CSREA’s fellows contribute greatly to the intellectual life of the Center. As they work through their ongoing research, writing, and artistic projects in community with one another, they produce new ideas about race, ethnicity, and indigeneity that inspire our community on campus and beyond.
This semester, CSREA is proud to host a cohort of eight Faculty, Postdoctoral, and Graduate Fellows selected from a pool of exceptional applicants.
Learn more about the Fall 2023 cohort below.
Faculty Fellows
Keisha Blain is Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, Blain is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Professor Blain is now writing A Global Struggle: How Black Women Led the Fight for Human Rights (W.W. Norton). The book offers a sweeping history of human rights framed by the work and ideas of Black women in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present.
Heather Dorries is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Geography and Planning and the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban planning and settler colonialism and examines how Indigenous intellectual traditions—including Indigenous environmental knowledge, legal orders, and cultural production—can serve as the foundation for justice-oriented approaches to planning.
Sarah Stefana Smith is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. They are an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist whose research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer theory and affect studies, visuality and aesthetics, exploring the intersection of repair and disrepair, aesthetics and visuality in difference (e.g. race, gender, sexuality).
Lucia Hulsether is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. A theorist of religion, culture, and politics in the Americas, her core areas of study and teaching include capitalism and labor, histories of social movements, feminist theory, popular culture and media, and other topics in contemporary cultural critique.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Ella Friday is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Race and Ethnicity, finishing the second of a two-year appointment. Her areas of specialization include mass incarceration, women, gender and sexuality studies, time and social theory, and social movements. She worked as a prisoner’s rights advocate, community organizer, and researcher for her forthcoming book project, Weaponizing and Resisting Time.
Maya Singhal joins CSREA as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Race and Ethnicity, entering the first of a two-year appointment. Their current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of mutual aid, criminalized activities, and community defense between African American and Chinese American populations in New York City. They also write more broadly about capital, forensics, and childhood.
Interdisciplinary Opportunity Graduate Fellows
Melaine Ferdinand-King is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Africana Studies, joining CSREA this Fall as an Interdisciplinary Opportunity Fellow. Her current work is a cultural history and exploration of Afro-Surrealism throughout the Black Radical Tradition, emphasizing 20th-century U.S. and Francophone Caribbean art and activism. In addition to her graduate work, Melaine is a poet and curator committed to bridging gaps between academia and the Providence community. She enjoys jazz and soul music, language learning, and comedy.
Siraj Sindhu is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science focused on political theory and the history of philosophy. He is interested especially in dialectical materialism's distinctive conceptualizations of freedom & alienation; the mutual interplay of ecological attunement and the organization of democratic life; and the relation between religion, spirit, and the political. His dissertation project, “From Critiques of Progress to Practices of Presence: Temporalities of Resistance in Contemporary Political Thought,” draws upon a diverse archive to theorize a collective ethic of presence as a mode of resistance to incursions by capitalist and colonial powers.