© photo by Jeff Day

Kaitlin Noss

Kaitlin Noss

Doctoral Student Fellow

Doctoral Student, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Project: Race, Land, and Revolution between the United States and Kenya

Kaitlin Noss is entering her 6th year in the American Studies doctoral program at NYU. She was raised as a radical environmentalist, and is a grateful student of the Black radical tradition, Indigenous resistance history, and the prison abolition movement. Her work focuses on the relationships between race, capital, and land in the post-WWII era of US imperialism. Specifically, her dissertation maps international anti-colonial and Black liberation movements, race-making, militarism, agriculture and environmental change between the US and Kenya from 1952-1998. The questions shaping her dissertation emerged out of 12 years of working with the Maasai Community Partnership Project—an international solidarity network undertaking research to support Indigenous land rights cases and monitor the practices of US and UK NGOs in East Africa. Her research, in turn, has grounded her activism in the US as a union organizer for the UAW and against policing, gentrification, and other forms of racial violence in New York City. She is also an Instructor at the innovative Social Justice and Human Rights Master’s program at Prescott College based in Arizona, teaching social movement theory and community organizing skills. She most enjoys spending time in Prospect Park with her dog Trotsky (political ideologies forgiven), and at the gay end of Riis beach with her wildly wonderful friends.

Simón Trujillo

Simón Trujillo

Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science

Project: Land Uprising: Mystical Materialism and the Indigenous Reclamation of the Americas

Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies in the English Department at New York University. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he teaches and researches on Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, Borderland methodologies, decolonial social movements, and comparative racialization in the Americas. Grounded in the locality of New Mexico, his book project unpacks the labor of Indigenous land reclamation as a cross-racial and transnational intellectual labor on the politics of reading and writing. By engaging writings by La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the EZLN, this project shuttles between colonial, national, and neoliberal periodicities and highlights submerged points of convergence between Indigenous North and Latin America. It thus offers a different take on Chicana/o and Indigenous cultural studies as fields constituted through intertextual and intersubjective relations that break down the abstract divisions between religion, history, politics, economy, and culture.

Greg Vargo

Greg Vargo

Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science; Gallatin

Project: Chartist drama: the performance of politics and the politics of performance

Greg Vargo is an assistant professor in the department of English, FAS and the Gallatin School. His research focuses on the literary and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century British protest movements and the interplay between politics, periodical culture, and the novel. He is the author of An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2017-18), which suggests that underground newspapers affiliated with radical movements fostered an experimental literary culture which stretched the contours of well-known Victorian genres including the Bildungsroman, melodrama, and social-problem fiction. A new research project focuses on anti-imperialism in nineteenth-century British radicalism. At the Center for the Humanities, he will be working on the role of theater in working-class political movements of the Victorian era.

Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin

Doctoral Student Fellow; Doctoral Student, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Project: The Communication Cure: Tele-Therapy 1890-2015

Hannah Zeavin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Her research examines the relationships between the history of psychiatry and media history. Her dissertation, “The Communication Cure: Tele-Therapy 1890-2017” focuses on the delivery of talk therapy over distance, arguing that tele-therapy, far from being a new treatment modality in the age of Skype and smartphone apps, is at least as old as psychoanalysis itself. She has served as the Managing Editor of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, and the Assistant Editor of Public Culture and Public Books. Beyond the academy, she volunteers as a state-certified crisis counselor.