Fellows

Heyman Center Fellow 2016-17 Jean Howard's areas of interest include Renaissance literature, history of drama, feminism, new historicism, and Marxism.

Heyman Center Fellow (Graduate Student) 2016 - 17 Ulug Kuzuoglu received his BA in Sociology and MA in History from Bogazici University, Istanbul.

Heyman Center Fellow 2016-17 Natasha Lightfoot, assistant professor, specializes in slavery and emancipation studies, and black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History. Her forthcoming book focuses on black working class people's everyday forms of freedom in Antigua after emancipation.

Heyman Center Fellow 2016-17  Professor Milanich's scholarly interests include modern Latin America, Chile, and the comparative histories of family, gender, childhood, reproduction, law, and social inequality.

Max Mishler received his PhD in History from New York University in 2016. His current book project, The Atlantic Origins of Mass Incarceration: Punishment, Abolition, and Racial Inequality,explores the intertwined history of slave-emancipation and the birth of the modern penitentiary in the Atlantic world. This research has been recognized and supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Library Information Resources, the Institute for Historical Research, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Max’s work has appeared in Social Text and New Labor Forum. Prior to graduate school, Max was as an educator at a juvenile correctional facility and spent nearly a decade working as a union organizer with the Service Employees Union, Local 32BJ.

Public Humanities Fellow | Natacha Nsabimana is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation is concerned with the everyday aftermath of violence in post-genocide Rwanda. It examines the ways in which the violence of the genocide against Tutsi occupies the spatial memory of Rwanda's landscape and the kinds of individual and national narratives such memory allows and disavows. Her project will engage young women at the Rose M Singer Center for Women on Rikers Island to produce a literary journal discussing social justice issues such as racism, slavery, incarceration and sexual violence through the prism of art. This project expands on existing programs developed by the Justice in Education Initiative at Columbia University, a collaboration between the Center for Justice and the Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Heyman Center Fellow 2016-17 Rhiannon Stephens specializes in the history of precolonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the nineteenth century. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of marriage as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Uganda political, economic and social change. She is currently working on a second monograph that is a history of poverty and wealth as economic and social concepts in eastern Uganda over the past thousand years. 

Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah is an academic, artist, and linguist whose work bridges the gap between the ivory tower and community. A Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D, Ullah is the recipient of the Presidential Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor at Columbia. Her work has been published in journals and webzines like Baraza, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Arabic Literature and Translation, and The Once and Future Classroom. As a Public Humanities fellow, Ullah facilitated storytelling workshops for young women through the Rikers Education Program and has taught literature through the Justice-In-Education Initiative.