Current Fellows
2023-2024 Faculty Development Program Fellows
Dr. Mia Alafaireet, Assistant Professor - Department of English (College of Liberal Arts)
Mia Alafaireet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin whose research bridges African American literature, medical history, and the environmental humanities. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Transplanting Blackness, which explores intersections between the Harlem Renaissance’s botanical motifs and New Negro health discourse. Her work is published and/or forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Modernism/modernity.
Talk Title: “Between Man and His Plants”: Agricultural Metaphor and Eugenic Debate in New Negro Homesteading
Dr. Rosemary Candelario, Associate Professor - Department of Theatre and Dance (College of Fine Arts)
Rosemary Candelario was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. Research interests include Asian and Asian American dance, dance and ecology, site-related performance, arts activism, and representations of sex and reproduction in performance and popular culture. In addition to publishing numerous journal articles, she is the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018) and with Matthew Henley of Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices (Routledge 2023). Her current book project builds on decades of work for abortion access to examine performances about and in response to abortion by artists and activists in the US. Rosemary is Associate Professor of Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas at Austin with an appointment in the Expanding Approaches to American Arts cluster. She serves as the Dance Studies Association Vice President for Publications and Research and holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA. www.rosemarycandelario.net
Talk Title: Viva Ruiz’s “Thank God for Abortion” Project and Emergent Cultural Politics
Dr. Jennifer Donegan, Assistant Professor - Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Dell Medical School)
Jennifer Donegan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Dell Medical School. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the Institute for Early Life Adversity Research. Donegan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Christian University with a B.S. in psychology. She obtained her Ph.D. in neuroscience from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Prior to joining Dell Med, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio. Donegan’s research focuses on understanding how stress throughout the lifespan affects neural circuit function. Specifically, her research examines the effect of early life and adult stress on the function of ventral hippocampal circuits known to be involved in schizophrenia. Her lab uses a combination of techniques, including behavioral phenotyping, in vivo extracellular electrophysiology and molecular assays. The ultimate goal of the Donegan laboratory is to understand how neural circuit function is disrupted in schizophrenia so that new therapeutic targets can be identified. Donegan has received numerous awards for her work, including an American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Travel Award and a BRAIN Initiative Pathway to Independence Award.
Talk Title: Targeting Ventral Hippocampal Circuits to Treat Schizophrenia
Dr. Nicole Ramsey, Assistant Professor - Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (College of Liberal Arts)
Nicole D. Ramsey is an Assistant Professor in the department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women and Gender Studies. Her research examines formations of blackness, identity and nation in Latin America and the Caribbean through an interdisciplinary and Black diaspora lens. Her research and teaching expertise is on Black Central Americans in the isthmus and in Diaspora and she is currently working on her first book, a transnational study of Black and Black indigenous formations of Belizean identity through postcolonial performances via national commemoration visual culture, digital space, migration and popular culture.
Talk Title: (Re)imagining Black Central American Migrations: A Gendered Analysis
Dr. Carolina Snaider, Assistant Professor - Department of Curriculum and Instruction (College of Education)
Dr. Carolina Snaider is an Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Texas at Austin. Former preschool teacher, her work focuses on gender justice in early childhood education policy and practice. Taking up critical policy studies alongside poststructural feminism, queer and trans-informed frameworks, Dr. Snaider conducts qualitative and mixed-method studies to examine the structures and systems of power that shape gender policy processes; and how gender-justice practices are taken up in early childhood classrooms.
Talk Title: “Because Men Don’t Get Pregnant”: Unpacking Early Childhood Teachers' Cissexists Biases Through Photo-Elicitation Interviews
Dr. Julija Šukys, Associate Professor - Department of English (College of Liberal Arts)
Julija Šukys (PhD, University of Toronto) is the author of three books (Silence is Death, Epistolophilia, and Siberian Exile), one book-length translation (And I burned with shame), and of many essays. In her work, Šukys draws on archives, interviews, bibliographical research, and observation to write about everyday lives in war-torn or marginal places, about women’s life-writing, and about the legacy of violence across generations and national borders. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and, in Fall 2022, held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto. Her current book-in-progress is Bloom: In the Campus Shooting Archives.
Talk Title: Bloom: Gender and Violence in the University Archives