Mandel Center for the Humanities

"Transmitting Spirit Through Song: Sonic Memory, Spirituality, and Survival in the Resonances of Igbo Chant and African American Spirituals"

This project investigates the resonances between Igbo chant traditions and African American spirituals, examining how sound carries memory, spirituality, and cultural knowledge across time and displacement. Centering the concept of sonic memory, it approaches chant as a spiritual technology through which communities sustain identity, transmit cosmological knowledge, and endure conditions of rupture. Through a hybrid methodology that combines archival research, ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria and the U.S. South, performance documentation, and community collaboration, the project foregrounds the role of practitioners, especially women, as primary custodians of these traditions. It culminates in both a scholarly study and a public-facing digital platform that curates chants, oral histories, and performance materials, revealing how survival is enacted through resonance, through sound that echoes, transforms, and continues to carry meaning across generations and geographies.

"Pathways to Social Inclusion among Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities"

Widespread social isolation and loneliness have been recognized as a national public health crisis in the United States. My research centers on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), who have disproportionately high rates of both. One solution is fully realized social inclusion, an ongoing experience comprised of quality community participation and meaningful relationships. Pathways to social inclusion depend on both formal and informal support systems, but these systems are increasingly under strain. My three-paper, multi-method dissertation explores the relationship between direct care workforce challenges, family caregiver supports, and social inclusion among people with IDD.

For my third paper, I am using an inclusive, qualitative research design, grounded in
collaboration with two community research partners with IDD, to further explore how support systems shape social inclusion among underrepresented IDD communities. My co-researchers, Austin Carr and Tatiana Thomas, are experts in social inclusion. In addition to having lived expertise as people with IDD, Carr and Thomas co-founded a non-profit organization called Access 2 Community and Friendship, which plans social events at least once a month to bring people with and without disabilities together in the community. Carr and Thomas are compensated hourly for their involvement in every research stage, from design to dissemination. Data will be collected through a series of co-facilitated focus groups with adult participants with IDD, with targeted recruitment of Latina and Spanish-speaking individuals. We plan to share findings with the community through plain language and video summaries of our work.

"The Kestenberg Reforms and the Utopian Dilemmas of Weimar Music- Pedagogical Policy"

The Kestenberg reforms in music education were established under Leo Kestenberg (1882–1962) during his tenure as an administrator for the Prussian Ministry of Culture in Berlin. Kestenberg’s policies, first proposed in his 1921 treatise Musikerziehung und Musikpflege, offered a utopian vision for how music could form the foundation of public education and civic life, but his ideas were met with significant resistance in the wave of cultural politics that gripped the late Weimar years. This dissertation seeks to understand the retreat of the reforms beyond the conventional narrative of Kestenberg’s dismissal in 1932. What factors undermined the Kestenberg reforms and how was it that music became so contentious within the Prussian Ministry? Building on the work of Dietmar Schenk and Wilfried Gruhn, I aim to demonstrate how the reforms were exemplary in many ways but also unrealistic – the conservative backlash in the realm of state policy proved that the movement to propagate music education as the fundamental building block of society had its limits. Questions of tuition, repertoire, and curricula became intractable dilemmas that struck at the heart of ideological conflict between the more universalist Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the religiously conservative parties, such as Zentrum. Music-pedagogical thought and policy coming from the progressive circles to which Kestenberg belonged ultimately failed to bridge classical music education with the burgeoning state, and inadvertently laid groundwork for cultural-nationalism. The Kestenberg reforms make for a useful case study of music converging and conflicting with statism, one that can teach about the intrinsic value of music in society and simultaneously warn about the risks of lofty cultural policy.

