RPE Postdoctoral Fellows

is a scholar of Afro-Latin American Studies, and his work focuses on the literatures and cultures of the African Diaspora in the Americas, especially Brazil and Cuba. Mauricio is now an Assistant Professor and Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

Ernesto Benitez holds a PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies with a concentration in Sociocultural Anthropology from Florida International University (2021). His research is grounded in a decade-long ethnographic engagement with the Amazonian Kichwa (or Quichua) people of Ecuador’s Napo province. He has paid particular attention to the ecotourism boom that occurred in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon in the early 1990s and the impact it has had on the livelihoods and identities of Kichwa people. He is currently an Assistant Professor at UVA in the Department of Anthropology.

Kat Cosby was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Department. They are now an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI), with an emphasis in Modern Latin America, Black Feminist Studies, African Diaspora, Black Geographies, as well as Black women and their geographies in Brazil in the post-abolition era.

Siddhant Issar was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics. His research and teaching interests lie in modern and contemporary political theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the politics of race, class, and settler colonialism in the US. Issar is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville.

Janet Kong-Chow's teaching and research are broadly concerned with diaspora, imperialism, and North American culture, examining overlapping processes of racialization, power, and language. She is committed to interdisciplinary research, specializing in theories of racial capitalism, the environment, disability, postcolonialism, the African diaspora, transnationalism, and legal studies. Kong-Chow is now an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Alexa Rodríguez's book Crafting Dominicanidad is a transnational and intellectual history that examines how Dominican stakeholders used public schools to articulate and circulate competing notions of Dominican racial, class, and national identity during the early twentieth century. Rodríguez is now an Assistant Professor of Education in UVA's School of Education and Human Development, and a faculty affiliate for the Center for Race and Public Education in the South as well as at the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Terry Allen joined UVA Law School with more than a decade of interdisciplinary training. His research focuses on the role of police, and the law governing police, in the lives of students across U.S. public schools. Allen’s teaching interests span several fields foundational to the study of constitutional law, education law, criminal procedure, remedies, and race and the law. Allen previously earned a J.D. and Ph.D. in education and information studies from UCLA, an M.A. in education policy from Columbia University and a B.A. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Assistant Professor of Law at USC Gould School of Law.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow, Jessica Forrester worked with Youth-Nex and the Youth Action Lab in UVA's School of Education and Human Development. Jessica earned a Ph.D. in STEM Education from the University of Minnesota as well as a Bachelors and Masters degree in biomedical engineering. Her dissertation research combined her interest in STEM engagement with justice-oriented practices in education to create culturally responsive mathematics activities for an after-school tutoring program. Specifically, qualitative and community-based approaches were utilized to acknowledge community assets and in turn value those assets during mathematical learning to influence students’ identity development, skills development, criticality, and joy. She continues her work with Charlottesville youth as a Research Scientist at UVA.

Rashana Vikara Lydner holds a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies with a Designated Emphasis in African and African American Studies (African Diaspora Studies) from UC-Davis. Her work focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black Popular Culture in the Caribbean basin (Francophone/Anglophone) at the intersections of language, identity and power. Her work highlights how speakers of Creole languages continue to challenge dominant language ideologies and embrace their multilingualism. A postdoctoral fellow at UVA in the Department of French, she is now an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.

Sarah L. Orsak is a feminist disability scholar whose work is broadly concerned with the imbrications of disability, race, gender, and nation in the United States, specifically focalizing the relationship between disability and Blackness through literary and cultural analysis. Trained in Gender Studies, Orsak connects Black feminist thought and critical disability studies. Orsak continues in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at UVA as an Assistant Professor.

Leticia L. Ridley's primary teaching and research areas include African American theatre and performance, Black feminisms, Black performance theory, and popular culture. Leticia earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (where she was a Predoctoral Fellow) and the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities program (AADHum). She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto. 

Erica Sterling's research focuses on the history of education law and policy, and twentieth-century U.S. urban and philanthropic history. Her book project tells an intellectual history of federal education politics from 1954 to 1994; she interrogates how federal bureaucrats and philanthropists, education researchers and practitioners theorized and developed non-judicial alternatives for large segregated school systems of the North and West untouched by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Erica continues in UVA's history department as an Assistant Professor.

Anneleise Azúa received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses largely on Texas, Mexico, and the ways humans, plants, and the land create history and culture together. Her work investigates the science of plant medicine and healing in Texas and Mexico, and its complex relationship with the environment, colonialism, and transnational understandings of race. She is also working on a food project that investigates the rise of Tex-Mex food popularity in the Nordic countries. She continues in UVA's Department of American Studies as an Assistant Professor.

