Fellows

kt shorb is an assistant professor of theater and dance at Macalester College. They are also a director, scholar, and facilitator. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, they will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Saint Paul-based Theater Mu. They hold a BM in music composition from Oberlin Conservatory, an MA in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in performance as public practice from UT-Austin. shorb’s scholarship is rooted in critical race studies, queer studies, performance studies, and creative practice-as-research. It examines how queer people of color theater artists enact heroic …

siri gurudev hernández is a trans nonbinary writer, performance artist, activist, and researcher from what we know today as Bogotá, Colombia. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, they will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the San Antonio-based Esperanza Peace & Justice Center. They have a PhD in theater and performance studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Their work orbits around the questioning and destabilization of the gender binary, the visibilization of racialized gendered violence, and the transformative work of embodied critical spirituality. hernández encountered performance when they started gender transition and joined activist collectives in

Claudia Sofía Garriga-López is an assistant professor of queer and trans Latinx studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico.  As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the San Juan-based Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico. She has a PhD in American studies from New York University. She is working on her book manuscript titled Gender for All. She conducted long-term participatory research with trans, feminist, and queer activists and artist groups in Quito, Ecuador, and is currently researching transfeminism’s emergence in Puerto Rico. Garriga-López

J.V. Decemvirale is an assistant professor of art history and global cultures at Cal State San Bernardino. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, he will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Los Angeles-based Self-Help Graphics & Art, Inc. An Angeleno of Italian and Peruvian descent, his research focuses on contemporary American community art politics. Decemvirale most recently published a chapter in the anthology Self Help Graphics at Fifty (UC Press, 2023), an exploration of the storied Latinx art organization’s aesthetic foundations. He is currently working on his book, Keeping Fires in the Hinterlands, a decolonial untwining of art’s hidden histories

Amanda Boston is an assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current projects explore gentrification’s racial operations in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and their role in the making and unmaking of the borough’s Black communities. As an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, she will conduct a year-long ethnographic research project with the Brooklyn-based Laundromat Project. Boston holds a PhD and an MA in Africana studies from Brown University, an MA in political science, and a BA in political science and African & African American studies from Duke University. She is a trustee emerita of

Maro Youssef is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and the Strauss Center for National Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and speaks Arabic, English, and French. Her research focuses on gender, social movements, religion, and policy in the Middle East and North Africa. As an applied sociologist, she has shared her research findings with academics and policymakers through oral and written briefings with Congress, the US State Department, USAID, the UN, the Foreign Ministry

David C. Thompson is a Research Fellow in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He received a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2020. Thompson’s research examines prisons and incarceration in Brazil, with a particular focus on Rio de Janeiro. This work draws on ethnographic methods to bring into focus the horizons of punishment—that is, the futures that are made and unmade within an expanding penal landscape. His current project turns towards Brazil’s interfaith “decarceration” movement—the coalition of activists, NGOs, and religious groups who work to eliminate mass incarceration and address

Evan Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and associate editor of the journal Sociology of Religion. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Political Theory and Social Policy from Michigan State University’s James Madison College. His research examines religious change, belonging, and diversity in public life. His RSDR fellowship will support the preparation of a book manuscript. Using decades of survey and administrative data, this book challenges the assumption that rising religious disaffiliation and spirituality are detrimental to the health of American democracy. Instead, it

Jacob Saliba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Boston College specializing in modern European intellectual history. He holds an MA in political science from Boston College and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Ohio Dominican University. Saliba’s dissertation project explains how and why a set of Catholic, Jewish, and secular intellectuals successfully built mutual intellectual projects and created sustainable civic bonds during the social-political tumult of interwar France. Drawing on archival evidence together with published texts, it demonstrates that the period’s looming context of fascism, racism, and extremism produced new conditions of possibility for

Ebtissam Oraby is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University. She is a curriculum and pedagogy scholar specializing in multilingual education and Arab and Muslim cultures. Her research interests lie at the intersection between philosophy, language, religion, and education, ultimately exploring notions of alterity and ethical possibilities in educational spaces. Oraby’s project is an ethnographic study of a social design experiment that explores the intersections of science pedagogy and Muslim epistemologies. The research questions how elementary school students engage with a philosophy of science curriculum rooted in Muslim ways of knowing. This project aims to address curricular and pedagogical equity