2017-18 Graduate Student & Faculty Accomplishments and Milestones

June 09, 2018

History of Consciousness

2018 INCOMING PHD STUDENTS


Jack Davies
Jack studied his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, majoring in History, before moving to the American University of Beirut for his Master’s program. His thesis examined a decision of the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia to award asylum to an ex-member of the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, studying particularly its philosophy of history and conceptions of evil and justice. He is looking forward to continuing his study of human rights and asylum law, political economy (particularly theories of finance capital), political theology, and, increasingly, psychoanalysis. He is from Australia and enjoys doing things outdoors; he’s studied Arabic for about five years and lived in Lebanon for three.

Juan Huerta
Juan holds a BA in English from UC Santa Barbara. During his undergraduate studies, he specialized in American Cultures and Global Contexts, with a focus on minority representations in U.S. popular culture, and particularly film. His research interests include Race and Ethnic Studies, monstrosity and the horror film, human rights in literature, border studies, and housing legislation. Outside of the academy, he enjoys writing horror fiction. He is currently looking to expand the research he conducted in his undergraduate thesis, which dealt with representations of race and housing in the post-recession American haunted house film.

Xindi Li
Xindi holds a BA in Cultural Studies and East Asian Studies from McGill University and currently works in libraries. She is interested in how criminality is produced under states of diffuse and oversaturated surveillance. Her proposed research attends to the re-articulation of surveillance infrastructures in evidentiary paradigms, emphasizing the relationship between criminality and impasses of sense and action. Other people would call her interdisciplinary but she definitely wouldn’t use that word.

Hafsa Mohamed
Hafsa holds a BA and MA in Psychology from San Diego State University. Her research interests include Feminist Studies, African/a Studies, Critical Legal Studies and the politics of humanitarianism/human rights.

Stefan Yong
Stefan was born and raised in Singapore and is finishing the last few weeks of his time at Amherst College, where he has been trained in Black Studies and Political Theory. His recently completed undergraduate thesis encounters Samuel R. Delany's science fiction texts as an opportune meetingpoint for black radicalism and Marxian totality thinking. Much of his current research concerns discourses--in particular, black studies, Marxism, and political theology--that share in common the capacity to derive theoretical force from their self-positioning as counter-genealogies of modernity. Going forward, he hopes to think more deeply about: antiwork philosophies and practices; religion and capital accumulation; and racial biopolitics.


PHDS IN 2017-18


Ari Cushner (Summer 17) Cold War Comrades: Left-Liberal Anticommunism and American
Empire, 1941-1968 (Barbara Epstein, chair; Eric Porter, Matthew Lasar).
Lecturer in American Studies, San José State University

Lindsay Weinberg (Spring 18) From Mass Culture to Personalization (Robert Meister and Carla Freccero, co-chairs; Warren Sack and Mark Andrejevic)
Two-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with Purdue University's Honors College and Polytechnic Institute https://honors.purdue.edu/

Asad Haider (Spring 18) Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory (Christopher
Connery and Max Tomba, co-chairs; Deborah Gould and Robert Meister)
2018-19 Mellon Post-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

Jessica Neasbitt (Spring 18) Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: Neoliberalism, Medicalization, and the
Pathologization of Embodiment (Carla Freccero, chair; Marcia Ochoa and Eric Porter)

 

ADVANCED TO CANDIDACY IN 2017-18


Ryan Lee
Jared Gampel
Key MacFarlane

 

TA TRAINER 2017-18


Delio Vasquez

 

GRADUATE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES 2017-18


Lindsay Weinberg
Gabriel Mindel

 

2017-18 TEACHING FELLOWS


Isaac Blacksin
Robert Cavooris
Asad Haider
Alirio Karina

 

AWARDS AND HONORS (GRADUATE STUDENTS)


Christian Alvarado
2018 Summer Research Fellowship @ The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz

Isaac Blacksin:
Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grant, US Department of Education
Kathryn Davis Fellowship, Middlebury College
2018 Gary Lease Summer Dissertation Fellowship

Daniel Butler
2018 Tribeca Land and Cattle Fellowship for summer research and travel

Robert Cavooris
2018-19 Humanities Division Dissertation Quarter Fellowship

Spencer Coffey
2018 Summer Dissertation Fellowship @ The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
2019 (spring) UCHRI Residential Research Group Fellowship: “Truth”
2018-19 UCHRI Graduate Student Dissertation Fellowship

Adrian Drummond-Cole
2017-18 Outstanding TA Award

Stephen Engel
2018 Tribeca Land and Cattle Fellowship for summer research and travel

Jared Gampel
2018 Tribeca Land and Cattle Fellowship for summer research and travel

Gabriel Mindel
2017-18 Multi-Campus Graduate Working Group, UCHRI
Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) Fellowship, UCSC, 2017-18
Accessibility Leadership Internship (ALI) Award, Disability Resource Center, UCSC, 2018

Alirio Karina
2018-19 UC Chancellor's Dissertation-Year Fellowship

Patrick King
2017-18 Outstanding TA Award

Jane Komori
2018 Summer Research Fellowship @ The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
2018-19 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship.

