Past Teaching Fellows

Teaching Fellows 2011-2012

Jakeya Caruthers, School of Education
Jakeya Caruthers is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology of Education at Stanford University.  Before receiving her MA in International Comparative Education from Stanford, she earned a Bachelor’s degree at Alabama A&M University and from 2001-2006 was an Institute for International Public Policy (IIPP) Fellow.  Her research and teaching interests include gender, sexuality, and embodiment; critical race theory; black humor; afro-futurity; and black childhood. Jakeya’s dissertation “They Knew God Had a Brother: Political Affect and Oppositional Legitimacy in Black Humorous Literature and Performance” is a study of a mode of Black humor that “tarries” with racial terror and in so doing enacts a kind of oppositional legitimacy.  The complicated humor in this ideology is often missed by scholars who focus most on the socio-spatial and logical distance – the absurdity – that laces black comic attendance to the realities of anti-black racism.  This dissertation asks what kind of humor is observed when that distance is narrowed, and absurdist irony (with its haunted investment in justice) is replaced by a sense of legitimacy that refuses to juxtapose what is against what should be so.  What kind of humor asks why shouldn’t it be so?  Rejecting a simple reading of such humor as nihilistic, apathetic, melancholic, or even post-modern or “post-soul” the research ventures into the archive of slave narratives, stand-up comedy and afrofuturist literature and cultural production to offer alternative readings of discursive/affective response to what would otherwise be understood as tragicomic, “dystopic” riffs on gendered violence, institutional oppression, and the racialized dynamics of space and time.

Teaching Fellows 2010-2011

Teaching Fellows 2009-2010

Brenda Frink, Doctoral Candidate in History, Stanford University
Brenda Frink’s dissertation is titled “Pioneers and Patriots: Race, Gender, and the Construction of Citizenship in California, 1875-1915.” The dissertation examines historical memory in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era American West, paying particular attention to racial and gendered images of national belonging. Her research has been supported by grants from the Huntington Library and the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. from San Francisco State University.

Ju Yon Kim, Doctoral Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University
Ju Yon Kim is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. She received her B.A. in English from Yale University, where she graduated summa cum laude. Her dissertation, “Disappearing Acts and Uncanny Materializations: Performances of the Racial Mundane,” explores how representations and reenactments of everyday behaviors in American theater, fiction, and film crucially mediate between the ostensibly opposing pressures of racialization and assimilation. As a graduate student at Stanford, she has served as a CSRE mentor and worked with the Asian American Theater Project. She is also the past recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

Rand Quinn, Doctoral Candidate in Education, Stanford University
Rand Quinn is a doctoral student at Stanford University School of Education. He studies the politics of education and his principal research interest is in the interplay of private and public institutions, organizations, and action in education. Prior to graduate school, Rand was a community organizer and policy advocate working on welfare rights and other public benefits issues on behalf of homeless and low-income families.

Teaching Fellows 2008-2009

Matthew Daube, Doctoral Candidate, Drama and Humanities, Stanford University
He has a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College. At Stanford, he has directed Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud, and his own adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. His dissertation research centers on race and ethnicity in stand-up comedy, with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor serving as the primary case studies. Last year, his article “The Case of Rabbi Cantor vs. Roscoe W. Chandler: The Marx Brothers’ Ethnic Construction of Character” was published in the anthology A Century of the Marx Brothers (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Later this year, his article “Seats of Power: Stand-up Comics and Their Audiences” is scheduled to be published in the anthology Live Comedy and Its Audience (West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press).

Doris M. Madrigal, Doctoral Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese, Stanford University
Doris M. Madrigal received her B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her fields of research and interest are Chicana/o cultural studies, bilingualism, and Latin American colonial literature. Her dissertation is titled Beyond Spanish: Ideologies of Language and Identity in Chicana/o Cultural Production.

Rand Quinn, Doctoral Candidate, Education, Stanford University
Rand Quinn’s general academic interest is in the interplay of private and public institutions and action in education. His research seeks to better understand how urban school districts allocate educational resources, implement reform policy, and cater to the demands of competing interest groups and coalitions. Prior to graduate school, Rand was a community organizer and policy analyst working on behalf of low-income and immigrant communities. He holds an MA in Political Science from Stanford University and an MA in Education from San Francisco State University.

