GHI Global Racisms Early Career Scholars Selected
The following early career scholars were selected in an international search for participants in the upcoming Global Humanities Institute 2023: Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and the Imagination of Just Futures. Global Racisms is a Global Humanities Institute that draws on the strong transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the compelling responses of global communities across distinct demographics and colonial histories to reflect more broadly on the global reach and relevance of humanistic scholarship on the study of subaltern pasts. The main institute meeting will be in Delhi, India from December 10-22, 2023.
To learn more about this project, please visit the GHI's website here. To learn how you can apply to host a GHI along with other international collaborators, please read the CFP for GHIs in 2025 here, with a deadline of December 15, 2023.
Dr. Haydée Bangerezako is a lecturer at the History Department in the University of Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), Senegal. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Social Studies from the Makerere Institute of Social Studies at Makerere University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow, she holds an MA degree in Anthropology from the University of Witwatersrand. Dr. Bangerezako lectures historical methodology and feminist history at UCAD. Her present research project studies a government initiative during the late 1970s to 1990s in independent Burundi that perceived alternative (to colonial) histories as a way to deal with the political (ethnic) violence at the time and to create a sense of national unity. The research studies the oral archive, revealing how politics and the production of history of an archive are tied together.
David Borgonjon is an advanced PhD Candidate in Chinese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. His dissertation entitled “Revolution’s Intermediaries: Chinese Print Culture in Indonesia, 1930s-1965” traces the project of “decolonizing Chineseness”. David’s research is interested in the racialization of Chinese-language print culture in early-mid 20th century Indonesia. His research is on the historical complexities of diasporic communities who migrated for the colonial capitalist productions across regions of Africa, Asia and Europe. Additionally, they are also interested in discussing the political and cultural literature that influenced the socialist and communist projects in 20th century decolonizing nations.
Peter Yuanxi Chen is a PhD student at Columbia University in East Asian Languages and Cultures, affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Otherwise than Empire: Anarchist Philology in Late Qing China” looks at how classically-trained Chinese philologists turned anarchists sought to construct a global order through philological and philosophical investigations into political forms and position of the self.
Dr. Leonard Dickens is an Assistant Professor in Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Dr. Leonard is interested in the anti-caste ideals within and through conceptions of religion in India. Through the texts of Iyothee Thass and Ambedkar on Buddhism, he hopes to interpret the thinkers’ conceptions of anti-caste religion. The ethical basis of the renewed and radical conceptions of caste and religion here together is of particular interest, since it distinguishes the vernacular anti-caste nature of the religious cultures from the otherwise nationalist or dominant tropes of Buddhism and its ideals.
Dr. Edachira Manju is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Dr. Manju Edachira is conducting research on the representation of anti-caste ideals and their affective production within South Indian films. The sensorial affect and feelings evoked through films upholding anti-caste ideals are of interest for her as she reads them as archives. Through a study of Dalit and anti-caste aesthetics, Dr. Edachira would like to produce counter-hegemonic understanding of film aesthetics at large, and also resonate with conceptions on Black aesthetics in films.
Tushar Ghadage is a PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. His research examines the conversion movement to Buddhism by non-Mahar caste groups in Maharashtra. Through his work, he examines the histories of sociopolitical and religious ideals of equality against caste and Brahmanical norms. He is interested in comparing alternative religious traditions amongst Maratha groups who mobilized the claims for equality.
Dr. Netsanet Gebremichael is an Assistant Professor and researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Social Studies from Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Uganda. Dr. Gebremichael’s research has been concerned with the historical production of memory on the afterlives of 1950-70s anti-colonial struggles within Africa’s scholarly debates. Her research investigated the legacy of the past through mediums of oral history, photographs, autobiographies, memoirs, and more. She documented the genealogy of “women’s question” within archives of the Ethiopian Student Movement that was also leftist in its political orientation.
Samuel Hellmann is a PhD Student at Columbia University in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department, and he is affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Center for Comparative Media. His dissertation, tentatively titled “International Form/Socialist Content" looks at the work of central state architects in the early years of the Chinese Revolution, alongside their Soviet counterparts, turning to both their design work and theoretical output to reconstruct the parameters of socialist internationalism as it materialized in the spaces of urban China.
