Graduate Students

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Ashley Agbasoga

E-mail: ashleyagbasoga2021@u.northwestern.edu

Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology with a graduate certificate in African-American Studies at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. in Anthropology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 2015. Her dissertation, titled We Dance With Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond, illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and (nation-) statehood in México. Agbasoga’s dissertation research merges ethnographic and archival research conducted from 2016-2020 in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz and Mexico City with theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Black Studies, and Native/Indigenous Studies.

Alissa Baker-Oglesbee

E-mail: alissa.baker-oglesbee@northwestern.edu

Alissa Baker-Oglesbee (Cherokee Nation) is a mother, wife, and doctoral student in cognitive psychology. She works with her advisor Dr. Doug Medin on a collaborative project with the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) on studying factors related success among Native American STEM scholars as well as on a collaboration with Dr. Megan Bang that evaluates how cultural models of knowledge and education affect our cognition of human-nature relations. She is also interested in how language affects how we relate to and learn about nature. Previously a resident of Jay and Tahlequah, Oklahoma, she plans on returning home following the completion of her doctoral education to continue teaching and conducting research within the Cherokee Nation.

Bobbie Benevidez

E-mail: bobbiebenavidez2022@u.northwestern.edu

Bobbie Benavidez is a doctoral student in the biological sciences subfield of Anthropology. Her research broadly focuses on population genetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework. She is interested in understanding how political-economic systems and environmental stressors impact biological processes that are inherited by the next generation and widening the disparities gap. Currently, she collaborates with Yucatec Maya community members in Mexico where there is an increased burden of non-communicable diseases. Her work focuses on centering Indigenous knowledge and health-based systems to account for social determinants of health in ways that are culturally relevant. Her methodological approach employs a bio-cultural perspective to help clarify the complex relationships between health, culture and environment in an effort to identify genetic susceptibility to disease and Indigenous cultural practices that mitigate these risks with a long-term goal of informing future policy interventions that best serve the community.

She received her Bachelors in Anthropology with a concentration in biological sciences from California State University, Dominguez Hills. She previously worked as a Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) intern at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where she analyzed oral health in human skeletal remains. As the Board Member of Education for Shared Science, a non-profit that serves underrepresented communities throughout Southern California, she was able to focus on her passion working with youth and promoting diversity and inclusion in STEM-related fields.

Sara Černe

E-mail: SaraCerne2019@u.northwestern.edu

Sara Černe is a PhD candidate in the English Department focusing on 20 th /21 st -century American literature and culture. Her dissertation-in-progress traces the discourse of environmental justice in culturally diverse literature, music, and visual arts centered on the Mississippi River in the long twentieth century. She is currently researching Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley for a Humanities Without Walls grant and serving as a Franke Graduate Fellow at Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Brad Dubos

E-mail: BradleyDubos2020@u.northwestern.edu

Brad Dubos is a PhD candidate in the English Department working in American poetry and culture. His dissertation investigates how Native American, African American and women poets represented the lived experience of religion from the Revolutionary period to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on how religious spaces functioned for—and came to matter to—Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, and women during this period, his project uncovers a proto-phenomenological undercurrent in a tradition of poets who offer a radical reimagining of the natural and social worlds constituting American space.

Ángel A. Escamilla García

E-mail: angelescamillagarcia2015@u.northwestern.edu

Ángel A. Escamilla García is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department. His research focuses on how migrant youth negotiate high-risk environments. His current project uses ethnographic methods to explore the different strategies that Central American youth use to migrate through Mexico on their way to the United States. Since 2015, he has spent extensive time in migrant shelters across Mexico and has interviewed Central American migrants, as well as a wide range of officials, aid workers, and stakeholders. His research reveals the capacity of Central American migrant youth to constantly adapt to their circumstances, employing a wide range of tactics to avoid the many harms and dangers of moving through Mexico. Ángel also studies the role of rumor, reputation, legal consciousness, and illegality in shaping youth’s journeys. His research ultimately challenges the characterization of migration journeys as linear events and sheds important light on the role of journeys in shaping overall migration flows.

Jordan Gurneau

E-mail: jordangurneau2026@u.northwestern.edu

Jordan Gurneau is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe in the federally recognized tribe St Croix Chippewas of Wisconsin. He was born and raised in Chicago, a survivor of the Chicago Public School system. He graduated high school at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota, attended Haskell Indian Nations for a semester before returning to Chicago to continue his college education at City Colleges of Chicago. He earned his Associate of Science degree in 2017, and his Bachelor of Science degree in environmental science in from Northeastern Illinois University in 2020. Jordan is currently entering his second year at Northwestern University in a PhD program for environmental engineering working under Dr. Aaron Packman. Jordan’s research interests include wetland ecosystem monitoring using remote sensing methods. He also hopes to help aide tribal efforts to conserve and protect Manoomin, a traditional first food, using remote sensing techniques. Jordan is a father of two young children and a husband to a beautiful Oneida matriarch. His goal is to continue pursuing research after earning his PhD from Northwestern and hopefully become a faculty member himself all to reciprocate the knowledge and opportunities he received on his journey.

