Faculty Fellows
Andy Urban
Title: Associate Professor of American Studies & History
Degree:
Specialty: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century US: Immigration and Labor History
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Bio: Andy Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, whose research and teaching focuses on labor, migration, and public memory. In 2019, he was the Fulbright Fellow in American Studies in Austria. Andy’s current book project explores the history of Seabrook Farms, a frozen foods agribusiness in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, migrant farmworkers from the US South, European Displaced Persons, and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s and 1950s. His work on Seabrook Farms is the subject of an online exhibition hosted by the New Jersey Digital Highway, which he curated with Rutgers’ students, and in 2018 was the focus of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute that he led on how histories of incarceration, relocation, and resettlement during World War II can be integrated into K-12 curricula. Andy has also worked with the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and public stakeholders on how Seabrook Farms’ history can be made relevant to contemporary audiences. Andy’s academic writing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of American History, Journal of Policy History, Gender and History, The Public Historian, Radical History Review, and American Studies. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, Newark Star-Ledger, South Jersey Times, Public Radio International, and Inside Higher Ed. Andy serves on the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Executive Board and as the Vice President of the New Brunswick chapter of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union.
Arlene Stein
Bio: Arlene Stein’s research focuses on the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The author or editor of nine books, she received the American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities. She teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, culture, self and society, and trauma/memory, and writing within and beyond academia. She is the director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers and serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.
Ethel Brooks
Bio: Ethel Brooks is Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. Brooks is a Tate-TrAIN Transnational Fellow at the University of the Arts London, where, in 2011-2012, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair. Brooks was appointed under President Obama to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, where she served from 2015-2020. She is Chair of the Board of the European Roma Rights Centre and member of the Bavarlipe Academy of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, the RomaMoma Think Tank, and the US Delegation to the IHRA and its Roma Genocide Working Group. Since 2007, she is co-Director of the annual Feminist Critical Analysis course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brooks is the author of the award-winning Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work. Her current book project focuses on encampment, claim-staking, and Romani futures.
Evelyn Saavedra Autry
Title: ACLS Emerging Voices Post Doc Associate Fellow
Degree: Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies, Univ of Georgia
Specialty: Latin American Studies, Peruvian Literature, Memory and Testimonial Studies
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Bio: "Evelyn Saavedra is a 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She is currently working on her book Race, Gender, Violence, and Memory in Peruvian Narratives of the Andes, developing and teaching courses, and mentoring students. Her research creates a conversation between various fields of knowledge: Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies, literature, cultural studies on (de)coloniality, and gender studies through the analysis of Andean women’s identity formation from colonial times to the present. She received a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.
At Rutgers, Dr. Saavedra Autry has developed and taught two graduate seminars and one undergraduate course on indigeneity, Indigenous feminisms, and moves to the decolonial otherwise. In these courses, students explore how Indigenous peoples in the Américas resist colonial domination and work toward liberation, re-existence, and resurgence of knowledge from within. Particular areas of focus include coloniality/modernity, settler colonialism, Indigenous feminisms, blackness and indigeneity, transness and indigeneity, immigration, and ongoing resistance to colonial violence."
Leslie Alexander
Title: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University
Degree: Ph.D., Department of History, Cornell University
Specialty: Early African American and African Diaspora History
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Bio: A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the
author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-
1861 and the co-editor of three additional volumes. Her forthcoming book, Fear of a Black
Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States (Fall 2022),
examines how the Haitian Revolution and the emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation
inspired the birth of Black internationalist consciousness in the United States. Her newest
project, “How We Got Here: Slavery and the Making of the Modern Police State,” examines
how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras
laid the foundation for modern-day policing. A portion of that research appears in The 1619
Project: A New Origin Story. A recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Ford
Foundation Senior Fellowship, Alexander is the immediate Past President of the Association for
the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and is an Executive Council member
of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS). She also serves on the Advisory Councils for
the Journal of African American History, Black Perspectives, and The Black Scholar. Most
recently, she was elected to the Montpelier Foundation Board, which seeks to create an inclusive
history of President James Madison’s former plantation. During her career, she has won several
significant awards, including the coveted University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching
at The Ohio State University.
Iuliia Skubystska
Title: Research Scholar, Department of History, Princeton University
Degree: Ph.D., Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Specialty:
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Bio:
Stephanie Love
Title: Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
Degree: Ph.D., Anthropology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)
Specialty: Linguistic anthropology, colonial and contemporary Algeria
Stephanie V. Love received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022. Her first book project, “Streets of Grievance: Everyday Poetics and Postcolonial Politics in Urban Algeria,” explores the complex ways the colonial past gets inscribed into urban landscapes and memory practices, exerting a force on postcolonial politics, language and urbanism in contemporary Algeria. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic, archival, and linguistic anthropological fieldwork, this project examines how painful colonial pasts are revivified in everyday language to speak to the injustices of the postcolonial here-and-now, including struggles for adequate housing, the preservation of a city threatened with irreversible decay, and debates over what cultural heritage is and can be. Her research has been funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Maghreb Studies, and CUNY’s Urban Studies Core Fellowship. She has published articles in the City & Society, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Anthropology Now, Current Issues in Language Planning, International Journal of Multicultural Education, and other journals. She was the co-editor (with G. R. Bullaro) of the volume The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (Palgrave McMillan, 2016). At CUNY, she also coordinated other inclusive and responsive pedagogy initiatives in higher education, including the Carnegie Educational Technology Fellowship and the Heritage Arabic eBook project at the Center for Integrated Language Communities
Tatiana Sejas
Title: Associate Professor of History
Degree: Ph.D., History, Yale University
Specialty: Early Modern Global History, Pacific World, and Latin America
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Bio: As a historian, I aim to cross historiographical and geographical frontiers and to reconstruct the everyday experiences of people who were born without the privileges of power. I want to include their stories in the historical narratives of the "early modern" period and nineteenth century, when Indigenous peoples around the world confronted European colonialism.
Viola Lasmana
Title: South and Southeast Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies
Degree: Ph.D., Department of English, University of Southern California
Specialty:
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