RPE Postdoctoral Fellows - Cohort 2

Terry Allen joined the Law School as the inaugural Race, Place and Equity Fellow as part of the University-wide Mellon Foundation-funded program. 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. During this time at UCLA, he served as the editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review. Allen has also worked in various research capacities at organizations such as Meta, RAND Corp., the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Government Accountability Office. After his undergraduate studies, Allen interned at the White House and served as an advance associate for the Obama administration.

Jessica Forrester is a RPE Postdoctoral Fellow working directly with Youth-Nex and the Youth Action Lab in the School of Education and Human Development. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, 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 in North Minneapolis. 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.

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 the University of California, Davis. She earned her Bachelor’s degrees in French and Spanish with a minor in Psychology, and her Master’s in French from the University of California, Davis. Her work mainly 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. At the core of her research is her passion for Creole languages in the Caribbean. Her work highlights how speakers of Creole languages continue to challenge dominant language ideologies and embrace their multilingualism.

Sarah L. Orsak is a feminist disability scholar. Her 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.As a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Orsak is currently at work on her first book manuscript, Extractive Inclusion: Blackness and the Rehabilitation of White Disability. The project examines how Blackness structures the contours of disability and able-bodiedness in the US and how institutions mobilize this relationship for oppressive ends.

Dr. 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 has presented her scholarship at numerous conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, American Society for Theatre Research, National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Studies Association. Leticia is also the co-producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto. 

Erica Sterling is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department. Her 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 holds her BA in History and Psychology from Emory University, and her PhD in History from Harvard University.Erica is the Curator for Class Action, an exhibit opening at the DC History Center in the summer of 2025.