New Fellows

Minali Aggarwal (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Departments of African American Studies and Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on identifying and interpreting the ways race is politically constructed and weaponized to serve both liberal and right-wing political projects. Her dissertation research examines how racialized data and statistical evidence generate new political challenges for racial justice movements, often subverting the radical and transformative demands of Black social movements.

Minali is also part of the editorial team for a forthcoming edited volume entitled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (NYU Press 2026), which examines the growing appeal of right-wing politics among communities of color in the U.S.

Before beginning graduate school, Minali worked as a data scientist for five years. She received her B.S. from Georgetown University in 2016.

Cam Cannon (they/them) is a scholar working at the intersection of trans studies, history of medicine, and social movement history within the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. Their dissertation, “Standard: Trans Activism and the History of Gender-Affirming Care in the U.S.,” considers the diverse ways that trans activists have worked to improve access to gender-affirming care from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Through oral history interviews, legal analysis, and a wide range of archival sources, “Standard” shows how these activists have both shaped and adapted to major changes in public attitudes and legal frameworks. “Standard” pays particular attention to the range of viewpoints, tactics, and political investments between various trans individuals and communities, as well as the differential availability of care along axes of race, class, ability, incarceration status, and documentation status.

Cam’s writing has appeared in Real Life magazine and Feminist Media Studies. They were a 2024-2025 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow.

Jennifer Dunn (she/her) is a lawyer and a PhD candidate in medical sociology at UCSF. Her research focuses on reproductive health, social justice, and health care systems.

Her dissertation investigates the origins and persistence of segregated pregnancy care in the U.S. Using legal and historical methods, she traces how segregation by race and class was created and sustained from Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era; how it was reconfigured through the design of the Medicaid program and reinforced through health care financing; and how medical education contributes to the normalization of segregated care.

Jennifer’s qualitative research focuses on perinatal care at two university medical centers: one using a traditional model that assigns Medicaid patients to resident-run clinics, and a second that adopted a payer-integrated model, blinding insurance at intake. Through interviews and fieldwork, she explores how providers and trainees experience these different models.

Jennifer holds a J.D. from UC Law SF and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. She co-founded the California Abortion Alliance and served as its Director from 2007 to 2021.

Brianne Felsher (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at University of California, Berkeley. Their dissertation project focuses on the legal history of queer families in the United States from the early 1800s through the early 1900s. They argue that queer people deliberately navigated legal institutions to form their families, and that queer families were neither inconceivable nor presumptively illegal.

Their article, “‘Sex Changed by a Court’s Decree’: The History-and-Tradition of Gender Transitions in the United States,” is forthcoming in Georgetown Law Journal. Outside UC Berkeley, Brianne teaches free online queer history classes open to the community. They also volunteer for the Monroe County History Center’s project on the queer history of Bloomington.

Their work has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. They have a JD from Berkeley Law and a BA from Columbia University.

Orlando Lara (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Irvine. Orlando is an anthropologist, Ethnic Studies scholar, and writer. Working with colleagues in Texas, he co-founded the Ethnic Studies Network of Texas, and has most recently been involved in the creation of a high school-level course in American Indian/Native Studies.

Grounded in the Rio Grande Valley and Southeast Texas, Orlando Lara’s dissertation focuses on the growth of identity precarity and insecurity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and US passports. While research on liminal non-citizen statuses has flourished in recent years, his ethnographic and archival research opens new ground in the study of the ongoing and intensifying challenges to legal citizenship and other forms of purportedly ‘legal’ status, including birthright citizenship itself.

Working with the artist Delilah Montoya, he co-created “Sed: A Trail of Thirst” and, with the Sin Huellas Artist Collective, the multimedia installation, “Detention Nation.”

Rosa Navarro (she/her) is a first-generation college student and the proud daughter and granddaughter of Mexican Immigrant farmworkers from the Pacific Northwest. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Rosa’s dissertation project is a transnational community-engaged research project in collaboration with Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (FUJ), an independent Indigenous Farmworker Union in Washington. Her project tracks the rise of the H-2A guest worker Program in the state and its long-term implications for local farmworker communities as the temporary guest worker program displaces and replaces local farmworkers from the agricultural labor market. She is also shadowing a transnational labor recruiter who recruits mostly rural Mexican men to work as temporary guest workers in the US to understand the role of labor recruiters in the fast expansion of the H-2A guest worker program.

