Student Profiles

Franky Abbott
fabbott@emory.edu
20th century black migration in and to the United States. Areas of focus include return South migration, and African and Haitian immigration to Atlanta since 1970

Jere Alexander
jalexa5@emory.edu
Ethnography of dogfighting in the U.S. South; history of representations of pit bull dogs in popular culture, film, and literature; critical and feminist legal analysis of breed-specific legislation and animal welfare laws; posthuman theory

Melissa Anderson
cmande4@emory.edu
Critical theories of identity and difference, memory studies, visual culture, and critical regional studies; dissertation project examines the role of Appalachian visual culture, particularly photography, in constructing regional and national identities in the twentieth-century U.S.

Camila Aschner Restrepo
caschne@emory.edu
Performance Studies, theater and politics, cultural history of the ninetheenth and twentieth century in Latin America. Comparative studies in carnival and festivities. Interested also in cultural policies and public scolarship

Chante' Baker
cbaker3@emory.edu
Twentieth-Century African-American Literature; Explorations of race, region, and representation in the writings of African-American writers; Currently studying the works of Ernest J. Gaines and his depiction of African-Americans, especially black males, in the rural south

Mary Battle
marypbattle@yahoo.com
American Studies and History (especially oral history); research focuses on the impact of various forms of tourism as an industry on communities in the American South, especially in representations of race and class in historical and cultural tourism on the South Carolina coast

Harold Braswell
haroldbraswell@hotmail.com
Via research in disability studies and continental philosophy; to expand our understanding of bioethical issues, particularly euthanasia and assisted suicide; exploring how a consideration of bioethics might contribute to the discussion of topics in philosophy, political theory, gender studies, and the anthropology of violence

Jean Paul Cauvin
pyjpclk@yahoo.com
Twentieth Century Programs in Ontology, particularly the work of Deleuze, Badiou and Laruelle; History and Theory of Aesthetics, particularly nineteenth and early twentieth century french theories of the imagination

Ajit Chittambalam
achitta@emory.edu
Philosophies of nonviolence of Gandhi and King as a practical strategy as well as a theoretical response to violence and oppression

Claire Clark
cdclar4@emory.edu
Narratives of addiction and recovery; nonsubstance-based addictions; American self-help discourse

Sheri Davis-Faulkner
sddavi3@emory.edu
Research looks at the prevalence of youth target marketing in American culture with a particular focus on food, beverage, and tobacco marketing; address these issues within the context of increasing public health concerns of childhood obesity and diabetes; multidisciplinary arguments about hyper-consuming American youth culture; and growing advertising access to youth through mass media and corporate involvement in public schools; work seeks to bring youth voices, particularly those from groups often marginalized by race, class, and gender, into larger discussions of youth, media, and marketing .

Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson
kdegraf@emory.edu
Linking landscapes and peoples of enslavement in the Atlantic World

Stephen Dominick
stephen.dominick@gmail.com
The ways that the body and the bodily are revalued, transfigured, and/or transmuted for the sake of integration into esoteric spiritual practices designed to orient the practioner within an ethics of compassion

Sarah Franzen
sarfranzen@gmail.com
Focusing on farming communities and global impacts while using visual studies and film

Megan Friddle
mfriddl@emory.edu
Young adult fiction; history of writing and publishing for children in the U.S.; adolescent identifications and difference; gender, sexuality, disabilities

Michael Hall
mrhall2@emory.edu
20th Century and contemporary (African) American literature and visual culture; urban tourism in the United States and tourism theory

Kazumi Hasegawa
khasega@emory.edu
Interested in multiracial relations and history in the US, US-Japan International history especially from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, and gender/feminist studies

Josef Horacek
jhorace@emory.edu
Project proceeds from the premise that for the last century, much of literary translation in the English language has been
realist in method. Using the work of poet-translators Ezra Pound, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, and Jerome Rothenberg as notable examples, to identify a distinct tradition of avant-garde translation that challenges the realist claim to objectivity.

Mary Horton
Fields of Biomedicine & Society along with a historical analysis of the disorder.

James Hughes
birdaconda@yahoo.com
The history of the South since 1945, documentary production, and film.

Ju-Hwan Kim
jkim42@learnlink.emory.edu
Research interest include postcolonialism, Orientalism, U.S. Military and Cultural Imperialism in Asia, Asian American History/Culture, intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and nation 

Anson (Anne) Koch-Rein
akochre@emory.edu
(Trans)-Gender and Queer Studies - American Studies - Rhetoric; Project keywords: tropes around transgender, Frankenstein metaphors, and "dysphoric knowledge"

Leslie Leighton
Applied history of medicine

Mashadi Matabane
mmataba@emory.edu
Exploring the architecture and geography of Afro-diasporic identities, music and visual cultures, with a focus on race, gender, representation, space and place; the vocal and visual presence of black women’s cultural productions; the construction and negotiation of contemporary global black identities such as black bicultural identity in the United States; autoethnography and personal narrative

Sarah Melton
Explore the fields Visual Studies and Documentary Tradition, and as a doctoral candidate she would like to focus on ‘visual representations of race, gender, and regionality, elements that factor predominantly into American self-identification’.

