FELLOWSHIPS
Next steps for the 2022-23 SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellows
The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) Diversity Predoctoral Fellows are concluding their time in the program.
Learn more about this year's fellows and their plans for the future!
Christine Chalifoux
Christine is a sociocultural anthropologist and conducted long-term fieldwork in Kampala, Uganda. Centering the lives of migrant workers precariously employed, her dissertation and book manuscript explores the circulation of stereotypes about ethnic minorities, which bear the weight of Uganda's postcolonial history. Her work ethnographically renders how people categorize others, showing how kinship bonds are forged despite the potency of ethnicity. Building a theory of "contentious kinship", her work ultimately argues that meaningful lives are created through the formation of kinship bonds, even amidst social uncertainty.
She will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College beginning Fall 2023.
Danielle Dorvil
Danielle's research examines how Afro-Brazilian, Dominican, and Haitian women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created fiction for aesthetic and social-justice purposes. More pointedly, it develops a transnational framework for analyzing how marginalized individuals offer counternarratives about their subjecthood and positionality in their respective societies.
After the fellowship, she will be joining Sarah Lawrence College as an Assistant Professor of Spanish.
Ever Osorio-Ruiz
Ever is finishing the dissertation VIVAS: Politics and Poetics of Mexican Feminisms in the XXI Century an exploration of the history and configuration of Mexican feminist social movements through slogans and the writing of testimonies in protests, rallies, and in analog and digital media posts.
After finishing the MIT Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship, she will be a Research Associate at the Five College Women Studies Center in Amherst, Mass. and plans to complete her degree in the spring of 2024.
She is currently co-editing a dictionary of untranslatable concepts in Latin American gender and sexuality studies and plans to keep growing in her career in academia.
Porntip (Ploy) Israsena Twishime
Porntip Israsena Twishime is a storyteller and scholar. She researches stories and storytelling as a mode of communication and a methodology for communication studies. Her creative research practice considers the relationships between empire, race, gender, class, and sexuality in Asian America. This work draws upon the political and theoretical traditions of Asian American cultural production and literature, queer and feminist of color critique, and performance studies.
During her time at MIT as a Visiting Scholar in CMS/W and a SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellow, she completed and defended her dissertation, “PLOY : An Immigrant Daughter’s Archival Survival Strategy,” earning a PhD in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Next year, she will be a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar in the Women's Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University and a Pauline Scheer's Fellow at GrubStreet creative writing center in Boston where she will continue to develop her debut novel and novel writing methodology.
The purpose of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) Diversity Predoctoral Fellowships program is to enhance diversity in the School and to provide the Fellow with additional professional support and mentoring as they enter the field.
The fellowships are intended to support scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, who can contribute to the diversity of SHASS and the higher education community.
Fellowships support graduate scholars for a 9-month appointment at MIT that generally runs from September through May. They offer an opportunity for scholars who plan a career in higher education and have completed all other PhD requirements to finish their dissertations with access to libraries and faculty of the School.