Natalia Koulinka
2018 Gary Lease Summer Dissertation Fellowship

Key MacFarlane
2017 Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize for “A Thousand CEO’s: Relational thought, processual space, and Deleuzian ontology in human geography and strategic management”

Jessica Neasbitt
2017-18 University of California President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship

Melody Nixon
2018 Summer Research Fellowship @ The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
2018 Chancellor’s Summer Graduate Internship Program
2017-18 Graduate Student Council Research Grant
2017-18 UC Humanities Research Institute Humanists @ Work Travel Grant
2017-18 UC Santa Cruz Graduate Leadership Certificate Program

Delio Vasquez
2018 Summer Dissertation Fellowship @ The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz

Aaron Wistar
2018 Tribeca Land and Cattle Fellowship for summer research and travel

 

PUBLICATIONS (GRADUATE STUDENTS)


Mario Díaz-Perez
“Policing by Numbers.” Review of Andrew G. Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing. In Studies in
Control Societies.

Stephen Engel
“The Body-Loving Philosophers,” in The Anthology of Babel, ed. Ed Simon (Punctum Books, 2018)

Asad Haider and Erin Gray (and Ben Mabie)
Co-edited Black Radical Tradition: A Reader (Verso Books, November 2018)
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2715-black-radical-tradition

Asad Haider
Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso Books, April 2018)
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity

Key MacFarlane
Co-authored with Katharyne Mitchell, “Geographies of Lifelong Learning and the Knowledge Economy,” in Making Workers: Radical Geographies in Education (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 67–82.
Co-authored with Katharyne Mitchell, “The Choice Machine and the Road to Privatization,” in Making Workers: Radical Geographies in Education (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 119–136.
“The Greenhouse Effect,” Mute Magazine, (4 February 2018)
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/greenhouse-effect

Gabriel Mindel
Coauthored with Alexander Ullman, “A Tradition of Free and Odious Utterance: Sacred Noise and Free Speech in Steve Waters’ Temple ,” Sounding Out! (April 2018).

Patrick King and Asad Haider
Co-edited dossier, “The Crisis of Marxism,” Viewpoint Magazine (December 2017) https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/the-crisis-of-marxism/

Jessica Neasbitt
“From Super-Humanity to Queer Mutanity: Superheroes in Post-WWII American Comics.” Review of Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, (2017), 607-09.

 

PUBLICATIONS, HONORS AND GRANTS (FACULTY)


Banu Bargu and Massimilano Tomba
2018-19 UCHRI Multicampus Faculty Working Group Grant for “Sanctuary Practices” ($15,000)

Banu Bargu and Massimilano Tomba with Fernando I. Leiva (Latin American and Latino Studies), Lindsey Dillon (Sociology), Deborah Gould (Sociology), Dean Mathiowetz (Politics)
2017-2018 THI Research Cluster Grant for "After Neoliberalism​"

Eric Porter with Lindsey Dillon (Sociology), Madeleine Fairbairn (Environmental Studies), Miriam Greenberg (Sociology), Julie Guthman (Social Sciences Division), Lisbeth Haas (History)
2017-2018 THI Research Cluster Grant for "The Problem of California: Landscapes, Infrastructures, Ecologies"

Banu Bargu
“Year One: Reflections on Turkey’s Second Founding and the Politics of Division,” Inaugural Issue of
Critical Times, vol. 1 (2018), https://ctjournal.org/index.php/criticaltimes/issue/view/1

Massimiliano Tomba
*“Who’s Afraid of the Imperative Mandate?” Inaugural Issue of Critical Times. vol. 1 (2018), https://ctjournal.org/index.php/criticaltimes/issue/view/1
*Attraverso la piccola porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin.(Milano: Mimesis, 2017)
*“Politics Beyond the State: The 1918 Soviet Constitution” Constellations , vol. 24, n. 4 (2017): 503-515.
* “Justice and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Time of Anticipation” Theory & Event, vol. 20, n. 3 (2017): 579-598.
*“Layers of Time in Marx: From the Grundrisse to Capital to the Russian Commune” in V. Morfino and P. Thomas, ed., The Government of Time. Theories of Plural Temporality in the Marxist Tradition (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2018), 58-77.
*UCSC New Faculty Research Grant (NFRG), January 2018, $3,700

 

RECENT ALUMNI


S.A. Smythe, 2017 History of Consciousness PhD, currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender & Sexuality Studies at UCI, will be joining the faculty at UCLA as Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies in 2019, after completing the second year (2018-19) of the postdoc in the Anthropology Department at UCI. S.A.’s dissertation, “L’Italia Meticcia : Being and Belonging in the Black Mediterranean,” was co-chaired by Gina Dent and Carla Freccero, and included Eric Porter as well.

Erin Gray, 2017 History of Consciousness PhD, currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at UCI, will be a Transition and Diversity Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018-19, and joining the English Department at UC Davis in the fall of 2019 as Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies. Erin’s dissertation, “Laughing at Meat and Fury: A Materialist Critique of US Lynching Culture,” was supervised by Gina Dent, Angela Davis, David Marriott, Bettina Aptheker, and Martin Berger.