"Solar Pastoralism: Energy, Agriculture, and the Fields of the Future"

My dissertation examines the expansion of and resistance to solar development in rural, agricultural areas of the United States, with a focus on New England. Solar development has long been contested terrain in the United States, in part due to decades of climate denialism and anti-environmentalism advanced by fossil-fuel energy incumbents. At the same time, solar is a land-intensive energy source. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that decarbonization in the United States will require over 10 million acres of land to be converted into energy, and 90% of new energy development will take place in rural communities. In an effort to understand challenges and opportunities posed by the transition to renewables, this research asks: 1) How is solar re-shaping rural, agricultural communities in the midst of the energy transition, and how is this process in turn shaped by rural, place-based politics? 2) How does solar development, and the ongoing anti-solar backlash, relate to historical patterns of spatialized environmental inequality? To answer these questions, I use a mixed-methods approach that involves 1) mapping the socio-spatial dimensions of solar development and 2) collecting qualitative data through interviews and participant observation with farmers, solar developers and advocates, and residents of rural communities.

"Reimagining Caribbean Women’s Futurity Through Scales of Belonging In Literary and Digital Spheres"

This dissertation, “Reimagining Caribbean Women’s Futurity Through Scales of Belonging In Literary and Digital Spheres,” posits ancestral lineages, familial relationships, the self, and the digital collective as “scales of belonging” in which Caribbean people wrestle with their ruinous inheritance in order to create alternative worlds in the face of colonial violence. Each chapter examines a different thread of how Indo- and Afro-Caribbean women and queer subjects emerge in the contemporary moment: tracing archival genealogies of indentureship and its intersections with enslavement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; interrogating fraught familial relationships; rejecting imposed heteronormative identities; and reimagining communal subjectivity through oral histories. In this way, all the chapters of “Reimagining Caribbean Women’s Futurity Through Scales of Belonging in Literary and Digital Scales” weave a tapestry of different scales of belonging that helps us understand how novels, poems, memoirs, and digital archives generate alternative imaginaries.

"Archives of Slow Mediation: Vernacular Ecomedias and Decolonial Interventions in South
Asia"

With the support of the Mandel Research Grant, I will analyze 20th-century Bengali periodicals and graphic narratives housed at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), and the National Library of India to examine the mediated landscapes of colonial and post-independence Bengal. By studying fragmented records—ranging from taped Bhojpuri folk songs to vernacular archives of slow mediation—I aim to trace how these ecomedias offer a decolonial intervention against imperial temporalities of speed and transparency. This research will explore how material and oral archives facilitate a slow translation of toxic histories and forced displacements that exceed human control. By situating these material residues within the broader context of planetary critical theory, my project investigates the intersections of mediated toxicity, vernacular archives, and postcolonial ecological endurance.

"Minga de Saberes: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization and Education Initiatives in Andean Colombia"

Indigenous activist networks in Colombia function as pre-colonial corridors of exchange that have persisted and adapted through ongoing armed conflict. Communities connected through periodic national Minga eruptions are reclaiming education as a form of political power as they continue to disproportionately face the conflict's effects. This research hones in on two cases in Andean Colombia as they advocate for culturally-rooted schools, revitalize ancestral languages, and develop their histories on their own terms. Through community workshops, children's books, and language classes, these communities are shaping education in zones of conflict and opening dialogues with regional ministries. These initiatives simultaneously reveal geographic logics of the armed conflict, the effects of mass displacement that activated urban Indigenous organizing in Bogotá, and the continuity of Indigenous political life. This summer, with support from this grant, I will travel to Colombia to conduct preliminary interviews with Indigenous educators, laying the relational groundwork for my dissertation on Indigenous self-organizing and autonomous education.

“Where Does the City Begin?: Walls, Access, and Urban Mobility in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Constantinople"

My dissertation investigates the socio-spatial dynamics of the early Ottoman capital by examining urban thresholds such as the land and sea walls, gates, and zones of passage that mediated movement and access. Building on a focus on the Theodosian land walls as both physical fortifications and legal, economic, and symbolic boundaries, the project explores how urban limits structured patterns of mobility within and in-and-out of the city in the decades following the Ottoman conquest. Through spatial analysis and close readings of diverse textual sources, including visitors’ travelogues, Ottoman Turkish manuscripts, archival documents, endowment deeds, and administrative records, the study traces how religious institutions, residents, state officials, and outside visitors negotiated the meanings and uses of liminal spaces.