2026-2027 Academic Fellows
Each year, BBQ+ has the distinct pleasure of welcoming a new group of scholars to the academic fellowship program!
The fellowship fosters ongoing relationships between academic fellows and BBQ+ that continues after the academic year is done. Integral to one of our core passions, focused on building an intergenerational community of scholars, past cohorts remain an integral part of the BBQ+ community.
Please scroll down to meet our amazing 2026-27 fellows and learn more about what drives their academic, personal, and professional work!
Postdoctoral Fellows
Reem Awny Abuzaid
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Reem Abuzaid is an Early-Career Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, she was a Lecturer in Middle East Politics at SOAS, University of London.
Reem is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of law and activism, gender and sexuality, and political legitimation. Her research brings together insights from security studies, critical legal theory, and feminist and LGBTQ+ activism to examine how law operates as a site of political contestation and state-making. Through a qualitative, multimethods approach combining archival research, ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis, her work investigates the relationship between the application of law, processes of state legitimation, and the regulation of gender and sexuality. Her research focuses particularly on Egypt and Lebanon, examining how governing regimes deploy identity politics and practices/discourses of protection to produce and legitimise particular forms of political authority.
Reem received her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick, UK. Prior to this, she studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the American University in Cairo (AUC).
She is currently developing her first monograph, which examines the political meaning of activists' engagement with law through litigation in restrictive contexts where formal legal reform is difficult or unattainable. The book asks why activists continue to engage with legal processes even when litigation is unlikely to produce direct changes to law. It argues that legal activism in such contexts can operate through alternative modalities that are not primarily oriented towards transforming legal rules themselves, but towards intervening in the discursive frameworks through which law is understood, applied, and legitimised. In doing so, the project reconceptualises legal activism as a form of political engagement with the conditions that give law its authority and shape its application.
Emily Mitamura
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Emily Mitamura is a poet and scholar of gender, race, film, and empire. With commitments to women of color and Third World feminisms, Asian/American expressive culture, and anticolonial thought, their book project unpacks afterlives of mass and colonial violence in 1970s Cambodia and its diasporas as a lived terrain negotiated and contested by survivors and kin. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, Cultural Studies, Theory & Event, Third World Quarterly, [PANK], and The Margins, among other places.
They received their PhD in political theory working closely with Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies graduate group at the University of Minnesota. Her academic work has been supported by the Center for Black Brown and Queer Studies, a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, a Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the Center for Khmer Studies, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, and other interdisciplinary awards and centers.
They teach courses on Asian American cultural and literary studies, global and women of color feminisms, girlhood, feminist thought, and film.
Cera Smith
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Cera Smith (they/she) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. They received a joint Ph.D. in African American Studies and English from Yale University, with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, after earning bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from California State University Long Beach. Their research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Black literature and visual art, Black Studies, and the health humanities.
Cera is currently working on a book project, Vivified Viscerality: Bioscience and the Black Interior in U.S. Black Literature and Sculpture, that demonstrates how and why U.S. Black artists use biology to depict racialized life. Cera’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Multiethnic Literature of the United States, and Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. For their research, Cera received the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts’s Schachterle Essay Prize for best new essay on literature and science published by a nontenured scholar and the Oregon Humanities Center’s Ernest G. Moll Faculty Research Fellowship in Literary Studies. Research for Vivified Viscerality has been supported by the American Philosophical Society and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities.
Shatavia L. Wynn
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Armanc Yildiz is an anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of sexuality, race, value, spirituality, science, and medicine in Europe, with a focus on how knowledge is produced and contested. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-University of Berlin in the International Research Training Group Transformative Religion. His book project, Sensitive Subjects: Sexuality, Race, and Money in the Sex Education of Postcolonial Germany, shows how sex education in Germany, celebrated as progressive and emancipatory, also works as a racializing technology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, it demonstrates how the politics of “sensitization”—the pedagogical promise of making students more aware of gender equality, sexual diversity, and consent—sorts students along racial lines, positioning Muslim and refugee youth as sexual threats in need of reform. Bringing queer of color critique into conversation with science and technology studies, the book reveals how sex education universalizes liberal ideals of sexual freedom and equality through the language of science, reproducing whiteness and liberal subjectivity under the guise of neutrality. His next project investigates Anthroposophy at the intersection of science and spirituality. His scholarship has appeared in Studies in Religion, Sexualities and Cultural Studies. Beyond writing, he produces the podcast Academics Write to demystify scholarly publishing, and as a host for the New Books Network he interviews authors to share their work with audiences beyond academia. He also serves as Co-Editor at Culture and Religion and Associate Editor for Cultural Anthropology at American Anthropologist.
