Current Fellows Fall 2024
Faculty Fellows
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Marina Bilbija
Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies
Read MoreIn her writing and teaching alike, Marina Bilbija analyzes the role of print culture, more specifically, magazines and newspapers, in the making of black internationalist publics. Her work thus bridges the concerns of African American and Global Anglophone literary studies with those of book history. Bilbija’s current book manuscript, Worlds of Color: Black Print Networks and the Making of the Anglophone World shows how a vibrant culture of citation, advertising, and reprinting between black and anti-racist editors in the UK, US, and Nigeria produced a new black literary and political sphere that she refers to as “the Black Anglosphere.” Her other scholarly interests include interdisciplinarity in the black intellectual tradition (especially in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois), and comparative studies of race and ethnicity. Her work has appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Oxford Bibliographies, the South Atlantic Review, and Modern Fiction Studies. -
Katie Brewer Ball
Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies & Theater
Read MoreKatie Brewer Ball (KBB) is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department & affiliated Faculty in Feminst, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University where they previously held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities. Brewer Ball earned their PhD in Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Their research focuses on performance, visual culture, Black and Indigenous aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Brewer Ball is the author of The Only Way Out: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape (Duke University Press, 2024), editor of Mommy Wound, with artist Vick Quezada, and is currently working on a new project about art criticism, arctic science, and colonialism. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball curates Adult Contemporary and publishes creative non-fiction. -
Jeffers Lennox
Professor of History
Read MoreJeffers works on the history of Early North America from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. His specific areas of interest include the British, French, and Indigenous relations in northeastern North America, and the impact that Canada had on the American Revolution and the creation of the United States.
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Zaira Simone-Thompson
Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Read MoreZaira Simone-Thompson is an assistant professor in the African American Studies department. As a geographer, her work and teaching centers on contemporary experiences and representations of slavery, colonialism and uneven development in the Caribbean. Her past work examined the symbolic and material forces of reparative claims in Barbados—a small but politically large landscape. Her current book project explores the multiplicity of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean visions of recovery, wholeness, and justice relating to the geographic realities of chattel slavery, indentureship and colonialism.
Zaira Simone-Thompson is also the co-coordinator of the Caribbean Studies Minor here at Wesleyan University.
Zaira embraces teaching as a form of active engagement and encourages students to approach the course material as a political “toolbox” and more importantly to show up as their most authentic selves.
Andrew W. Mellon Fellows
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Devin Choudhury
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Read MoreDevin Choudhury is an interdisciplinary literary scholar working across the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, science and technology studies (STS), and critical geography. His research focuses on the agrarian roots, rots, and routes of global capitalism, attending to the ways in which literary engagements with agriculture—and, more broadly, labor-mediated modes of human-nonhuman relation—can reveal, decompose, and reconstitute the material, conceptual, and rhetorical bases of our seemingly all-encompassing socioeconomic system.
Devin’s current projects include Forms of Development, a monograph that maps a tradition of critiques of and alternatives to agrarian development in twentieth century South Asian narrative literature; Subsistence Beyond Man, a monograph that turns to anticolonial literary visions of subsistence in order to critically reevaluate the concept in light of our current ecological conjuncture; and a journal article attending to the liminality of the human corpse as a site from which to think forms of historical continuity and rupture, as well as more-than-human community, that arise in the midst and wake of statist violence in the (post)colony.
Devin received his BA in English from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Department of Rhetoric, where he also completed a designated emphasis in STS.
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Cameron Hu
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Read MoreCameron Hu is an anthropologist whose work explores questions of technoscience, capitalism, colonialism, and environment in contexts of U.S. empire. His projects include Knowing Destroying, a theory of imperialism by way of ethnographic fieldwork in a Texas oil zone; Powerpoint Metaphysics, a book-length essay on aesthetics and geopolitics in the “systems” epoch; a sequence of theoretical articles on the liberal form of life and its deeply-ramified grammar of historicity, activity, and necessity; and, with several collaborators, an exploration of secular epistemomania and epistemophobia. As a member of the LiCo group, he produces fictions, films, and installations examining the choreography of mental and environmental life, most recently for Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). Cameron received a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation received the 2022 Daniel F. Nugent Prize in Historical Anthropology. He comes to the Center for the Humanities from Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. In Spring 2025 he will teach “Burnout,” on ecological, psychic, and political exhaustion.
Research Fellows
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Hassan Almohammed
Read MoreHassan Almohammed is a Visiting Associate Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, where his academic pursuits span the fields of French, Francophone, and Intercultural Studies, Middle East Studies, Media, and Environmental Studies. He is not only an academic but also a journalist and digital artist. His multilingual abilities extend to English, Arabic, and French.
Previously, Hassan taught a seminar on the Arab Spring at Marburg University, affiliated with the Center of Conflict Studies in Germany. His academic experience also includes serving as a Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara and Brandeis University, along with being a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University (Columbia Global Centre| Amman). Additionally, he held the position of Professor of French at Sivas University in Turkey.
As a journalist and translator, Hassan has significantly contributed to documentary filmmaking in Paris, collaborating with notable entities such as Capa Presse and Arte. He has authored numerous non-fiction articles in both French and Arabic languages.
His academic record includes multiple peer-reviewed articles, a book on Poetry and Ecology, an Anthologie de poésie écologique (2019), and a My Digital Art Book (2022), Hassan has delivered talks at various international symposiums, spanning different countries including France, Tunisia, Algeria, the UK, USA, Romania, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Cameroon, and Cote d'Ivoire.
Recently, Hassan completed a critical text in Arabic that delves into the intriguing relationship between Meteorology and Writing, focusing on narrating climate within the Arab Novel. The novels examined in this work include "The Blue Gerboa" by the Algerian Mohammad Baba Ami, "Endings" by the Saudi Abdel Rahman Munif, "The Sail and the Storm" by the Syrian Hannah Minah, and "The Gold Dust (Al Tibr)" by the Libyan Ibrahim Al Koni. He has also authored a novel titled "Papers of Love and Death: From Don Quichotte to Abu Khaizaran," which explores the impact of war in Syria.
Currently, Hassan is actively engaged in writing another novel that explores the theme of Sudanese immigration to Saudi Arabia, titled "The Immigrant's Coffin." Additionally, he is working on a Monograph project: Poetic Meteorology and Eco-Writing, Analysis of Double Climate in Francophone Literature.
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S.E. Freeman
Read MoreS.'s research broadly explores modes of categorization and enumeration, and the epistemological assumptions and hierarchies of value that shape and are shaped by such practices. Their dissertation asks how 'displacement' is made legible as an indicator of humanitarian need in contexts where migration is marked less by encampment than by more fluid forms of mobility. Attending to the discursive and material practices through which displacement is categorized, measured, and quantified in South Sudan, their dissertation asks how the use of biometric technology is changing the identification and evaluation of lives worth saving. Approaching the infrastructure of humanitarian data collection as a contested terrain through which decisions over life and death are made, S.'s work explores how humanitarians are mobilizing new technologies to adapt to a world defined by increasing movement, redefining what constitutes political life for a digital age.
S. is a Research Fellow at the Wesleyan Center for Humanities for Fall 2024 and is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Geography Department at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Their research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, as well as the Center for African Studies and Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley.
Student Fellows
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Greta Alexandra-Parker
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Isaiah Fraley
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Nic Galleno
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Aurora Guecia