Teaching Fellows 2007-2008

MarYam Hamedani, Doctoral Candidate in Psychology, Stanford University
MarYam Hamedani is a doctoral candidate in the psychology department at Stanford University. She graduated summa cum laude as a Phi Beta Kappa from Middlebury College, where she received a double major in Philosophy and Psychology Honors. Her research focuses on how patterns in the sociocultural environment shape self and identity. Some topics she has investigated in her research include how Americans’ attitudes and behaviors are affected by different perspectives about their national identity, how Americans are influenced by messages focusing on their freedom from vs. their connection to others, and representations and interpretations of Hurricane Katrina survivors’ actions. Her dissertation, Interdependence in the Land of the Free, examines the psychological consequences of interdependence in American contexts, where the importance of independence is typically emphasized. She is a recipient of Stanford’s Centennial Teaching Award and has taught courses on social psychology, sociocultural psychology, statistics, and comparative studies in race and ethnicity.

Julie Minich, Doctoral Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese, Stanford University
Julie Minich is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Smith College. Her research interests include Chicana/o cultural studies, feminist theory, disability studies and Latin American and Spanish literature. Her dissertation, National Bodies/Embodied Nations: Reading Disability in Chicana/o, Mexican, and Spanish Cultural Production, is concerned with how disability functions in feminist, queer, decolonial, post-dictatorial and/or anti-racist engagements with nation and nationalism. She has taught courses at Stanford in both Chicana/o Studies and Spanish language.

Marcela Muñiz, Doctoral Candidate in Education, Stanford University
Marcela Muñiz is a doctoral candidate in Education with a concentration in Higher Education, Administration and Policy Analysis at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Sociology (with honors) and Spanish, and earned a certificate in Curriculum on Children and Society from Stanford. She is currently conducting research and preparing policy-related papers on graduate issues for the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and providing consultation for The College Board’s initiative on Educating Latinos for the Future of America. She has been a writing mentor for the Students of Color Research Network and an instructor for Upward Bound at Stanford. Her research interests include access and equity in higher education, affirmative action, faculty diversity, Latinos in higher education, college student development, and institutional change. The title of her dissertation is The Politics of Diversity: How Affirmative Action Policies are Interpreted and Enacted in Faculty Hiring Decisions.

Teaching Fellows 2006-2007

Sapna Cheryan, Doctoral Candidate in Psychology, Stanford University
Sapna Cheryan is a doctoral candidate in the Psychology Department at Stanford University. She graduated cum laude with a B.A. from Northwestern University with honors in both Psychology and American Studies. Her dissertation, entitled Strategies of Belonging: Defending Threatened Identities, examines how individuals react when their sense of belonging to an important social group is questioned because they do not resemble the idealized group member. She has studied this phenomenon in Asian Americans, a group that is often denied their American identity, and has a recent article “Where Are You Really From? Asian Americans and Identity Denial” appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She is the recipient of a Departmental Teaching Award and would like to teach a course for CSRE on Asian American Politics and Psychology.

Teresa Pellinen-Chávez, Doctoral Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University
Teresa Pellinen-Chávez is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. She received her M.A. in Latin American Studies from U.C. Berkeley, and an interdisciplinary B.A. from the Evergreen State College. Her dissertation, Shining Paths: Tourism and the Marketing of Innocence in Southern Peru, examines the role of tourism in the marketing of an indigenous state in the wake of the recent decades of domestic terrorism in Peru. Teresa has taught courses in Spanish, Latin American Literature, Writing & Rhetoric, and Pedagogy and has received Stanford's Centennial Teaching Award. She is also a Teaching Consultant with the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Victor Thompson, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University
Victor Thompson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His interests are in social demography and intergroup relations. He has taught courses in race and ethnic relations, immigration and identity, and political sociology. His dissertation, entitled Learning from Multiracial Identity: Theorizing Racial Identities from Response Variability on Questions about Race, explores response variability to questions about race using Census data and large sample surveys.