Shashikumar Jayaramappa is an advanced PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at University of Alberta. Shashikumar’s research is on the history of dalit movement in Karnataka during 1970-90s through the organization of Dalit Sangharsh Samiti. The aesthetics of radical articulation in poetry, songs and literature of the organization and its leaders is of significant interest in the research. The historical period of interest is also remarked as a moment of political churning for anti-caste politics in Karnataka state which paralleled the global exchange of ideas between Dalit and Black political movements.
Linda Luu is an advanced PhD Candidate in American Studies at the New York University. Their dissertation on “Affective Empire: Race, Psychological Trauma, and the Vietnam War” studies the rise and development of the technologies of trauma and psychology within US conceptions following the Vietnam war. They offer a critical reading of State rehabilitation for post-war traumas as instruments furthering the US State’s military capacity.
Hongyun Lyu is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Toronto, and is trained in environmental history, history of technology and media studies. His doctoral project investigates the nature of the relationship between electrical technological advancements and the life of the rural population in China. Hongyun is interested in the social relations operating around infrastructural developments influenced by global and national policies since 1949 to present time. It is of special interest for him to understand the histories of ideological contestation between capitalism and socialism, which arguably had a bearing on the idea of electrification across vast geographies, as necessary for societal progress.
Shabana M is an advanced PhD student in English (Cultural Studies) at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Shabana’s doctoral research has been on Muslim women in literature, prose and media during 2000-2020. Her interests lie at the intersection of much debated subjects of Islamic feminism and secularized politics while bringing the observed female agency and subjectivity outside their bounds. The participation of muslim women in the production of the political discourse on them is indicated to be of key interest within her work.
Dr. Haibo Ma is an associate professor of modern and contemporary Chinese literature at Qinghai Minzu University in China. Dr. Haibo did their PhD from School of Humanities, Tsinghua University. Dr. Haibo’s doctoral work was on the 1930-40s travelogues of Hui people (Chinese muslims) in the Indian Ocean. The period of the early 20th century marks the transformational moment for the positioning of Islam and Hui people in China’s literature and cultural discourse. The travelogues arose out of the journeys of Hui people to other Islamic worlds, also produced at a time when religious tensions were exchanged with transnational aggressions (against the Japanese). Dr. Haibo is interested in the politics of hate and communalism between religious groups that remains pervasive across nations in the contemporary period, a theme he hopes to discuss within the workshop.
Keshabhai Marvada is pursuing his PhD in the M.S. University of Baroda in Gujarat. He is interested in Bhakti folk poetry and its imagined futures for the Meghvar community in Kachchh, Gujarat. They are interested in the conceptualization for racialization of caste in the case of Meghvars, a Dalit community. They have worked and presented on early-late medieval poetry of Meghvar saints on their anti-caste eschatologies against Brahmanical oppression. They are also interested in engaging with the academic discourse on race and caste, specifically on making linkages between Phule, DuBois and Ambedkar.
Dr. Rijuta Mehta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of Toronto. Dr. Mehta’s research has been on the subjects of postcolonial feminist theory and anticolonial history through photo-literary and media studies. Her prior essays and chapters examined the histories of resistance amongst women and Muslims as archived in photos and fiction following historic moments of violence like the attempted Indian Mutiny and Partition. She has also written on the narratological and staging productions in US documentary material and its ability to absorb racial difference into hegemonic discourse. (Online participation)
Safia Ally Msami is an early PhD student in Global Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is interested in the political and cultural history of Cold War cities (like Dar Es Salaam) in Tanzania. The making of a Black place through anticolonial struggles and communist icons is of particular interest for her. She also researches upon the development of informal networks and opportunities that are adopted by the people in the region.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a visiting Assistant Professor at the Comparative Literature Department in New York University, and also a Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College at University of Oxford, England. Dr. Mushakavanhu research project concerns the poetic history of stone sculpting in Zimbabwe (colonial Rhodesia) as politically generative. The 1950-60s stone sculpture movement of Zimbabwe underwent a tumultuous period of racist afflictions that led to a distorted representation of the art and artists. ‘The Stone Philosophers’–the name of the research project–is invested in contesting the curation of the ‘archive’ of African art. The project seeks to collect stories from networks of artists across villages and contest the sculptures’ co-options into the White art world.