Manuel-Julian R. Montoya
mrmonto@emory.edu
World Polity Theory, aesthetics, systems analysis and the global political economy.  World literature as a geo-political structure: 
from literary critique to the jurisprudence of global legal systems. Literary theory, political philosophy, socio-legal studies.

Shan Mukhtar
smukhta@emory.edu
Immigration and immigrant communities in Ireland & Northern Ireland and their relationships with established Irish political, socioeconomical and cultural identies

Kenneth Terrance Oliver
kolive2@emory.edu
Black male homosexuals; identity formation; masculinities; race, class, and gender oppression

Ronald "Joey" Orr
Interested in Curatorial and Museum Studies, Public Scholarship, and LGBTQ Studies. He aims to conjoin the practices of ‘history as a mode of cultural production’ with his ‘engendered participation’.

Angela Ragan
raganangela@hotmail.com
Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indian's participation in the American military and this participations influence on the nation's traditional forms of governance

Katherine Rawson
kerawso@emory.edu
Explores foodways: how food consumption and production relates to the formation of individual and social identities, and how people use food to negotiate power structures. Particularly interested in how food sourcing (how and where people get food) effects individual understandings and engagement in social power dynamics, specifically in the American South in the early 20th and 21st centuries

Leah Rosenberg
larosen@emory.edu
Explores the relationship between memory, mourning and television viewership of September 11, 2001

Jennifer Sarrett
jsarret@emory.edu
Exploring how cultural factors, such as educational structure, familial structure, religion, political structure, diet, medical 
facilities, etc. influence autism as identification, diagnosis, and treatment.  Currently focusing my research in Kerala, India

Laura Emiko Soltis
lsoltis@emory.edu
The intersection of musical performance, multi-ethnic labor movements, and the utilization of the global human rights framework. Specifically, her research is focusing on the Mexican son jarocho music tradition and transnational migrant farmworker mobilizations.

Theresa Starkey
tstarke@emory.edu
Interested in popular representations of women who have committed real or imagined crimes, and how their stories (and bodies) are treated, translated and consumed

Kyoko Taniguchi
ktanigu@emory.edu
Comparative Literature, Psychoanalytic Studies, Women's Studies; representations of "the maternal" in literature, examining them through Japanese and Western psychoanalytic understanding of motherhood; "Amae" (dependency, attachment); Japanese mountain witch (yamamba) legend

Namita Thakker
Proposes to ‘examine popular cultural artifacts’ in Digital Media and how they relate to Globalized Transracial Identity.

Brenda Tindal
btindal@learnlink.emory.edu
Black Power as a distinct genre of activism and its influence on women in the South; particularly interested in the manifestation of the Charlotte Three, the Winston-Salem Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and the Wilmington Ten. These Black Power constituencies serve as models of the maturation of Black Power in North Carolina from 1968 through 1980, and prompt new discussions about southern womanhood, and women's participation in “revolutionary" and/or "subversive" political activity"

Lynn Tinley
lynntinley@comcast.net
Early 18th Century samples as material objects of historical inquiry

Yolande Tomlinson
ytomlin@emory.edu
Dissertation undertakes a comparative analysis of violence, gender, and sexuality in the works of Frantz Fanon and black women writers of the African Diaspora. Ongoing research interests include narrative and visual representations of the body, global black feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and literatures of the African Diaspora.

Sarah Toton
stoton@emory.edu
Representations of Technology in 20th Century American Popular Culture

Anna Vandenberg
avanden@emory.edu
Age Studies: Narratives of aging, medical anthropology of aging, social gerontology. Exploring the uses of culture in mediating cognitive health and interventions for the compression of morbidity (dementia).

Kira Walsh
kwalsh6@emory.edu
The intersection between psychology and literature, specifically in regard to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Interests include reader response theory, the psychological novel, the psychology of creative writing

Betty Woodman
bwoodma@emory.edu
Sustainable Community: Existential Social Analysis of Violence,  Freedom, and Relational Authenticity. Philosophical study of social psychological motivations of violence, grounded in the thought of  existentialist philosophers and feminist/gender, religious studies, and environmental studies scholars. Application of this model to  contemporary topics: teen cruelty/bullying, domestic violence,  business leadership styles, and educational approaches.

Haipeng Zhou
hzhou6@emory.edu
American women's community in Republic China, these women's epistolary practice, and the transnational history embedded in such practice; international feminist studies; representations of Asia in the US