Advising

Committee Chair

Suzanne Nimoh is an MA student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. She is a critical and feminist geographer studying race, colonialism, and memory in the Spanish Caribbean. I co-advise Suzie with Dr. Caroline Faria, and we collaborate as well through the Feminist Geography Collective at UT Austin.

Committee Member

Libby McClure is a postdoctoral fellow at the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Research Center and the health data analyst with DataWorks NC. Her research is focused on the ways in which historical and structural inequalities produce health disparities. She seeks involvement in social and environmental justice-focused research that both critically complicates traditional study of health and illness while also supporting social change. Libby and I are collaborating on a health study of former Alcoa workers and their families, assessing the associations of toxic exposure with disease outcomes and mortality, and race and gender disparities.

Deidre Zoll is a PhD Candidate in Community & Regional Planning at UT Austin. Her research examines the relationship between race, class and climate adaptation projects in U.S. cities. Deidre and I are collaborating on a project titled “Urban Planning for An Uncertain Future” with Robert Paterson and Miriam Solis that recently won a Planet Texas 2050 grant.

Candice Lyons received her B.A. in Philosophy from UT Austin in 2012 and her M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from the same institution in 2017. She spent several years as a middle school English Language Arts instructor and is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. Her research interests include African American 19th Century history, slave narratives, Black queer theory and Black feminist theory.

Ruth Matamoros Mercado is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Institute of Latin American Studies in UT Austin. She is interested in indigenous people land rights struggles in Nicaragua and Honduras. Her research examines the cultural vision of indigenous People regarding land and natural resources in the context of ongoing colonization.

Khyree Davis earned their PhD in African & African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021. Currently, they are Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Middlebury College and 2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+). Their research and teaching explores Black queer and trans studies, Black geographies, feminist geopolitics, performance and visual cultures.  

Daelena Tinnin is a 2nd year PhD student in Media Studies in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores black feminist theories of the human and performances of black female subjectivity in media and other cultural production.

Nnenna Odim is a doctoral student in the area of Early Childhood Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. Blending influences of more-than-human species relations, her research focuses on socio-cultural influences, Indigenous knowledges, and inquiry-driven interactions in early childhood.

Jaden Janak (they/he) is a Donald D. Harrington Graduate Fellow and PhD candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at the UT-Austin. Their dissertation tentatively titled, “Experiments in Freedom: Present Histories of an Abolitionist Future” focuses on U.S. prison abolition organizing in the 20th and 21st centuries. Building on their own organizing work, Jaden’s dissertation accounts for how abolitionist organizations are actively creating abolitionist futures in the present moment. Jaden has upcoming publications in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Communication and Critical Cultural Studies. You can learn more about them and their public history work on their website www.jadenjanak.com.

*image credit: Illana Panish-Linsman

Mentor

Joshua Reason (they/them) is a Black genderqueer scholar from the Bay Area who combines performance, geography, and oral history to capture the material and affective registers of Black queer and trans life. Though based in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, their dissertation project is rooted in a fervent commitment to transnational solidarity, connecting the aesthetics, longings, and political strivings of Black queer and trans communities across the Americas. Joshua received their M.A. in Latin American Studies at UT Austin, and is currently a doctoral student in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. For more on their work, visit joshuakreason.com.

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