Teaching Fellows 2005-2006

Rachael Miyung Joo, Doctoral Candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
Rachael Miyung Joo is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. She graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Sociology from Pomona College . Her dissertation, Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivities: Manufacturing Koreanness through Media Sports, examines how notions of Korean identity are produced through media sports that feature Korean players and teams. She has engaged in ethnographic research with Korean communities in Seoul , South Korea and Los Angeles , California . Her research and teaching interests include transnational perspectives on race and ethnicity, Korea ’s globalization, sports and national identity, transnational popular culture, and feminist media studies.

Frank L. Samson, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University

Victor Thompson, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University
Victor Thompson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University . He earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Illinois , Urbana-Champaign. His interests are in social demography and intergroup relations. He has taught courses in race and ethnic relations, immigration and identity, and political sociology. His dissertation, entitled Learning from Multiracial Identity: Theorizing Racial Identities from Response Variability on Questions about Race, explores response variability to questions about race using Census data and large sample surveys.

Teaching Fellows 2004-2005

Graciela N. Borsato, Doctoral candidate in the School of Education, Stanford University
Graciela Borsato is a 4th year doctoral candidate at the School of Education with a specialization in Child and Adolescent Development. Prior to coming to Stanford, Graciela completed an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and a master’s degree in psychology at San Jose State University. Her main research interests are the role of race and ethnicity on children’s development and the education of language minority students. She has been recently awarded a research grant from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) to examine family-school relationships among English-language learners. Graciela has co-taught classes on the education of immigrant students and language policies and practices.

Todd Albert Dapremont, Doctoral Candidate in English and American Literature, Stanford University
Todd Dapremont is a 7th year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame and holds an M.A. in English and American Literature from Stanford University. His dissertation, “To Walk in the World Unquestioned”: Europe, Race, and Nation in African American Literature, examines how Europe and European travel served as a nexus for issues of race, class and national identity for African American writers and intellectuals from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century African American literature and culture; race and national identity; race in U.S. popular culture; and Black Atlantic literature and culture. Prior to coming to Stanford, he worked as a Team Leader on educational projects for the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps in and around the Southeastern U.S. and received the Most Outstanding Leadership Award. While at Stanford he has worked as a Graduate Student Mentor, Teaching Assistant and Instructor for a two-part course in composition and research.

Teaching Fellows 2003-2004

Lisa Arellano is a 7th year doctoral student in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Her M.A. research at San Francisco State University focused on issues of sex, gender and sexuality. While at Stanford, Lisa’s research has focused on an historical comparison of identity movements, culminating in her dissertation “Lynching and the American Past: Violence, Narrative and Identity.” As the senior seminar coordinator for CSRE, she co-taught the honors seminar this fall with Paula Moya. Lisa is currently teaching a course on violence, race and ethnicity for CSRE, and will teach a queer studies course this spring for the Feminist Studies Program.

Jennifer Marie Chertow is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. Chertow recently completed two years of dissertation fieldwork on childbirth practices in rural and urban Tibet, where she also researched state and non-state HIV/STI prevention for Han and Tibetan sex-worker populations in Lhasa. She returns to Stanford this year to complete her dissertation titled "National Minorities, Transnational Health Practices: Medicines, Modernities, and Constructions of Gender and Ethnicity in Tibet."

Teaching Fellows 2002-2003

Marisol Negrón is a 6th year doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. After completing her B.A. in Spanish from Dartmouth College, Marisol Negrón worked briefly as an assistant in the Public Affairs Office at the Department of Justice under the Clinton administration. She later served as the Program Coordinator and then Acting Director for the multicultural center at Connecticut College. While at Stanford, Marisol has received several awards for service to the university as well as the Centennial Teaching Award. She has taught Spanish language courses for non-native students as well as heritage speakers, and is currently co-editing a manuscript on the teaching of heritage languages. Her course on Latinos in the music industry served as the initial framework for her dissertation, entitled "Salsa as Commodity and Cultural Signifier: An Analysis of a Nuyorican Musical Form." As the senior seminar coordinator for CSRE, she co-taught the honors seminar this fall with Paula Moya and leads a tutorial for students writing the senior research paper.

