This program fosters cross-disciplinary exchange and professional development with the goal of facilitating fellows entry into tenure-track positions in the academic marketplace and the public arts and humanities. The valuable presence of these fellows adds intellectual energy and vitality to the College of Arts and Sciences as a whole, contributing to interdisciplinary collaboration between academic units and the development of innovative scholarship and curricula. The program includes a strong mentoring component and also offers a series of formal and informal professional development opportunities.
Post-MFA Researchers in Creative Arts + Postdoctoral Fellows
2022-2023
VAN MY TRUONG
Postdoctoral Researcher, Imagined Futures: Graduate Professional Development Initiative
Truong is the recipient of an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship whose dissertation explores emergent modes of migrant memory in contemporary culture, theorizing “the utopics of migrant melancholia.” Truong explores allegories of migrant boat crossings and brings together, for the first time, a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, trans-historic, transoceanic archive of migrant culture.
MENTOR: Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Director of Imagined Futures and professor in the School of Music
BRETT ZEHNER
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Comparative Studies
Zehner is a scholar of performance studies and new media who researches emerging technologies of resistance. Their dissertation project explores the ubiquitous emergence of predictive media in the form of machine learning. This research aims to provide a conceptual genealogy of racial capitalism and automated systems prevalent in today’s mediascape. As a digital language artist, Zehner is also interested in new aesthetic-political formations emerging through artist explorations of artificial intelligence.
MENTOR: Kris Paulsen, GAHDT Advisory Committee and associate professor in the Department of History of Art
KIO ZHU
Post-MFA Researcher, Department of Design
Zhu has a background in media and communication design and works closely with moving images and texts, while actively engaging emerging technologies such as blockchain, computer vision and machine learning — not only utilizing the technologies, but also critically evaluating their underlying ethical implication and social impacts. Zhu’s works ranges from data-driven animation, video installation, live performance to interactive web platform, speculative design, and more.
MENTOR: Yvette Shen, associate professor in the Department of Design
Archive
Rasel Ahmed
Post-MFA Researcher in Creative Arts, Department of Theatre
Project Title | Goodbye, Snowball
Christopher Castillo
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English
Michael Charles
Postdoctoral Researcher, Newark Earthworks Center
Project Title | Sustainable Solutions in the Face of Injustice
Gregorio Gonzales
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Comparative Studies
Project Title | ndn title: Kolumbia edition
Rachel Hopkin
Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Folklore Studies + Humanities Institute
Julia Keblinska
Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Historical Research + Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies + East Asian Studies Center
Project Title | From New Media in a New Era (1978-1989) to Media Nostalgia in Contemporary Postsocialism: China in Comparative Perspective with Eastern Europe
Dionne Lee
Post-MFA Researcher in Creative Arts, Departments of Art + Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Amber Whatley
Post-MFA Researcher in Creative Arts, Department of Theatre
Project Title | Black Out: Lighting Design and Technology Workshop for Black Youth
Fede Cámara Halac
Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Music + ACCAD
Cámara Halac’s work focuses on live multimedia performance, instrumental and computer music, and immersive music for massively-multichannel systems. He designs and theorizes audio and image database systems that explore the relationships between sound, image, space and performance.
Moriah Flagler
Postdoctoral Researcher, Departments of Theatre + Comparative Studies
Flagler is a teacher, theatre maker and scholar. Her research focuses on community-based devising, applied improvisation and digital storytelling. She is the artistic director of Be the Street — a community partnership in the Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus.
Eric Herschthal
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of African and African American Studies
Herschthal’s research interests include the history of slavery and abolition; African American history from the colonial era through Reconstruction; early American history; and the history of science, medicine and technology.
Harry Kashdan
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of French and Italian
Kashdan’s research focuses on the food cultures of the contemporary Mediterranean and how experiences of migration and diaspora are expressed in Italian, Arabic and Sephardi Jewish literature. His current projects examine the literary qualities of Mediterranean cookbooks.
Sona Hill Kazemi
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English
Hill Kazemi is a multi-lingual postdoctoral researcher of migration studies, disability studies and medical humanities. Her research program is located in contradictions among transnational disability rights frameworks in the context of global and regional imperialism(s).
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Folklore Studies
Waugh-Quasebarth teaches the Ohio Field School course and coordinates the Sharing Visions Project. His recent research interests have involved craft economies and production in global mountain forests, with a focus on Carpathia and Appalachia and collaborative methods.
Danielle Schoon
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Schoon is a cultural anthropologist with interests in migration, performance studies and the politics of identity. Her current research focuses on the ‘politics of presence’ for Roma (“Gypsies”) in Turkey and Turkish migrants in Europe and the United States.