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Current Fellows

Ryan Burns (Geography)
Portfolio Advisor: Phillip Thurtle (Comparative History of Ideas)
Ryan Burns’s interests lie at the intersection of geographic technologies and social relations, with a particular focus on the role software and digital mapping applications (such as Google Earth or Bing Maps) can play in producing urban spaces. The public is an integral element to this process because these technologies can augment and mediate urban experiences and influence long-term societal trends.  By adopting a participatory action research framework in his research, Burns seeks to investigate the ways in which the public becomes implicated – if not empowered – in these processes.  The goal of his research is to influence the discourse surrounding the public dimensions of geographic technologies.

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Lillian Campbell (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Alison Wylie (Philosophy)
Lilly Campbell’s research focuses on the role of language in framing women’s health movements, historically and in the present day. She studies the rhetorics of public texts, and is interested in how the relationships between scientific, feminist, and other discourses shapes the insiders and outsiders of these movements. Lilly is also fascinated by composition pedagogy and the interactions between different teaching paradigms in composition curriculum. She has taught introductory composition in both conventional and computer-integrated classrooms and will contribute to curriculum development and to graduate student instructor training as Assistant Director of the Expository Writing Program beginning September 2011.

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Maurice Dolberry (Education)
Portfolio Advisor: Ralina Joseph (Communication)
Maurice Dolberry’s scholarly interests are at the intersection of hip-hop epistemology, critical media literacy, and critical and culturally responsive pedagogy, and their use in curriculum development and teacher training for science educators.  He is also concerned with informing practice, practitioners, and communities in an effort to reform educational practices that contribute to the disproportionate performances of Black American children in schools.  Before graduate school, Maurice spent three years as a middle school educator and eight years as a high school educator in various roles, including science teacher, math teacher, dean of students, and director of diversity.

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Anne Dwyer (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Anis Bawarshi (English)
Annie Dwyer studies late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature and culture, focusing on transformations in the configuration of the human/animal divide and the production of “human” difference through the discourse of animality.  Before coming to the University of Washington, Annie worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer, developing and implementing literacy programming in south King County. Among other projects, Annie is currently involved in Transformative Education Beyond Bars, collaboratively developing college-prep writing and math curriculum that will be piloted at Monroe Correctional Facility in Fall 2011.

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Elyse Gordon (Geography)
Portfolio Advisor: Candice Rai (English)
Elyse Gordon's work focuses on issues of urban inequality, community organizations, and identity. She is specifically interested in how identity is constructed in and through neoliberal urban projects. Her master’s thesis work will deal with community garden organizations in Seattle, trying to bring new insights into how these organizations are situated in discourses of neoliberal urban natures. Elyse was previously an active community gardener in the Twin Cities, and served as an Americorps volunteer for two years, helping low-income high school students get into college. She is deeply committed to continue partnering with community organizations through her scholarship. 

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Timothy Green (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Bruce Burgett (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
Timothy Green’s scholarly interests focus on discourses on the emotions – including cultural rhizomes of feelings and psychoanalytic theories of group psychology – and the expression of affect in twentieth-century literature and culture.  He is the producer and host of “C89.5’s Electrobox,” a weekly radio show that showcases transnational electronic dance music.  Timothy plans to experiment with scholarly writing intended for multiple audiences and to gain an understanding of the collaborative networks that provide performance outlets for such work.  He is currently compiling a mixtape and annotated playlist of recent transnational electronic dance music and writing an essay that positions the mix in relation to popular music criticism, “sub-bass materialism,” and the intimate public sphere.

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Gonzalo Guzmán (Education)
Portfolio Advisor: Moon Ho Jung (History)
Gonzalo Guzmán’s research interests lie at the intersection between labor, history of education, and migration of Latinos.  Gonzalo focuses on the educational experiences of Mexican American and Mexican students in the Yakima Valley of Eastern Washington State from 1937-1970, asking how Mexican American educational experiences in the Mountain States and Southwest informed Mexican American educational experiences and expectations in Eastern Washington, and also how labor informed educational practices on Mexican American migrants and settlers. He intends to build curriculum based on rural oral histories of Mexican American laborers in the Yakima Valley, and to elaborate best practices for utilizing them in classrooms and the community.

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Melanie Hernandez (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Ralina Joseph (Communication)
Melanie Hernandez’s scholarship takes a comparative ethnic studies approach to the “passing” genre in African American and Chicano literary historiographies, with a particular focus on narratives about miscegenation and racial hybridity.  In her scholarship, she tracks inconsistencies in U.S. attitudes toward racial intermixture(s) at concurrent historical moments across distinct geographical landscapes.  She has designed and taught an array of American and transatlantic literature courses for the Department of English on topics that include: passing narratives, American frontier mythology, nineteenth-century pseudoscience, and the Gothic.  She is currently a teaching assistant in the Department of American Ethnic Studies.

