Her dissertation, “Puerto Rican Tobacco Migration, Postwar Settlement, and Community Development in Hartford, Connecticut, 1947-1973,” documents the history of Puerto Ricans in the city and state and is based on the belief that communities are invested in knowledge-making practices and are entitled to seeing themselves in historical narratives. It also employs participatory methodologies to uncover records of marginalized communities and produce material that makes stories accessible through deliverables.

Elena is a member of Hartford’s Puerto Rican community, and her scholarship is deeply rooted in her identity as a Puerto Rican woman of the diaspora. She received her B.A. from Connecticut College in 2014, where she was selected as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She is a 2022 Humanities Without Walls Career Diversity Workshop Fellow and a 2022-2023 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow.

Her dissertation titled “The hands that feed us: experiences of migrant workers in food processing” explores the nexus between industrial food production, migration policies, and precarious working conditions. Centering first-hand accounts of a majority migrant and feminized workforce employed in twenty food processing companies, I develop a broad analysis of the industry’s working conditions and examine the racialized and gendered impacts these conditions have on the workers’ physical and emotional health, economic stability, and family well-being.

Her interest in the experiences of these particularly marginalized and vulnerable workers is part of a political commitment to build more equitable and sustainable workplaces, reflected in her methodological approaches. The questions and themes she pursues have been shaped by workers’ struggles and constructed through close collaboration with migrant workers’ organizations.

Lola received a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires and is the 2021-2021 Wayne Morse Fellow at the University of Oregon. She will be the 2022-2023 Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jones’s dissertation, “Jim Crow Prerogatives: Race and Consumption in the South, 1890-1980,” explores the ways Southerners’ experiences of food shopping varied according to race, and that Southerners’ experiences of race varied according to the way they shopped for food. Grocery stores have long been and remain sites of high-profile racial conflict, from the murder of Emmett Till to the murder of George Floyd. This project aims to understand why, by exploring the duality of consumption as both a mode of extracting resources from Black communities and a tool of anti-racist protest.

Prior to pursuing her Ph.D. at Yale, Micah completed her B.A. in History and African American Studies at Yale in 2016.