RPE Postdoctoral Fellows - Cohort 3

Anneleise Azúa is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies. Azúa received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and her bachelor’s degree in Communication and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses largely on Texas, Mexico, and the ways humans, plants, and the land create history and culture together. Her work largely 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. From 2021-2023 she held a postdoc in anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. In 2021, she was a Fulbright EDUFI fellow in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). From 2018-2020, she served as a fellow and researcher in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

John Handel is an RPE 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. He is currently at work on two projects. The first is a history of the first efforts to design, enclose, and connect financial markets at a global scale during the 19th century. This book examines how the introduction of new technologies like the telegraph, ticker tape, and telephone reshaped financial markets; how financial markets standardized pricing data; and how the expansion of global financial markets relied not only on the expertise of specialized financiers, but also lower-class back-office and service workers. Dr. Handel’s second project 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, and a B.A. in History from Cornell University.

Olanrewaju Lasisi is a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, in the 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. Lasisi is currently working on two book projects. The first, "Yoruba Archaeoastronomy," dives into the methodological exploration of ancient astronomy in indigenous societies, using Yoruba as a case study. It elucidates how practices of observing the heavens were encoded in Yoruba architecture and indigenous hermeneutics such as ritual movements, toponyms, and oral poetry. His second book, "Architecture of Ritual Movements," recontextualizes our understanding of physical architecture by emphasizing the enduring nature of ritual movements as architectural elements in their own right.

Ana Ozaki is Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate 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. Centered on Brazil's construction of an architectural ideal for the rest of the tropics, her dissertation, "The Brazilian Atlantic: New 'Brazils,' Plantation Architecture, Race, and Climate in Brazil and Africa, 1910-1974," examined the country's connections to West and Southern Africa, specifically Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique, albeit often mediated by Europe. 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.

Rolando Vargas is a media artist and scholar working with installation and digital media. He is currently based at UVA as a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Art and Global Studies. 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. Rolando has presented his work at Transmediale, the Kassel Documentary Film Festival, SESC Videobrasil, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kunstverein Düsseldof, EMAF, Ficvaldivia, and other international venues. In 2022, he received a Processing Foundation Fellow for promoting the use by Kuna children of P5.js language while reflecting on digital workflows and appropriating digital methods in their terms and world conceptions. You can read more about his latest project in Darién here.

Yingchong Wang is a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity fellow 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 placemaking. 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 is a 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.His publications have appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform and the Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights. In 2023, he became UVA Law’s second Race, Place, and Equity Fellow. Williams was previously a Neubauer Fellow in the sociology department at the University of Chicago and a Dean’s Merit Scholar at the University of California School of Law, where he chaired the Black Law Students Association.