PhD candidate, African Cultural Studies, minor in African American Studies
Kiiru’s dissertation considers how African immigrants to the U.S. from the 1950s through the present day interact with American racial logics and politics, in how they are seen, defined, and treated, and how they accept or challenge the racial designations placed upon them.
WARF
Yacov Zohn
PhD student, History
Yacov Zohn is a PhD candidate in History at UW–Madison specializing in sports history. His dissertation follows the story of the national Soviet soccer team from its first competitive international competition at the 1952 Olympics to its disintegration in the early 1990s.
Ruby Bafu
PhD student, Sociology
Ruby is working with a midwestern school district to study how microschools, which are smaller and often more personalized learning environments, utilize unique strategies for educating and supporting their students.
Katie Deaven
PhD student, Philosophy
Katie studies the philosophy of biology. She hopes her dissertation work will push the conversation further into a new direction.
Shannon Dillard
PhD student, Geography
Shannon uses remote sensing techniques to map thawing permafrost in Alaska. She is a collaborator on a Department of Energy project that seeks to understand the processes of permafrost thaw to improve predictions for the future.
Marie-Agathe Simonetti
PhD candidate, Art History
Marie-Agathe’s dissertation examines photography as an expression of politics from the French and Vietnamese perspectives.
Genesie Miller
PhD student, Japanese
Genesie is a scholar of Japanese literature and visual culture. She focuses on early modern Japanese feminine and queer sexualities in poetry and images, exploring the range of expressions of the feminine experience in early modern Japan.
Elliott Brandsma
PhD student, Scandinavian Studies
As a PhD student, Elliott studies how trends and features of literary modernism took root across the Nordic region during the first half of the 20th century. Two of the authors he works on – Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness and Swedish poet Harry Martinson – have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Piper Rawding
PhD student, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Piper’s work in the Hong research lab focuses on developing nanocarriers to improve cancer immunotherapy. By understanding and controlling the interactions that polymers have with cells, researchers like Piper can engineer nanocarriers’ biological behaviors to improve the efficiency and accuracy of cancer-battling drugs.
Jeffrey M. Thomas
PhD student, French
Jeffrey M. Thomas is a PhD student in French whose research focuses on literature about and from Corsica, specifically from the 19th and 21st centuries.