John Handel was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the McIntire School of Commerce. His research examines how technical questions of market structure—that is, how we design, operate, and regulate financial markets—have social effects beyond the financial system itself. Among other research projects, Handel investigates how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, British bankers and financiers reinvested in slavery throughout the rest of the Americas. Dr. Handel holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University.

Olanrewaju Lasisi was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in UVA's Department of Architectural History. His research explores the complex relationship between astronomy, architecture, ritual, and power within the Yoruba cultural landscape. He brings together methodologies from architecture, ethnography, performance genre, archaeology, oral history, and archaeoastronomy, weaving an interdisciplinary framework that offers fresh perspectives on architectural spaces and their cultural, historical, and astronomical significance. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University.

Ana Ozaki held her Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Architectural History, School of Architecture. Ozaki's research investigates the complex ways racial ideologies have interfered with architectural understandings of climate and the environment within the African diaspora, mainly within the Black Atlantic. Through Black feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial theories, her research elucidates how the history of modernism and modernist architecture in the tropics has been entangled with racial capitalism. She argues that such narratives are central to local and localized Black experiences and negotiations brought into relation by colonialism and cannot be understood without cross-cultural and South-to-South exchanges between tropicalized sites, subjects, and practices. She is now Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rolando Vargas is a media artist and scholar working with installation and digital media. He has a BFA in Fine arts from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, received a Fulbright grant for his MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at the University of Maryland, and has a Ph.D. in Film and Digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rolando’s research «Kuna Indigenous Media and Knowledge in the Darién Tropical Rain Forest» focused on the politics of traversal and terrain, mapping and survival, and the geographies of collective labor and will as modes of indigenous resistance. He remains at UVA as an Assistant Professor of Art History and Global Studies.

Yingchong Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Data Science. Ying completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at the Ohio State University. Prior to her training at OSU, she obtained her master's degree in Arts Management at Carnegie Mellon University and BA in English at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her research centers on city branding, cultural heritage, and creative place-making. Additionally, Ying is a cello player. In June 2019, she won first prize at the 20th Osaka International Music Competition for cello in the China region. Throughout her academic journey, she has conducted research and pursued academic opportunities in various countries, including Britain and Italy. Notably, she has also engaged in research at prestigious cultural institutions such as the Palace Museum in Beijing and Lincoln Center.

Christopher Williams was Research Assistant Professor of Law and Race, Place, and Equity fellow at the School of Law. He is primarily interested in race, gender, sexuality, and their intersection with constitutional law and criminal procedure. He writes on problems related to the criminal justice system as well as the people who attempt to make the criminal justice system more equitable for communities of color. In doing so, Williams’ research not only attempts to highlight pitfalls in the law but also to provide pathways to make the law more equitable. He is currently Assistant Professor at UC-Irvine School of Law.

Dr. Yunina Barbour-Payne is a scholar/artist whose interdisciplinary scholarship involves Africana studies, Appalachian studies, folklore, and performance. Her teaching and research areas include Black performance theory, Black theatre and performance, Theatre with and for Youth, Black feminisms, Black Appalachian performance traditions and Affrilachian (Black artists experiences in Appalachia) aesthetics. Barbour-Payne earned a Ph.D. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin where she was a Donald D. Harrington Fellow. As a scholar/artist, Barbour-Payne has experience as a performer, dramaturg, director and playwright. As an actor, some of her favorite roles include Clyde in Ground Floor Theatre’s production of Lynn Nottage’s Clydes, Edna Thomas in Penfold Theatre’s world premiere of War of the Worlds, and Sally Mae in the Ensemble Theatre’s production of Too Heavy for Your Pocket.

Xanni Brown is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She studies racial and political attitudes in the U.S., with a focus on how people react to increasing diversity in various contexts. Currently, she is particularly focused on the relationship between attitudes toward increasing diversity and backlash against democratic institutions. She also studies how to confront bias effectively in a variety of contexts, including schools and workplaces. Brown received her PhD in social psychology from Yale University and was recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ren Capucao is a registered nurse and the inaugural Mellon Race, Place, and Equity fellow at the School of Nursing, where he received his Ph.D. in Nursing with a research focus on the history of nursing and medicine, and completed graduate certificates in American studies and digital humanities. Capucao is also a “triple Hoo,” earning his bachelor’s in history and his master’s in nursing at the University of Virginia. He explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses through the critical lens of (dis)ability to illuminate and redress systems of oppression affecting the global nursing profession and health equity. His research examines how Filipino nurses’ capacities from the early 20th century onwards have remained suspended in becoming human under racial capitalism despite nursing’s history as a normative career path. It also considers these nurses’ life-making practices illegible to capitalist exploitation as ways to resist, survive, and reimagine the good life amidst the inescapability of hegemonic forces. He was a 2022–2023 US Fulbright scholar at the University of the Philippines College of Nursing, where he co-authored Raising Standards, Saving Lives: The History of UP Nursing.