Rosa was a community organizer for over a decade before returning to academia. She worked mostly in Immigrant rights work, deportation defense campaigns, and organized alongside domestic workers in Chicago for several years. She has an MA in Sociology from the University of Albany, SUNY, an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and an MA in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo. She holds a BA in History from Portland State University. Her public work has been published in Open Democracy.

Michael Nishimura (he/him) is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCSB. Michael researches the relationship between Asian racialization, the carceral state, and the migrant punishment system. His dissertation focuses on the pathways and livelihoods of formerly incarcerated and deportable Asian Americans to explore the connections between Asian racialization, carcerality, and ongoing imperial relations. Critiquing normative understandings of "reentry," it analyzes how social control and economic precarity affect Asian Americans and provides novel theorizations of criminalization and racialization processes. The research also centers anti-carceral and anti-deportation organizing led by systems-impacted people to explore the complexities of solidarity and community building towards collective liberation.

Michael is also an organizer with mutual aid and abolitionist organizations in Los Angeles. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and BA from Vassar College.

Victor Ultra Omni (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their dissertation, The Love Ball: A History of New York City’s House-Structured Ballroom Culture, 1972–1992, offers a historical account of ballroom’s origins through oral histories, participatory action research, and memory work. Their work intervenes in dominant histories of ballroom culture by foregrounding Black forms of intertwined kinship as history-making: a relational praxis that shapes collective survival, rearranges Black femininities, and preserved intergenerational memory amid the grief of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Victor’s body of scholarship grounds approaches to theories of Black gender and sexuality. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Black Scholar, African American Intellectual Historical Society, and Australian Feminist Studies. Previous and current academic appointments include the inaugural Trans Studies at the Commons Fellow at the University of Kansas,  Scholar in Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute and the Ethics and Outreach Coordinator at the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives. They also co-direct the 2025–2026 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship with Imagining America. Victor’s work is supported by the Mellon Foundation, Society for History of Visual Anthropology, the Ten:Tacles Initiative for Transgender History.

Since 2017, Victor has been a proud member of the Worldwide Pioneering House of Ultra Omni. Currently, they are the co-editing Trans Studies Quarterly issue 13.3 with Dr. Eva Pensis and ballroom-archivist-filmmaker Noelle Deleon and a scholarly advisor to the City Museum of New York City's exhibition ¡Urban Stomp!

Guillermo Paez Gallardo (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Irvine. His dissertation, Demolition Men: Precarity, Illegality, and Masculinity at a Latino Workplace, explores how undocumented migrant men navigate an informal and high-risk occupation. Using ethnographic and qualitative methods, Guillermo researches migrant work life at the intersection of race, illegality, and gender. He draws on three years of fieldwork laboring alongside migrant men to understand their struggles with workplace injuries and deaths, exploitation, and the threat of deportation.

Guillermo has a MA and BA in Sociology from UC Irvine. At UC Irvine he’s been part of campaigns and mentorship programs to support undocumented and marginalized students.

Summer Sullivan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. Summer’s research takes advantage of the evolving context in which technologies are transforming social and environmental relations, especially for already exploited, racialized workers. Her dissertation traces the uneven ways in which agricultural automation is unfolding, but also its profound limits within the delicate, leafy farming systems of California’s Salinas Valley. Through interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, her research shows how the materiality of crops like lettuce continues to organize labor and limit technology. Contributing to analyses of the uneven racial and class dynamics of the “future of work,” the project centers the emergent, uncertain relationships among farmworkers, the plants they care for, and the fragile futures of capitalism.

Summer also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Lehigh University. She organizes with UAW 4811.

E. Taylor Silverman (they/them) is a PhD candidate specializing in transgender studies, childhood studies, and medical anthropology.

Their dissertation examines the everyday practices and politics of pediatric gender affirming care in the contemporary United States. Based on 16 months of in-depth clinic- and community-based ethnographic fieldwork, this research centers the experiences and perspectives of youth, families, and clinicians negotiating these politicized issues in their daily lives.

Taylor’s research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Society for Medical Anthropology. Before graduate school, they received a BA from Brown University and worked in public health research.

