They’ll teach and research at the University for the 2021–22 academic year.
The University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies has selected two 2021 postdoctoral fellows after a nationwide competition. They’ll join the University in the coming academic year to teach and continue their research.
Mia Alafaireet is completing her PhD in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her dissertation, Transplanting Blackness: New Negro Botanicals and the Ecology of Black Health, examines the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of environmental health, and draws from African-American literature, medical history, and environmental humanities.
Ricardo Milhouse is completing his PhD in gender studies at Arizona State University in the School of Social Transformation. His dissertation, (Dis)Locating the Sensual: Black Queer Placemaking in Brooklyn, New York, investigates the impact of gentrification on aspects of Black queer culture, drawing from urban geography, Black gender and queer studies, and scholarship on design.
The postdoctoral fellowship is a two-year program open to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Fellows participate in the intellectual life of the institute, pursue their own scholarship, and teach one course per year in their area of specialization.
They’ll also have the opportunity to present their work at the University’s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, the Humanities Center, and the FDI Work-in-Progress Seminar Series.
Kristin Doughty, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute, is the institute’s interim director. Jeffrey McCune joins the University as FDI’s director starting June 1.