Andrew Holter

E-mail: andrewholter2025@u.northwestern.edu

Andrew Holter is a first-year PhD student in the History Department. His research interests include social movements and transnational political activism, surveillance, biography, memory, the history of journalism, and the history of photography. Andrew holds B.A. degrees in English and History and an M.A. degree in History from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is an alumnus of the Fulbright Scholar Program in the Czech Republic and the recipient of a Rubys Artist Project Grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

Caitlin Jacobs

E-mail: caitlin.jacobs@northwestern.edu

Caitlin Jacobs (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) is a fourth year M.D. candidate at the Feinberg School of Medicine, pursuing a career in surgery. She received her B.S. and B.A. in Human Physiology and Biology from Boston University in 2017. Her research centers urban Indigenous people's experiences with and barriers to receiving quality healthcare. She hopes to continue examining the nuances of navigating healthcare systems by urban Indigenous peoples, and its relation to potential barriers to surgical care as well as health outcomes. Her current project examines urban Native and Indigenous people's experiences with reproductive care within Cook County, IL.

E. Bennett Jones

E-mail: ebennettjones@u.northwestern.edu

Bennett Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history of science, specializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation, “The Indians Say: Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of Animals in America, 1722 to 1860,” explores the use of storytelling in early American natural history, looking at the intersections between science and settler colonialism. Bennett is also a fellow in the Science in Human Culture interdisciplinary cluster.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from the University of Florida and was a participant in the four-week Summer Institute of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. While at the University of Florida, she completed a master’s thesis titled “Monarch of the Plains: Federalism and Ecology in 19th Century American Museum Habitat Groups.”

Kristina E. Lee

E-mail: kristinalee2025@u.northwestern.edu

Kristina E. Lee is a 3rd-year doctoral student in the Sociology Department. Common themes in her research are questions surrounding race, the state, transnationalism, Blackness, and Latin America. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she taught writing composition and English to high schoolers in Nashville and earned a MA in anthropology from Vanderbilt University; during this time, she conducted fieldwork throughout Peru regarding questions of African enslavement and state recognition of the Afro-Peruvian population today. In her time at Northwestern, she has conducted a comparative-historical analysis of state responses to the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism recommendations to formally include Afro-descendants in Mexico and Peru. Her most current research includes an ethnographic and interview-based project documenting the role of mutual aid in Chicago as a community response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a review of sociological literature pertaining to transnational race.

Walther Maradiegue

E-mail: WaltherMaradiegue2014@u.northwestern.edu

Walther Maradiegue is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his M.A. in Anthropology -with a focus in Andean Studies- from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 2014. His current research focuses on indigenous literacies, ethnography of writing and history, as well as the linguistic and visual construction of indigeneity, especially thinking of the Andes during the turn from the 19th to the 20th century.

Nikki Bonne McDaid-Morgan

E-mail: NicoleMcdaid-morgan2022@u.northwestern.edu

Nikki (Shoshone-Bannock Tribes) is a parent, partner, and doctoral student in Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy. Her research interests are broadly focused on the informal and formal learning environments at the intersection of place-based education and Indigenous resurgence. More specifically, she wants to understand the ways that youth in land-based learning environments attribute agentic capacities and personhood to more-than-human animals and plants and how this might affect youth decision making around social and environmental concerns. She is also interested in the epistemological orientations present in children's science-focused television shows, how these might affect children's conceptions of human-nature relationships and complex relationships in ecosystems, and the implications of this for youth decision-making. Nikki earned her M.A. in Teaching from Pacific University and her B.S. in Sociology from Northeastern University. She also has experience as a middle school and high school English and Musical Theatre teacher.

Heather Menefee

E-mail: heathermenefee2015@u.northwestern.edu

Heather is a doctoral student in Native American and U.S. History. Her research interests include transformations of Indigenous sovereignty and U.S. citizenship since the mid-nineteenth century, decolonial movements, Dakota history, the relationship of federal Indian policy to U.S. imperialism, the political philosophy of John Trudell, and Native American and Black political histories in the Great Lakes. She was previously a doctoral student and Royster Fellow in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, where she earned an MA in 2019 and participated in antiracist organizing on campus. In 2015, she earned a BA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern University with an ad hoc major in Native American Studies, and she was a John Lewis Fellow in Civil/Human Rights in Atlanta. She is happy to talk with any undergraduate student about activism at NU or beyond. She has an incorrigible Maryland accent.

