Joseph van der Naald’s dissertation examines the conditions that fostered the rapid growth of public-sector employees’ unions in the United States beginning in the 1960s.

Using a historical comparative analysis of government workers’ movements in Michigan and Ohio, two Midwestern states that once maintained divergent collective bargaining laws for public employees, Joseph’s research traces how insurgent unions in both cases drew upon a diverse set of resources and adapted their forms of mobilization to successfully organize across disparate institutional contexts.

Joseph has published research in Social Service Review, Social Science Research, and the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, and he has taught at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. His dissertation research has received support from the Labor Research and Action Network and the Walter P. Reuther Library. Joseph received his B.A. at Portland State University and an M.A. from the Central European University.

Raquel Rose's research seeks to understand the impact of systemic trauma, resource precarity, and deficit-based narratives around racial/ethnic minority and SOGIE diverse youth on psychosocial outcomes particularly in the mental health, education and legal fields.

Raquel’s dissertation, ROSES in the Educational Margins: Analyzing the Impact of Unmet Needs, Trauma, and Stakeholder Perceptions on School Pushout and Sense of Safety for Black and Latine Girls, explores how the mismatch between the purported aims of institutions and the expressed safety needs of girls leads to negative psychosocial outcomes. This project aims to create change within systems, strengthen community-based partnerships outside of the formal system, and directly collaborate with girls of color to hold contexts accountable.

As a first-generation, Caribbean immigrant, her scholarship is deeply rooted in her identity as a black woman of the diaspora. Her work received a 2023 Ford Foundation honorable mention and was selected for the 2023 Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz fellowship.

L. Chardé Reid is a historical archaeology doctoral candidate at William & Mary. She has over twelve-years of experience in collections management, geographic information systems (GIS), compliance review, cultural resource management, and engaged archaeology.

Her dissertation, Beyond the Shores: An Archaeological Exploration of Racial Formation, Self-Making, and Community on Mulberry Island, Virginia (1619-1705), is an interdisciplinary study of how the emergent process of racialization led to a reconceptualization of gender, class, and sociopolitical relationships in seventeenth-century Virginia. Her field work is based in southeast Virginia, where she works alongside members of a local descendant community to explore the lives of their ancestors. She uses archaeological objects along with archival documents and oral histories to better understand the ways African-descended people negotiate the transforming social landscapes of settler-colonial Virginia.

Recently, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (AY 2023-2024) which will support completion of her doctoral research and writing.

Bethany Johnson’s dissertation, In the Aftermath of the ‘Lost’ Pandemic: Philadelphia, 1919-1923, reexamines the period following the catastrophic influenza wave in the fall of 1918.

Bethany’s focus on post-pandemic Philadelphia utilizes a range of historical subdisciplines (e.g., social, urban, environmental, and queer history) to reconstruct the experience of a diverse population. She employs overlooked or unexamined sources, such as city council records, post-pandemic surveys, records from children’s homes, and physician’s files describing post-pandemic health problems. This approach is central to understanding how pandemics end, how a community seizes opportunities for change after outbreaks and contextualizes responses to future pandemics and public health crises. One of her key findings is that influenza was not a great equalizer, as is so often claimed. Black and immigrant families and poor and working-class communities lost far more folks than white, middle-class, and upper-class families. Thousands of families institutionalized children or rehoused them in other family units; others left the city.

Bethany's dissertation project reflects her research focus, which is to examine how individuals and institutions have created, normalized, and reproduced science, medical technology, and public health discourses from the nineteenth century to the present.

In her public-facing work in media interviews and on podcasts, she uses historical events to ask difficult questions about the present. For example, in a society built on extractive labor, how will we include the millions of Americans now struggling with long-COVID in economic and social recovery? Her dissertation project offers critical complications for narratives questioning the effectiveness of masking, social distancing, layered testing, and other actions that protect the disabled and those who face a greater exposure risk through their work (e.g., bus and Lyft drivers).

Bethany received her B.A. in History from Nyack College, an MPhil in Development Studies from the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Glasgow, and an M.A. in Historical Studies from The New School for Social Research. She is the 2022-2023 Albert M. Greenfield Research Fellow for the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Her 2019 book, co-authored with Dr. Margaret Quinlan, You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise is available through Rutgers University Press.

Kimberly Hess is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests center broadly around the culture and politics of inclusion and exclusion within states and nations.

Kim's dissertation, “Representation Matters: Minority Inclusion and American National Identity in K-12 U.S. State Social Studies Standards,” considers how social, historical, and regional contexts affect who and what is included in contemporary US social studies education and how differences in these inclusions relate to different narratives of American history and national identity. She uses a comparative analysis of all 50 states’ K-12 social studies curriculum standards, alongside case studies of the process of standards creation and revision in six states, to identify patterns within social studies education in terms of minority representation, characterizations of US history and government, and portrayals of American national identity. She is interested in the ways that nationalism affects and is affected by the content of history and civics education in particular.

Kim holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in History from the University of Maryland. While at Michigan, she has taught many courses in the sociology department, as well as a first-year writing course of her own design on nations and nationalism. Kim also served as an online teaching course consultant for her department in 2020 and published a co-authored article in Teaching Sociology based on this work supporting instructors during the pandemic. When she’s not teaching or working on research, Kim enjoys gardening, traveling, and spending time with her family.

Katherine Maldonado Fabela is a mother of three from South Central Los Angeles, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her research interests include medical sociology, inequalities, critical criminology, and visual methodology. She earned her B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UCLA, Katherine conducted research as a McNair research fellow on gang-affiliated mothers’ resistance through education. She received her master’s degree in Sociology where she examined the ways gang-affiliated women experience institutional violence and developed a conceptual model on life course criminalization. She continues this line of work in her dissertation by examining the experiences of Latina mothers with the carceral system, specifically the Child Welfare system and mental health.

Katherine’s research has been published in multiple journals and book chapters and her work has been included in policymaking toolkits at the United Nations.