Teceta Elaine Rudder Thomas is a 5th year doctoral candidate in the department of psychology. She completed a B.A. in psychology and in Spanish from Duke University in 1998, and holds an M.A. in psychology from Stanford University. In her dissertation, entitled, "Black Americans and Black Immigrants: The Influence of Ethnic Identification on Expectancies for Success and Perception of Prejudice", Teceta will examine the influence of ethnic identity and immigrant status on perceptions of race, stigma, and the potential for success in American society. She has co-taught a class on cultural psychology, and in the spring, will teach a course on ethnic minority immigration to the United States. In the spring of 2002, Teceta received a Stanford Psychology Distinguished Teaching Award and a Stanford University Centennial Teaching Award.

Teaching Fellows 2001-2002

Shana Beth Bernstein, a Ph.D. candidate in History, is currently completing her dissertation "Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954." She has a B.A. in History and in French from University of California at Berkeley as well as an M.A. in History from Stanford. In 1999, Shana Bernstein received Stanford University's Centennial Teaching Award. This year she coordinated the CSRE Senior Seminar, organizing the RICSRE Graduate Seminar, and co-taught the Honors Thesis seminar with Professor Al Camarillo.

Mark Robert Brilliant is a Ph.D. candidate in History. His dissertation, "Color Lines: The Struggles for Civil Rights on America's 'Racial Frontier,' 1945-1975," is an exercise in comparative civil rights history. Mark Brilliant has a B.A. in Political Science from Brown University and worked as a teacher at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, NY, where he was named Teacher of the Year in 1993-1994. In 1997, he transferred to the History department from Stanford's School of Education. In 2000-2001, Brilliant was a dissertation fellow at RICSRE and this spring, he taught a course on America’s Civil Rights Movements.

Victoria Caroline Plaut recently earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Her dissertation was on the nature and prevalence of various conceptions of difference and inclusion (Models of Diversity) and the implications of these different approaches for intergroup relations. She is currently pursuing four lines of research which focus on the relationship between sociocultural context and psychological functioning. Plaut completed her B.A. in Psychology at Harvard (1996). She holds also a M.Sc in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics (1997) and an M.A. in Psychology from Stanford (2000).

Teaching Fellows 2000 – 2001

Marisol Negrón is a 4th year doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. After completing her B.A. in Spanish from Dartmouth College, Marisol Negrón worked briefly as an assistant in the Public Affairs Office at the Department of Justice under the Clinton administration. She later served as the Program Coordinator and then Acting Director for the multicultural center at Connecticut College. While at Stanford, Marisol has received several awards for service to the university as well as the Centennial Teaching Award. She has taught Spanish language courses for non-native students as well as heritage speakers, and is currently co-editing a manuscript on the teaching of heritage languages.

Simon Weffer (Sociology)

Teaching Fellows 1999-2000

Stephanie A. Fryberg, a Ph.D. student in Psychology, was a TA for the new CSRE Core Course and taught her own course, “Identity, Inequality, and the Self: The American Indian Experience.” The class examined how historically and socially constructed representations and stereotypes of American Indians influence the identities of contemporary Native Americans. Her dissertation is entitled “Representations of American Indians in the Media: Do they influence how American Indian students negotiate their identities in mainstream contexts?”

Martha Mabie Gardner, a doctoral candidate in History, served as the CSRE Senior Seminar Coordinator, helping CSRE majors conceive, research and write their honors theses. She also completed her dissertation,” The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965,” which traces the application of U.S. immigration and naturalization law to women, from the first federal immigration restrictions against Asian prostitutes in the late 1870’s to the immigration “reform” measures of the late 1960s. Martha joined the history department at De Paul University in September of 2000.

Sara Johnson-La O, a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, is working on a dissertation entitled “Migrant Recitals: Pan-Caribbean Inter-changes in the Aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.” She offered a course entitled “Comparative Caribbean Discourse,” a survey of literatures from the Spanish, French, and English Caribbean. Focusing on key social and cultural movements that emerged on that imperial frontier, the class examined slavery and labor, nationalism and transnational identities, post-coloniality, and mestizaje.

Teaching Fellows 1998-1999

Maria Cotera
Jacqueline Lazu
Lisa Thompson

Teaching Fellows 1997-1998

Renya Ramirez