Risa Puleo

Office location: Kresge Hall 4305
E-mail: RisaPuleo2022@u.northwestern.edu

Risa Puleo is an independent curator and PhD candidate in Northwestern University’s department of Art History. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated for The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and will travel open Tufts University Art Gallery in January 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in residence, traveled through the summer of 2019 to MoCA North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Kansas City. Other exhibitions have been hosted by the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, ArtPace, San Antonio, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications and lectured at The University Of Texas, Austin; The Rhode Island School of Design; Cranbrook Academy of Art; School of Visual Arts, New York, and the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

Daniela Maria Raillard

E-mail: DanielaRaillard2024@u.northwestern.edu

Daniela Maria Raillard is a Ph.D. student in the archaeology subfield of the Anthropology department. She received her B.A. (Hons) in Archaeology and Latin American Studies from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the relationships between people and landscapes in the Andes through community-based archaeological research. She is interested in combining GIS and spatial analysis tools with experiential approaches to study the role of place-making and indigenous Andean ways of knowing the land. Currently, she is focused on how people in the past and present relate to pre-Hispanic above-ground tomb sites in the Chachapoya region of Northeastern Perú. Her work is strongly centered around the empowerment of local communities through heritage management and sustainable tourism. This commitment to community-based work stems from her own maternal connection to the Andes and her experience growing up in Northern Canada with First Nations and Inuit communities. She hopes to continue working with local and descendent communities in Perú and in her mother’s Colombian hometown to decolonize the archaeological record and produce a self-determined heritage.

Cordelia Rizzo

E-mail: almarizzo2024@u.northwestern.edu

Cordelia Rizzo is an activist-scholar and maker from Monterrey, Mexico. Cordelia graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (cum laude) from the KU Leuven. Her current research project examines textile-making as a performance to protest state violence. This project delves into indigenous knowledges, among other praxes and theories, to identify beliefs and truths that lie in textile-making. Mayan textiles, Amuzgo textiles, and Oaxacan textiles are techniques Cordelia uses to listen and pinpoint the feminist and anti-colonial components of the protest. She focuses mainly on embroidery, since another site of research is the transnational Embroidering for Peace initiative, which began in 2011 to protest organized violence (the war on drugs) in Mexico.

Andrea Rosengarten

E-mail: andrearosengarten2015@u.northwestern.edu

Andrea Rosengarten is a doctoral candidate in the History Department and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow in 2021-22. Her dissertation is titled: “Remapping Namaqualand: Negotiating Ethnicity and Territoriality in a Southern African Borderland, 18th-21st centuries.” The dissertation explores the question: through what processes have people come to view themselves as indigenous in a particular territorial sense? The project addresses this question in the case of Namaqualand, a region today straddling the border of Namibia and South Africa, where ethnic belonging and land have a complex history. Namaqualand presents a rich documentary opportunity to probe this African intellectual history of geographical thinking during a long colonial period. Previously unstudied Khoekhoegowab language archives relate concepts of geography that illuminate the region’s formerly open borders, dynamic varieties of groupwork, and wide-ranging trade movements in a nomadic pastoral and hunter-forager economy in an arid environment. Lettered African intellectuals also experimented with Khoekhoegowab writing as well as composition in Dutch, English, German and Afrikaans in the region’s 19th -century epistolary networks. Through their letters and written negotiations, many leaders innovated ethno-territorial claims for particular communities in response to inter-African debates as well as new settler colonial politics. These aspects of Khoi speakers’ writing and political intervention have gone unexamined in histories that incorrectly project 20th-century and apartheid-era ethnic categories into the region’s deeper past. Andrea’s research has been funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship in 2019-2020, and a CLIR-Mellon Dissertation Research in Original Sources Fellowship in 2018-2019.

Carrie Stallings

E-mail: carriestallings2024@u.northwestern.edu

Carrie (Apache-Mescalero) is a Ph.D. student in the department of Sociology. Her research focuses on race, education and income inequality, particularly in Black and Native American populations. Her primary methodologies are quantitative and computational analysis. Her current project seeks to understand the economic impacts of allotment and white residency on Native American reservations; more broadly, she is investigating how gentrification functions in locales such as reservations, spaces which are typically less permeable and dynamic than the typical U.S. neighborhood. Carrie is also a data science research consultant in the Office of Research Computing Services.

Enzo E. Vasquez Toral

E-mail: enzo@u.northwestern.edu

Enzo E. Vasquez Toral is a theater director, scholar, and performer from Peru pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern. He holds a MA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, and a BA in History and Literature and Brazilian Studies from Harvard University. Formerly, he was a Harvard Artistic Development Fellow in Brazil, the Director and Founder of Princeton University’s Spanish Theater group, and a Davis UWC Scholar. Enzo’s doctoral work focuses on queer and trans engagement in cross-dressing ritual practices in patron-saint fiestas, folklore, religiosity, and visual and performance art in the Andes. To do so, he explores the ways contemporary queer and trans performers and artists engage concepts and elements related to Catholicism, indigenous thought, mestizo identity, devotion, and colonized views on gender and sexuality in relation to their own identities. Aside from his work on the Andes, Enzo has conducted archival research and written on performance in Brazil. His academic work and reviews have been featured in publications in the United States and Latin America, where he has also presented his theater and performance work and collaborations. Before coming to Northwestern, Enzo was an Exchange Scholar in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University.