Jade Conlee is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She specializes in antiracist and anticolonial approaches to the history of American popular music, jazz, and music theory. Her research works broadly across the music disciplines and engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities to ask how music and sound mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Her current book project studies how background music facilitated the expansion of American empire in the Pacific from the 1950s to present. Drawing on archival and ethnographic methods, it explores how background musicians and listeners have used music to depict the feel of tropical space, and in doing so, forged and contested the spatial imaginaries of U.S. colonialism. Jade is also co-editor of the edited volume Insurgent Music Theory: Terminology and Critical Methods for Antiracist Music Studies, under contract with the University of Michigan Press’ “Music and Social Justice” series. Trained as a pianist specializing in contemporary classical music, Conlee received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Music Studies from Yale University and holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University.

Isabel Felix Gonzales is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Their work moves across political theory, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies to examine the crisis and crystallization of identity’s meaning, and those queer, trans, and nonbinary people of color who, through modes of illegibility, unruliness, and kin-making, refuse its capture. Isabel received a PhD in political science at the University of California, Irvine.

Hu Young Jeong is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, he researches how individuals who have experienced collective violence make sense of their experiences and how these interpretations affect intergroup relations, conflict escalation, and resolution in global contexts. In addition, he investigates how perceptions of group power among racial and ethnic minority groups either facilitate or obstruct efforts to challenge unequal power structures.Jeong received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Clark University and his M.A. and B.A. in Psychology from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. His research has been supported by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, American Psychological Association Division 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology Division), and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Rina Priyani is an RPE Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Architectural History, School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a book project entitled Building Bandung: Colonialism, Ethnic Identities and Architectural Practices in Indonesia, which examines the efforts of Indonesian intellectuals and visionaries of the postcolonial world who have been reinventing the city of Bandung in West Java, rupturing it from its colonial origin. This research foregrounds class, ethnicity, gender, and race in Bandung’s urban transformation that grappled with the legacies of late Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and Indonesian post-independence. She traced this lineage to the important moment in global history when the city hosted the anticolonial Afro-Asian or Asian-African Conference, known as the "Bandung Conference," in 1955 and became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement. Priyani obtained her PhD in Architecture: History, Theory and Society from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Architecture from the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. Prior to joining UVA, she taught at Bandung Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley.

Kristen Raney studies phenomena in and around organizations. She is particularly interested in the dynamics between organizations and stakeholders and the social and cognitive factors that influence organizational behavior and outcomes. Her work examines how the characteristics of entrepreneurs influence access to early-stage funding, particularly for underrepresented groups. Additionally, Raney is investigating the implications of identity signaling for small businesses owned by members of underrepresented groups and the factors that influence market perceptions and outcomes. Raney also delves into organizational change, analyzing how identity shifts—when previously held identities stemmed from the disproportionate treatment of women and members BIPOC communities —affect organizational adaptation reputation management, and relationship repair with the affected groups. Dr. Raney graduated with a PhD in Business Management specializing in strategic management from Arizona State University in 2024. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she served as an instructor and the MBA Programs Assistant Director at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR. Originally from Arkansas, Raney holds a Master’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in Public Service from the University of Arkansas.

Adrienne Resha is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. She holds a B.A. in International Affairs and Anthropology from Florida State University, an M.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian representation and racialization in American popular culture, especially in the superhero genre. Her first book project, Arab and Muslim Marvels, combines cultural history of the genre and critical analysis of visual media (comic books, television, and film) featuring post-9/11 and post-Arab Spring superheroes.

Aaron J. Stone (they/them) is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Their primary research interests span queer and trans studies, multiethnic U.S. literature (C20–present), modernist studies, and narrative theory. Stone’s book project, Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life, explores the social crisis of form that Black and white queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America and the narrative strategies queer subjects employ in imagining what shapes their lives might take. Stone’s published and forthcoming work includes articles on Nella Larsen and queer experimentalism (Modernism/modernity, forthcoming) and Black American novelists and/as American sexologists (GLQ, 2023), as well as book chapters on drag and genderqueer life writing (A History of American Gay Autobiography, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and the resurgence of punk and alternative aesthetics within drag performance (The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Intellect Books, 2021).