Faculty Fellows

Alanna Beroiza

Alanna Beroiza is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program at Rutgers. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Rice University. Her work draws on film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis to examine how visual and aural media construct models for gender and sex in twentieth- and twenty-first century medical and popular discourses. Her publications include, “How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures: Gender as a Scopic System in Annie Leibovitz’s Photographs

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Daniel De Silva

Daniel da Silva is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, with a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey's Ironbound neighborhood, Silva's work centers queer performance and subjectivities in Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures. He has published “Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis” (Journal of Lusophone Studies 2018), and “Black Mothers and Black Boats: Queer, Indigenous and

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Evie Shockley

Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

Shockley's

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Nancy Rao

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is a music theorist and historian specializing in the analysis of American ultra-modernist musical works, the transpacific history of American music, and contemporary composers of East Asian heritage. Previously, she taught at Oberlin College and has held visiting professorships at the Curtis Institute of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, and Bard

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Stacy Klein

Stacy S. Klein is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on early English literature, poetry, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and is currently completing a monograph entitled The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Early English Literature, ca. 700-1100 AD. Klein has published numerous articles on Old English

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Timothy Power

Timothy Power is an associate professor of Classics at Rutgers University. His research has focused largely on matters relating to the lyric poetry and drama of early Greece, in particular their music, performance, and social and religious contexts. His 2010 book, The Culture of Kitharôidia (Center for Hellenic Studies/HUP), is a study of the popular Greco-Roman musical genre of lyre-singing from the age of Homer through the reign of the emperor Nero. In more recent work, he has also examined the

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Graduate Fellows

Aidan Selmer

My research examines early modern English poetry and drama in the context of post-Reformation church history. I have working projects on religious nationalism and discrimination in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Othello, John Milton's indebtedness in Paradise Lost to Paul's writings on religious mystery as a key way to realize religious "truth" in a faith community, and Edmund Spenser's ambivalence towards religious iconoclasm. I also work on the influence that music theory and media

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Emmanuel Aprilakis

Emmanuel Aprilakis is a PhD candidate in Classics at Rutgers University. His dissertation, “The Figure of the Koryphaios in Ancient Drama,” explores all aspects of the chorus leader on the ancient stage, including their selection, appearance, role, function, and performance. He is interested in the soundscapes of ancient plays and particularly the ability of the choral voice to break the fourth wall and to give agency to typically marginalized groups. In addition to close reading of dramatic texts,

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Julian Wong-Nelson

Julian Wong-Nelson is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Art History programme. Their research interests include Asian-diasporic performance and video, queer & trans* theory, and cinema studies.

Krysta Herrera

Krysta Herrera is a PhD candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Prior to Rutgers, she also holds a MM from the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied bassoon performance. Her dissertation, “Contrapuntos nacionales: Sound and Alternative National Imaginaries of the River Plate Region,” explores the role of music and sound in performances that reject unifying hegemonic identity discourses in the River Plate region (Argentina and Uruguay). In particular, she is interested in

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Milan Reynolds

Milan Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is researching magnetic tape’s influence on music, literature, and social movements in the latter half of the twentieth century, attending to the ways it is both used and imagined. Drawing together sources from Italian, Spanish, and English language contexts, he traces the shifting materiality of sound and symbolic investments in listening. His dissertation explores how the mediations between tape and

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Sara Sanchez-Zweig

Sara Sanchez-Zweig is a doctoral candidate in the English department working on theater and performance studies. Her dissertation, "Magic Acts: How Stage Magic Performs the Self," argues that stage magic and performance ritual model spectatorial relationships that disavow the porosity of representational knowledge: how we know the self and the other. Her interest in the voice is rooted in her research on Spiritualist trance-lectures and notions of presence and mediation.

Postdoctoral Associates

Derek Baron

Derek Baron received their PhD in Historical Musicology in 2023 from the Department of Music at New York University's Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences. Their dissertation, "The Geopolitics of Voice: Sound, Music, and Language in Early American Settler Colonialism," explores the role that vocal and sonic imaginaries played in the construction of United States settler-colonial law, science, racial ideology, and institutional complexes from the colonial period to the turn of the twentieth

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Nicholas Glastonbury

Nicholas Glastonbury received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in 2023 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation, “Audible Futures: Scenes of Sonic Encounter in Cold War Kurdistan, 1923-2023,” traces the cultural, political, and economic itineraries of sonic media in Kurdistan, from Soviet Kurdish radio broadcasting and pirated cassettes to private archives, DJ booths, and streaming platforms. Drawing on theories and methods from anthropology, history,

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Affiliated Fellows

Matthew Libassi

Matthew Libassi is a researcher and educator interested in the relationships between people, nature, and power. His work focuses on natural resource use, conflict, and governance, as well as more broadly on uneven human experiences of environmental change. Matt’s current project analyzes the politics of gold mining in Indonesia. He examines how contemporary modes of resource extraction have been historically produced and how they are experienced, engaged with, and contested by neighboring

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Jake Silver

Jake Silver is a cultural anthropologist who works with Palestinian astronomers, city planners, GIS experts, and activists to study the contemporary dimensions and volumes of Israel’s occupation. His work shakes our understandings of the sky as a stable environmental object and instead approaches how politics and political conflicts bring it into being, creating multiple skies that we each experience differently. In so doing, he hopes to offer new frameworks for grasping colonial settlement

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