Dr. Kumari Vibhuti Nayak is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata, India. Their research explores the challenges and issues that arise from the adoption of Sarna as a religious code in the Census. It historically and anthropologically explores distinctive religious identities that resist the assimilation of ‘indigenous’ people within the dominant Hindu fold with a focus on Sarna belief and practice in Jharkhand, India.
Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a graduate certificate in Translation Studies. His research work brings together the social history of migration and the intellectual history of internationalism in four linked Indian Ocean spaces: British India, Republican China, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. His research interests more broadly include political economy, intellectual history, histories of migration, and histories of the left. His published academic work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, South Asian History and Culture, and South Asia.
Apoorv Pragya is a PhD student at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. Apoorva researches the legal, economic, social and structural challenges in accessing scholarly knowledge focusing on copyright laws which entail a paradox of protection as well as circulation of knowledge.
Preeti is a doctoral candidate at the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD). Her research explores the lives of Dalit women student activists to understand their daily lives as they navigate their everyday lives through structures of power in India, focusing on institutions of higher education as sites of violence and resistance.
Dr. Yohann Ripert is the Jane Heman Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of the University Honors Program at Stetson University. Their research lies at the intersection of literary theory and diplomatic history with a focus on postcoloniality against the backdrop of Cold War humanism; they have explored the thought of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor as postcolonial thinkers.
Dr. Anthony Scott is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Dr. Scott’s present research focuses on Buddhism and politics in 20th Century Southeast Asia. He has recently completed his doctoral work at the Department of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. His doctoral work examines the intersection between scholastic literature in Pali, meditation practice, and Buddhist statecraft in mid-twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. For their postdoctoral research, he is interested in exploring in the intertwining of political struggle and religious ideology in the Cold War; they seek to explore how Buddhism was a contested site in the political struggle for the future of a postcolonial Asia (primarily Burma/Myanmar but with linkages to India and Japan) in the mid-twentieth century.
Dr. Caio Simões De Araújo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the ‘New Archival Visions’ project. Based in South Africa, Dr. Araújo has worked on research projects directly interrogating the global racisms question. Within their doctoral and postdoctoral work, the history and anthropology of decolonization, anti-racism, and conceptions of race were of particular interest. Presently, Dr. Araújo is contributing to an archival project at the University of Western Cape through research on transnational apartheid histories of emotions, feelings and affect. The affective nature of ‘archive of feelings’ identified to be of interest is drawn from queer archival theory.
Kamna Singh is a first year PhD student at the Department of English in University of Delhi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of caste and gender focusing on ex-patriate Dalit women’s autobiographies. She is also interested in exploring the intersection of caste, class and gender with other social justice movements within these autobiographical texts.
Tommy Song is a Ph.D student in global history at Yale University with an M.S. in investigative journalism from Columbia Journalism School. Tommy is most interested in the global history of American social thought and social sciences from the 1870s to the 1930s. Their ongoing research is on the global history of social thought in the United States, and the relationship between American imperial expansion and knowledge production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where the understudied role of minoritized intellectuals in that emerging intellectual order is of particular interest.
Surbhi Vatsa is a doctoral student at Centre for Historical Studies JNU and a guest professor of History at University of Delhi. Her/their research focuses on the relationship of women in the pre-television print culture in India between 1940s-1990s including their participation in the writing, circulation and readership of periodicals and magazines. She is interested in exploring transnational exchanges and interconnections between women’s print cultures.
Dr. Xianxin Yuan is presently working as an Associate Professor at Department of Chinese Language and Literature in the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS), Tsinghua University. They are interested in the emergence and proliferation of nationalism which was interrogated through the local Chinese categorical concepts like that of “minjian” (among the people, of the people). Dr. Yuan’s research in doctoral and postdoctoral work investigated the connections between nationalism and other conceptualisations which influenced Chinese politics like communism, Russian populism, etc., in exchange with complex invocations of race. They are interested in relating the Chinese nationalist world-views with those in other regions of the Global South. (Online participation)