Carolyn 아름 Choi, Misty De Berry, Najwa Mayer, & Tyler Monson join WGSS

The Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Prograrm extends a warm and enthusiastic welcome to a fantastic cohort of faculty and fellows joining us this year:

Carolyn 아름 Choi

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Carolyn 아름 Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California and a pre-doctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College. Carolyn prefers the pronouns she/her/hers. Her research examines the intersections of postcolonial legacies, language education, gender, and class in global migration and is currently completing her dissertation on the mobile lives of South Korean youth workers and students across cities in the Philippines, Australia, and the United States. She is a former Fulbright, Korea Foundation, and Department of Education fellow and has published in the International Migration Review, Global Networks, Positions: Asia Critique & Sexualities. When not writing for adults, she also writes for a kid readership and co-authored a children's book about intersectional feminism entitled IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All(Dottir Press, 2019).

Misty De Berry

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Misty De Berry is joining WGSS as a lecturer for the coming year. Misty is a performance studies scholar and serves as an artist-scholar in residence with the RMS Consortium. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Literature and the program in Women's and Gender Studies at MIT. She works across the fields of performance studies, Black Feminist thought, queer of color critique, aesthetic criticism, and critical theory. Both her scholarly and artistic work take up the relationship between Black women, durational performance, and everyday behavioral practices under late capitalism in the U.S. She is currently working on a book manuscript, In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt, which explores routine modes of debt and indebtedness in the lives of Black women's, and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Misty's current performance piece, little sister: an Afro-Temporal Solo-Play, tells the story of a nomadic child spirit who shape-shifts across several incarnations of Black queer women—spanning the Antebellum South to present moment Chicago. In addition to her research and performance work, Misty engages in building communities through her training in transformative justice and Reiki healing modalities.

Najwa Mayer

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Najwa Mayer is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in WGSS. Her research areas include cultural studies, critical race and Asian American/diaspora studies, religious studies, as well as transnational feminist critique, with particular interest in US Muslim and transnational Muslim cultures. Her first book manuscript, Making Muslim Americana: Formations and Contestations in Popular Culture, is supported by the Social Science Research Council's Religion and the Public Sphere program. The manuscript examines 21st century visual and performance cultures in relation to contentious trends: first, the nexus of multinational and private institutional investments in circulating Muslim American arts; second, how artists use popular cultures to engage issues of race, ethnic, gender, and queer disparities within American Islam as well as transnational Muslim feminist and anti-imperial critiques. At Dartmouth, Najwa is affiliated with the RMS Consortium. She completed her PhD in American Studies at Yale University, and is a founding member of the Northeastern Public Humanities Consortium. 

Tyler Monson

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Tyler Monson is joining us as the Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Director of RMS. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Marquette University. He has research and teaching interests in post-1945 American literature, queer of color criticism, militarism, and surveillance studies. His current book project argues an ideology of militarized masculinity to be a key criterion of inclusion to the US nation-state for some racial and sexual minorities, and instigates a mode of critique from the epistemological position of a sissy figure gleaned from texts whose authors are often queer of color. He has co-written a chapter with Jodi Melamed to be published in the forthcoming No Deed but Memory: Forging American Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois's Twilight Years.