Armanc Yildiz
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I am a scholar of Black religion and Black feminist and womanist thought, with a particular interest in the morals and values of Black women in the American South as influenced by religion. My research seeks to expand conversations around gender and sexuality in Black religion. This work is influenced by my roots from a small country church in South Carolina. Always questioning the systems establishing order within this space and others, my work seeks to disrupt restrictive religious narratives.
My scholarship has appeared in forums and publications such as the Public Religion Research Institute, Society for Christian Ethics, and Queer and Trans Studies in Religion journal. Currently, I am exploring the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion in women’s basketball. This project grows out of a deep love and appreciation for college and professional basketball.
I earned my undergraduate degree from Claflin University, followed by a master’s degree from Yale University Divinity School. After gaining experience in the college access and success field, I completed my PhD at Vanderbilt University."
Advanced Doctoral/Dissertation- Level Fellows
K Anderson
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K Anderson is a writer-artist, porn archivist, and doctoral candidate in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Rutgers University. Broadly, K's research interests include: 20th and 21st century sexual economies and geographies, history of medicine and technology, film and media production, black transfeminist theory, and pornography. Her scholarly and artistic work currently examines the convergence of transgender medicine, trans pornographic media and the rhetorics and narratives produced about blackness, assigned sex, and transness therein.
Jarvis Benson
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Jarvis Benson is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his research examines race, gender, sexuality, and violence in the American South. His dissertation, Constructions of Violence: Black Identity and the Queer South, traces how Black people in the South make sense of identity and belonging against the backdrop of legal and interpersonal violence. Benson's broader research agenda seeks to illuminate the interior and political lives of Black queer communities—how they experience domination, patriotism, and consciousness, and how they organize toward liberation. His scholarship appears in Current Sociology, Sex and Sexualities, and Canopy Forum at Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Campaign for Southern Equality, and the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. Benson earned his B.A. in international studies and B.A. in Spanish from the University of Mississippi. He is from Grenada, Mississippi.
Tathagat Bhatia
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Tathagat is a PhD candidate in MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program. They study the data practices of earth and environmental scientists who constitute planetary processes through mathematical formalisms, laboratory models, and fieldwork. They are interested in the politics of data access and sharing, particularly in South and Central Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present. They treat contestations over access to various formats of planetary data, from hefty earthquake catalogues of Cold War years to contemporary digital climate databases, as an epistemic question that is entangled with broader projects of decolonization, development and postcolonial worldmaking. Drawing on approaches from the history and anthropology of science and STS, their project spotlights the humble, quotidian and tedious scientific and extra-scientific labor of producing, storing and sharing data to narrate a more down-to-earth history of the planet.
Leslie Torres
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Leslie Torres is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Texas A&M University. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in 2022 and her Master of Arts in History at Texas A&M University in 2024.
Torres's Master's thesis, entitled, "Challenging Bad Sons of Uncle Sam: Ethnic Mexican Mobilization and Acts of Resistance in Early 20th Century Texas, uncovered the role of ethnic Mexicans in pursuit of civil and racial justice, spanning from the 1850s to the 1920s within the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her dissertation, “‘Can’t Keep Good Girls Down’: Tejana Feminist Mobilization in the Early Twentieth Century Borderlands,” continues this work by analyzing outsider-perceived and self-identified racial categorization, women's clubs, transborder experiences, American/Mexican nationalism, and the impact of segregation and racial violence on community mobilization.
Her research has been supported by entities such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, University of North Texas Libraries, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT-Austin, and more. Her work can also be read in peer-reviewed articles with Journal of Texas History (2025) and History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research (2023). From 2023 to 2024, Torres was a fellow with BBQ+ as part of its Masters and Early Doctoral cohort.