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Jessie Kindig (History)
Graduate Student Representative, Certificate in Public Scholarship Steering Committee
Honorary Fellow
Jessie Kindig’s scholarship examines the constructions of American empire in East Asia during the Korean War and how a “postwar Pacific” was formed in the American imagination, reworking American ideas of racial integration and masculinity. Jessie is an associate editor of the Pacific Northwest Civil Rights and Labor History Projects, a set of collaborative projects based at the University of Washington that bring undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and community members together to chronicle traditions of social movement activism and everyday life in Washington State (https://depts.washington.edu/labhist).  She received a 2010 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) fellowship from Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

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Christopher Lizotte (Geography)
Portfolio Advisor: Candice Rai (English)
Christopher Lizotte’s scholarly interests center on trends in K-12 educational choice, as policy and as practice, and their role in reshaping narratives about national identity and citizenship in the United States, Canada, and France.  He is interested in critical geography pedagogy and social theory.  His work seeks to open new channels for dialogue between academia and the broader public in order to enhance discourse in both spheres.  He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a UW Center for Canadian Studies Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

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Sasha Lotas (Education)
Portfolio Advisor: Anis Bawarshi (English)
Sasha Lotas studies adolescent and adult literacy, and spent ten years in Washington, DC, developing postsecondary preparation programs for adults and teenagers without high school degrees prior to her graduate studies in the Learning Sciences at the College of Education.  She works at North Seattle Community College (NSCC) as a writing tutor, and received a 2010-2011 Huckabay Teaching Fellowship to create and implement new developmental writing-curriculum based on her research at NSCC. Sasha also tutors students at Seattle Education Access, a non-profit organization providing higher education advocacy and opportunity to marginalized youth, and is a member of UW’s Studio Design Pedagogy Research Group, a team of learning scientists and landscape architects examining the use of studio pedagogy within higher education.   

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Alice Pedersen (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Miriam Bartha (Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Alice Pedersen’s scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, with special attention to citizenship and rights discourses. She is interested in literature produced in and out of moments of violence and struggle, and in considering how that literature intersects with theories of rights and the subject.  Before coming to the University of Washington, Alice worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer, developing and implementing literacy and creative writing programming in local public schools and non-profits.  Alice is currently an Assistant Director with the Expository Writing Program at UW, where she develops literature and composition curriculum and mentors fellow teaching assistants.  

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Amy Piedalue (Geography)
Portfolio Advisor: Amanda Lock Swarr (Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies)
Amy Piedalue comes to her work in Geography with a background in Women Studies and South Asian Studies.  Her current research explores gender violence and development in India, focusing on the importance of contextualizing women’s experiences in the socio-cultural and political-economic processes that structure their lives.  She seeks to locate this research as a form of critical transnational feminist praxis – a means of prioritizing and valuing collaborative research, thinking critically about authorship and representation, and re-imagining the relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘local.’  Engagement with community, and the freedom to shape what that looks like, has been one of the most vital aspects of her own education.

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Nicole Robert (Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies)
Portfolio Advisor: Ron Krabill (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
With a background in museology, Nicole's research looks at normalizing ideologies that construct race, gender and sexuality in U.S. history museums. Uniting feminist theory with museological practice, she is utilizing social media technologies as low-cost tools that cross geographical and cultural barriers, creating opportunities for engagement of audiences in content development, presentation and inclusion. She is currently working on the Women Who Rock Oral History Project, and is collaboratively developing a digital site that will create new opportunities for individuals to contribute and interact with the collected oral histories. Nicole is also interested in the ways that digital storytelling initiatives may be used to both expand existing archives as well as empower individuals and communities. Her work explores how the virtual world and the physical space of museums can impact and influence each other.

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Irene Sanchez (Education)
Portfolio Advisor: Rick Bonus (American Ethnic Studies)
Irene Sanchez’s work in Education Leadership and Policy Studies focuses on issues of access and retention in higher education for students of color, with a particular focus on community college students with aspirations to transfer to four-year institutions.  She is the 2009 recipient of the UW Alumni Association MAP Scholarship and a 2010 American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education Graduate Fellow. She serves as the Community Caucus Chair for the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS).  She has worked as a Research Assistant in Education and a TA for the American Ethnic Studies Department. She is also involved with El Centro de la Raza’s Hope for Youth Program and is a member of the Seattle Fandango Project where she plays jarana and dances.

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Balbir K. Singh (English)
Portfolio Advisor: Amanda Lock Swarr (Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies)
Balbir K. Singh comes to her work in the Department of English with a background in postcolonial theory and critical race studies. Her scholarship focuses on U.S. race-making and the construction of militancy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  She explores the relationship between racialization and resistance as it manifests in literary, cultural, and socio-political domains in the wake of 9/11. She locates this research in the field of transnational cultural studies, with an acute interest in the particularities of the U.S. regime of exclusion. She has designed and taught writing courses on ideology critique, the literature of crisis, and racial and state violences. Balbir is also co-founder and co-organizer of the university’s Women of Color Collective, which continues to remain influential in carving space for emerging women of color scholars on campus.

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“J.D.” John David Tovey III (Urban Design and Planning)
Portfolio Advisor: Rob Corser (Architecture)
John Tovey is a PhD Student in Urban Design and Planning program through the Graduate School and currently in the Urban Ecology Lab in the College of Built Environment. He is also IGERT Fellow in BioResourse-based Energy for Sustainable Societies program through the College of Engineering and School of Forest Resources.  He brings to this work a background in design and urban planning.  His current scholarship focuses on how teaching and learning occurs among planners and publics, with a particular focus on energy, built environment, population, and climate.  He worked for many years as a Senior Urban Designer in Florida and currently owns a small planning and design firm specializing in development assistance and design with the Pacific Northwest Tribes.

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Anna Zogas (Anthropology)
Portfolio Advisor: Crispin Thurlow (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
Anna Zogas studies mental illness and psychiatric treatment in the context of the United States military, with particular attention to how discourses of disability and biomedicalism shape people's access to health care and social services.  In previous ethnographic research, she has explored how discourses of homelessness shape the ways that people who lack stable housing conceptualize their engagement with or disengagement from various institutional settings in Chicago, including shelters, jails, and welfare offices. Contact: zogas@uw.edu.  

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