Hazel Velasco Palacios (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Pennsylvania State University. Hazel’s dissertation examines how structural and symbolic violence shape healthcare access for Latina/o immigrant farmworker families in Pennsylvania’s dairy and mushroom industries. Using an ethnographic approach, she analyzes how legal precarity, particularly deportability and liminal legality, and gendered labor expectations affect family wellbeing and access to care. Her research draws from fieldwork conducted in counties with large farmworker populations, including over two years of participant observation in food pantries, mobile clinics, and mutual aid networks.

The study highlights the everyday strategies farmworker families use to navigate healthcare exclusions while critically examining the limits of grassroots resilience in the face of systemic neglect.

Hazel’s work has been published in The Journal of Rural Health, Rural Sociology, and Women’s Studies Quarterly and The Conversation. She serves on the advisory council of Mighty Writers El Futuro Kennett and collaborates with immigrant-serving nonprofits.

Her research has been supported by the ASA DDRIG and the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety

Emily Hoffman (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the state child protection apparatus in the U.S., and in Eastern Oklahoma in particular. She writes about how “child abuse” came to be an object of knowledge and state intervention starting in the 1960s, focusing on the repression of political economy, the displacement of questions of historical repair and justice by the trauma concept, racialized and classed reckonings of kinship, and the figure of the child as a figure of projection and fantasy.

She has been an Affiliate Scholar at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Curatorial and Editorial Manager of the Social Study of Disappearance Lab at Columbia. She is also a poet. She volunteers with Poetic Justice, where she writes in community with women incarcerated in Oklahoma.

Meredith Jacobson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies Program and Sociology Department at University of Oregon. She is a non-Native researcher and organizer with FireGeneration Collaborative, a youth and Indigenous-led coalition working to reimagine fire policy and culture.

Her dissertation explores historical and present-day relationships to wildfire as a window into land relations. Through analysis of historical documents, her research examines how land, labor, and fire are co-constructed under settler colonialism in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Partnering with FireGeneration Collaborative, her dissertation also engages young people in collaborative listening circles to envision their futures working and living with fire.

Meredith has a B.S. in Forestry from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Forest Ecosystems and Society from Oregon State University.  Her background working in land management motivates her to pursue community-engaged scholarship that disrupts settler colonial power and promotes environmental justice.

Ellie Kaplan (she/her) is a PhD student at UC Davis where she studies the intersection of disability and US bureaucratic histories. Her dissertation explores how the National Park Service implemented the civil rights provision, Section 504, of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act from the 1970s to the present. Of particular interest are the ways disabled visitors and employees influenced the process and made the law meaningful to their lives.

As an intern with the National Park Service, Ellie conducted oral histories and wrote several articles for their website. The articles range from highlighting disabled visitors’ feedback forms at Yosemite National Park to comparing three guidebooks written by and for disabled visitors, and more. Additionally, Ellie is interested in the integration of disability stories and themes into K-12 curriculums. She has worked for the Library of Congress and the California History-Social Science Project on this endeavor.

Ellie earned her M.A. in history from Syracuse University and her B.S. from Cornell University.

Katy Maldonado Dominguez (she/her) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her experiences as a Central American immigrant inform the question at the heart of her work: How do people find belonging? She uses displacement as a framework to understand the way various communities respond to and challenge social, political, legal, and economic systems that disenfranchise them and insist on stripping them of community, place, and identity. She is interested in exploring these themes in the lives of Central American students, undocumented queer parents, migrant caravans, and undocumented scholars.

As an interdisciplinary scholar she positions her work at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Central American Studies, Critical Human Geography, Critical University Studies, and Public Humanities.

She received her Bachelor’s Degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Geography from UCLA. Her dissertation, Displaced Kinship: A Politics of Belonging Among Central American Students, explores how children of Central American immigrants inherit and draw from legacies of displacement to articulate their identities, develop a political consciousness, and navigate higher education. Drawing from 40 interviews with students, she proposes a theoretical framework she names “displaced kinship” to demonstrate how Central American students refuse the disenfranchisement that displacement creates for their families and in this refusal develop a form of belonging.

Annie Powers (she/her) is a PhD candidate at UCLA. Annie is a scholar of homeless people's political struggles in the United States. She is an organizer with the Union de Vecinos and the Downtown Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Annie's dissertation focuses on the National Union of the Homeless and the struggle for urban land in the late 20th century United States. She analyzes the political power of homeless people within the US in the context of landless people's movements across the Global South. Her research on the long history of unhoused people's political movements stems directly from her work as an organizer of homeless people today.