Vedanth Govi
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My doctoral dissertation sits at the intersections of the anthropology of education, time and temporalities and, social movement theory. Through a year-long undertaking of ethnographic fieldwork, I explored how Indian international students navigated a dramatically transforming immigration regime over one year (2024-25) in Canada. I examine how three policies— (1) the 2024 international student cap, which barred the entry of new students; (2) the reduced work hours policy and; (3) the work permit reforms, foreclosed immigrational mobilities for international students within and outside Canada. Marking a major break from two decades of steady edugration policy, these policies also function as bordering acts of the state. Edugration—a portmanteau of education and immigration—refers to the practices of recruiting future citizens through a migration pathway that recasts universities and colleges into a surveilling role. Touted through the 2010s as the solution to Canada's ageing workforce, such policies identified international students as potential immigrant-workers whose Canadian credentials would ease their "integration" into the labour market and body politic. Departing from spatial metaphors to understand migrant inclusion, I centre another throughline: the temporal. This dissertation focuses on how “migrant student time” is controlled and, consequently how time becomes an agentive force in negotiating everyday international-student life.
I begin by tracing how Indian students—the largest racial-ethnic group of international students—are embedded in larger assemblages of capital within Canadian higher education that shape trajectories of mobility and belonging. I draw on life-stories as a methodology to delineate how the past, present, and future intertwine across generations to inform the decision to immigrate. Then, I show how migrant students resist the nation-state’s control over their time through the direct-action(s) of two Ontario groups: Migrant Students United (MSU) and, the Post-Graduate Work Permit Committee (PGWPC). The deferred temporality of a better future becomes the material basis for my interlocutors’ transformation into resistant subjects. I theorise the term “solidarity time”— a strategy that reveals how organisers contend with multiple temporalities at once—immediate and distal. How do migrant-student organisers sustain an emergent movement in the absence of achieved outcomes? In the proximate future, solidarity itself is reformulated as success, intervening against a politics of disappointment. Throughout, my approach centres migrant-students’ agency in fighting a regime that renders them out-of-time in Canada.
Master’s/Early Doctoral Fellows
Corinne Adams
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Corinne Adams is an artist and art historian whose practice explores Afrosurrealism and posthumanism in transnational Black visual art and craft. She is a current Art History MA candidate at the University of Arkansas’s Arts of the Americas program, and a graduate of Spelman College. With a background in painting, conservation, and interpretation, she approaches art through an intimate engagement with materials and their social histories.
Her current research on Black Plasticity investigates waste and disregarded materials in contemporary Black wearable art as sites of transformation, examining how materials such as plastic can offer surreal and speculative ways of representing the Black body’s relationship to environmental racism. By attending to the social associations of undervalued materials, this relational thinking through materials can challenge racialized distinctions between human, nonhuman, and environment.
Olivia Newsome
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Olivia Newsome is a first year doctoral student in the American Studies program at Rutgers University and a Special Collections coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She earned her B.A. in History from New York University and an M.A./MLIS in Archives and Public History from New York University and Long Island University Post.
Broadly, her work is interested in Black feminist theories of the archive and in how Black lesbian groups have produced knowledge, preserved memory, and created histories that often exist outside of institutional archives.
Satoria Ray
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Satoria Ray is a third-year doctoral student in Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the entanglement of teaching, learning, curriculum, and abolition. She explores Black fugitive educational spaces that run parallel to and as a critique of dominant education. Satoria’s dissertation project examines the curricular choices Black-owned bookstore owners and booksellers make and how these choices often cultivate a counter, revolutionary education space where teaching and learning in the service of liberation is happening. She’s also deeply interested in speculative fiction and how it can be used in abolitionist world-making efforts. When Satoria isn’t studying, she can be found staring at paintings in an art museum or with her face buried in a romance book.
Gwendolyn Wallace
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Gwendolyn Wallace is an award-winning children’s book author and third-year Ph.D. student in the History, Anthropology, and Science & Technology Studies (HASTS) program at MIT. Gwendolyn’s primary research project examines past and present grassroots heritage preservation efforts in the Black Atlantic world, from home-based museums to avatars of historical figures. By situating African American preservation, archiving, and memorialization technologies within the history of diasporic identity-building, Gwendolyn asks how these practices expand established understandings of modern technology and scientific experimentation.
