance in the United States among people of Haitian descent, as well as non-Haitian converts.  Additionally, he is interested in the history of African diaspora religions, and the ways in which these histories are told.  Adam is also a published poet and a dancer.

Email: amcgee@fas.harvard.edu

Amber Moulton-Wiseman

Amber Moulton-Wiseman is a fourth year graduate student in the Department of African and African American Studies. She received her B.A. in History from Gettysburg College (2002) and her A.M. in History from Harvard University (2007). Her primary research interests include 19th- and 20th-Century African American history, theories of race, ethnicity and cultural belonging, slavery, lynching and racial violence, and interracial intimacy in the United States. At present, she is conducting research for her dissertation entitled "Marriage Extraordinary: Interracial Marriage and the Politics of Family in Antebellum Massachusetts."


Email: amoulton@fas.harvard.edu

Oludamini Ogunnaike

Oludamini Ogunnaike is a first-year graduate student in the Department of African and African American Studies with a primary field in Religion. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Cognitive Neuroscience and African Studies in 2007. His current research focuses on comparative religious philosophy and mysticism amongst various religious traditions in West Africa: Ifá, Sufism, and indigenous adaptations of Christianity, their historical interactions with each other and modern intellectual movements. His research interests also include theories of traditional West African aesthetics, and Orisa religion and African Christianity in diaspora.

Email: ogunnaik@fas.harvard.edu

Cameron Van Patterson

Cameron Van Patterson is a doctoral candidate in the African and African American Studies Department studying contemporary African American art and visual culture. His academic research interrogates the relationship between visual and performance art, social genres of difference like race and gender, and the politics of representation in American social history. While retaining a broader view of the ways in which art and politics intersect throughout the African Diaspora, Patterson's work places particular emphasis on the visual politics of race, "critical memory," and abstraction in twentieth-century African American art and history. His forthcoming dissertation is entitled, "Unmasking Modernism: Discursive Incursions in Contemporary African American Art."

Born and raised in Long Beach, CA, Patterson graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where he earned a B.A. in African American Studies with a minor in Education. Patterson has taught at the high school and college level, and is currently a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University where he serves the college as a Resident Tutor at Lowell House.

A visual artist and aspiring curator, Patterson is currently working on a series of collage installations that explore the relationship between music, history, and race in an effort to create critical spaces for dialogue where students can grapple with complex ideas and important social issues through the arts.

Email: cpatters@fas.harvard.edu

Chérie Rivers

Chérie Rivers is a fourth year doctoral student in the department of African and African American Studies with a secondary field in music.  She received a B.A. in Film Scoring from the Berklee College of Music in 2005, an A.M. in Music from Harvard University in 2008 and continues to work as an active composer.  Her academic research examines trends of social and political activism in African cinema, specifically its impact on large-scale social change and cultural identity construction.  Chérie works with activist filmmakers throughout West Africa and in the US.

Email: crivers@fas.harvard.edu

Jacqueline C. Rivers

A second year graduate student, Jacqueline C. Rivers has an AB/AM in Pyschology & Social Relations from Harvard, with an emphasis on Cognitive Psychology. Jacqueline was the founder and Executive Director of MathPower, a leading community based non-profit in Boston for mathematics education reform in urban schools. From 2001-2004, she also served Executive Director for the National TenPoint Leadership Foundation. Interests: Research that contributes to the understanding and amelioration of black academic underachievement, with a focus on culture, family, and schools. She is currently involved in research that contributes to the understanding and amelioration of black academic underachievement, with a focus on culture, family, and schools.

Email: jrivers@fas.harvard.edu

Grete Viddal

Grete Viddal is fascinated by the impact of the African diaspora on the spiritual and artistic traditions of the Americas, and the role of dance in Afro-Atlantic societies. She has traveled to Cuba and Haiti to study folkloric dance and ritual belief systems, and is interested in the interpretation and analysis of these forms.

Her research is based in the eastern provinces of Cuba, which were host to several waves of migration from Haiti. Grete’s dissertation will explore how folkloric performance groups, religious practitioners, government programs, academic institutes, and transnational contacts interface with Haitiano Cubano identity.

Grete has published in the Journal of Haitian Studies and in the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies magazine, ReVista, and is also contributing to a book on Caribbean dance to be published by University Press of Florida. She has served as a Teaching Fellow for classes such as “African Religion in Africa and the Diaspora,” “Other African Americans,” and “Slavery and Slave Trade in Africa and the Americas.”

Email: gviddal@fas.harvard.edu

 

Omar Wasow

Omar Wasow is a fourth-year doctoral student at Harvard pursuing a Ph.D. in African and African American studies, a Master's in Government and a Master's in Statistics. His research focuses on race and American political development. He is particularly interested in the effects of lawlessness and state power on minority welfare such as occurs with urban riots, red-light districts and drug prohibition. He is also interested in the political economy of education. In support of his research, he has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Humane Studies Fellowship and the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship. Prior to enrolling in graduate school he helped co-found the web site BlackPlanet.com and the K-8 charter school Brooklyn Excelsior. He received his BA from Stanford University in Race and Ethnic Relations. He can be reached at owasow (at) gmail dot com.


Email: owasow at gmail dot com