Anne Rong
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Anne Rong is a second-year master's student in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research investigates the relationship between drone warfare and Asian (American) identity within a broader genealogy of surveillance and war technologies mobilized against racialized communities. She asks what representations of drone warfare in diasporic Asian literature reveal about the logic of the signature strike—killing on the basis of readable behavioral pattern alone—and how the visual grammar of drone targeting encodes the same racial logic that constructs the Oriental body as inscrutable.
Devyn Whitaker
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Devyn Whitaker is a second year Religious Studies Masters student at the University of Denver. Her research explores the complex interrelations of Black Liberation Theology, surveillance, digital media, and racial identity formation through the lens of predominantly Black megachurches in the United States. This work contributes to a broader interest in the role Black religious community plays in the history and future of liberatory movement and politics in the US and abroad. Devyn was born and raised in Los Angeles, Ca.
Undergraduate Fellows
Gabrielle Cassell
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Gabrielle Cassell (she/they) is a senior at Spelman College, located on the unceded lands of the Mvskoke people, otherwise known as Atlanta, Georgia. She is studying Comparative Women’s Studies and African Diaspora Studies. She is devoted to the work of radical transnational Black queer feminist study and so she founded the Transnational Black Feminist Collective (TBFC) under the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center as a scholar-activist project. As a UNCF Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her current work utilizes archives and Black feminist auto-ethnography to engage the transnational Black feminist praxis of Black lesbian feminists. She hopes to expand her work to engage with Black queer feminist organizers across the African Diaspora utilizing a Black feminist ethnographic approach in a Black Studies graduate program.
Yasmine Skalli
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Yasmine Skalli is a community organizer and researcher with a Bachelor's in Social and Environmental Geography from Ohio State University. Her work is grounded in theories of space and place. As part of her fellowship, she focuses on how Black Muslims in Detroit practice place-making, situating these practices within broader temporal and religious geographies.
Feli Xiao
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Feli X. is a student and writer currently based in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Their interests span postcolonial studies and the history and philosophy of science, particularly in relation to questions of modernity in North America and the Asia-Pacific. Born and raised in the United States, they received their bachelor’s degree in Physics and History from MIT.
Jayda Hendrickson
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Jayda Hendrickson is an emerging scholar, writer, and humanist interested in how Black girls across the African Diaspora create knowledge, cultivate community, and build alternative futures. She holds a B.A. in Global and Diaspora Studies from Spelman College, where her work was shaped by the UNCF Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Justice for Black Girls Black Girlhood Fellowship, and the Yale Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
Her research explores the capaciousness of Black girlhood and the practices of survival that emerge during period of violence. Her undergraduate honors thesis, Errancy and Docility: Reimagining Black Girlhood, Education, and Becoming in the Archives of Inanda Seminary and Spelman College, examines how single-sex, racially homogeneous educational institutions in South Africa and the United States served as sites of both discipline and fugitivity for twentieth-century Black girls. Through archival research, Jayda is particularly interested in exploring the intimate life worlds of those who survived before us as she considers what their practices of refusal might teach us in this current political moment.
As she continues to develop her work, Jayda hopes to deepen her engagement with Black feminisms, African diaspora studies, and critical historiography. She ultimately plans to pursue graduate study while building a scholarly practice rooted in building liberatory futures for Black girls.
Daniel Sorungbe
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Daniel Sorungbe (he/they) is a researcher, writer, and artist whose work sits at the intersections of anthropology, sound studies, performance, and cultural studies. He recently completed a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and Human Biology with a minor in Religion at Emory University, graduating with Highest Honors in Anthropology. His research centers on embodiment, ritual, nightlife, identity, and collective meaning-making through ethnographic and multimodal methods.
His current work examines underground rave and electronic music cultures in Atlanta, with particular attention to how sound, movement, performance, and participation produce alternative forms of knowledge and belonging. His undergraduate thesis combined participant observation, interviews, autoethnography, photography, soundscape recording, and research-informed music production to explore rave culture as both a social world and an embodied research site.
More broadly, Daniel is developing a framework he calls “sonic pedagogy,” which considers how knowledge is learned, transmitted, and transformed through sound and embodied participation in sonic spaces. Drawing from anthropology, Black studies, performance studies, and endarkened co-composition, his work asks how artistic practice can function as an illustration of research, as well as a method of producing knowledge itself.