Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio

Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio

Project Coordinator: Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City

Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio holds a BA in Journalism from the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), and an MA in Social Sciences from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ). Her research focuses on visual arts and social memory from under-represented territories, especially favelas and indigenous communities, with an emphasis on photography. From a broader perspective, she aims to work with the Latin American feminist visual arts scene and their connections with activism and the geopolitical imagination. 

Before Columbia, Ana Luiza worked for 16 years as an art curator, researcher in visual arts and as a project coordinator and teacher in photography. Ana Luiza has wide experience in complex environments such as conflict zones, isolated communities, and extreme poverty territories. Throughout her career she developed a variety of projects across Brazil and abroad, including several initiatives in the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado region, Rio’s favelas, the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

Ana Luiza has undertaken efforts in the visual arts, digital humanities, preservation of material and immaterial cultural heritage, community and popular media, socio-environmental programs, and communications projects with indigenous groups. Ana Luiza has accomplished such work in the domain of public institutions and non-governmental organizations but has also developed partnerships in the private sector.

 Before joining Columbia University in the Fall of 2022, Ana Luiza worked for 8 years as the coordinator of the Social Action department of the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), Brazil’s most influential cultural institution. Ana is a PhD student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University.

Working Group Affiliation

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City

Levi C. R. Hord

Levi C. R. Hord

PhD Student, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Levi C. R. Hord is a writer, scholar, and public speaker based in Lenapehoking (New York City). They are currently a Ph.D. student in the department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where they hold a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Under the supervision of Professor Jack Halberstam, Levi’s research focuses on post-2010 shifts in gender identity claims, especially the flourishing uptake of “nonbinary”. Through their academic work, Levi aims to demystify cultural and legal anxieties surrounding this significant shift in mainstream gender politics, and turn this site of theorization into an opportunity for more effective political conversations.

Outside of the university, Levi devotes their time to community-facing research roles and public speaking. Between 2019 and 2021, they designed and ran nation-wide community consultations on transgender healthcare and criminal justice through Stonewall UK. Levi has been an invited speaker at venues including the Professional Institute of the Public Service Canada, TEDx, the Fierté Canada Pride National Conference, the Women of the World Festival, and the University of Oxford.

At Columbia, Levi is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and runs the Trans & Queer Theory Graduate Colloquium through the English department. They are the 2022-2023 Graduate Assistant for Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere.

Salma Ismaiel

Salma Ismaiel

Salma Ismaiel is a second year American Studies MA student. Her research interests intesect at Islamic feminism and Muslim American cultural studies. Some of her research has taken a look at how faith based legal models may serve young Muslim American women as they consult contemporary feminist issues in the United States.

Working Group:

Recovery

Corinne Kentor

Corinne Kentor

Phd Candidate, Anthropology & Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Corinne Kentor is a Ph.D student in Anthropology & Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersection of immigration and higher education policy. Her dissertation explores the educational experiences of older and younger siblings in mixed status families, with a specific focus on the institutional policies that shape their respective trajectories after high school. Corinne graduated with honors from Yale University, where she earned a B.A. in English and a certificate in Education Studies. In 2018, she was named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. That same year, she joined the research and evaluation staff at the City University of New York Office of Research, Evaluation & Program Support.

Working Group Affiliation

Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition, Graduate Coordinator

Hannah Pivo

Hannah Pivo

Hannah Pivo is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in 19th- and 20th-century design and architecture, with a focus on the history of graphic design and information visualization. Her work has appeared in the journals Design Issues and Public Art Dialogue and she has contributed to exhibition catalogs on various topics in modern and contemporary art and design. Her research has been supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection, where she was the Summer Research Fellow for 2021. Before entering the doctoral program in 2019, Hannah was Curatorial Assistant for 20th- and 21st-Century Design at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Working Group: Extractive Media

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert is a political anthropologist and a gender studies scholar. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Mashriq&Mahjar, Merip, Rusted Radishes, Kohl journal for Body and Gender Research, Jadaliyya, among other journals. She is currently working on two research projects. Her book manuscript Future Returns: Labor, Revolution and Sudan in the Middle East follows Sudanese migrant workers in Lebanon and migrant returnees in subsistence farming communities in Sudan during a time of economic and political upheaval in both countries. Her second project, “Sex and the Civil War”, examines the political economy of sex in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

Skye Shannon Savage

Project Coordinator
Working Group: Motherhood and Technology
Email: s.savage@columbia.edu

Skye Shannon Savage is a doctoral student in the Germanic Languages Department. Their research focuses broadly on the medical humanities in both the 20th and 18th centuries. They are currently writing a dissertation on authors Unica Zürn and Ingeborg Bachmann and their relation to post-war medical discourses, entitled The Performativity of Diagnosis: Medicine, Fascism, and Identity in Post-War Germany. They have previously presented research on Karl Philipp Moritz and his work with Deaf learners and their impact on his pedagogical theories.

In addition to their academic work in the department, they are extremely active in teaching development at the university, having held multiple positions at the Center for Teaching and Learning. They currently serve as a Teaching Consultant where they provide peer support for fellow graduate instructors seeking to improve their teaching. They have also conducted research in adult second-language acquisition and metalinguistic knowledge in the university foreign language classroom. Prior to beginning studies at Columbia, Skye served as an English teacher for a Denver-area refugee resettlement non-profit.

Jorge A. Rodríguez Solórzano

Jorge A. Rodríguez Solórzano

Jorge Rodríguez Solórzano is a writer, translator, and doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University. His current research examines how Indigenous Mixtec and Tlapanec communities in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, create alternative practices of jurisdiction to mitigate resource extraction and insecurity in their territories. His research has been supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the Graduate Coordinator for the “Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement” Working Group, sponsored by the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference. 

Jorge’s published translations have appeared on Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, LIFTA Volumes: Futures of Palestine, and Khabar Keslan. Jorge’s creative work has been published in oral.pub and rivulet.net. His work has shown at the London-in-Motion Film Festival and appeared in curated web volumes with artist Jumairy. 

He received an MA with Distinction in Migration and Diaspora Studies from SOAS, University of London, and holds a BA in French Literature from Reed College. In 2020, Jorge was named a Columbia University Provost Diversity Fellow.

Working Group: Refugee Cities

Fern Thompsett

Photo Credit: Hudson Gardner

Fern Thompsett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation research explores the Anti-Civilization Movement, an anarchist environmental movement that coheres around an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique of mass agriculture. Fern conducts ethnographic fieldwork in the US Pacific Northwest, where the movement originated, to investigate how those inspired by anti-civilization ethics put these ideas into practice. Much of this work is oriented around people's relationships with plant species, whether in terms of foraging wild edibles, exploring animist and Pagan modes of relationality, or reckoning with the effects of climate change. Fern has previously published work on anarchist and egalitarian pedagogies, in the context of the free university movement.

Working Group: Seeds of Diaspora

Lee Xie

Lee Xie

Ph.D. candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, New York University

Lee Xie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. She holds a B.A. in Spanish (high honors) and Journalism (double major) from New York University. She works at the intersections of diaspora studies and feminist aesthetics: her dissertation considers how Chinese diasporas are remembered in contemporary feminist aesthetic practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her most recent essay, "Mapping Covid-19’s Transnational Implications for Women Workers," was published in CUNY FORUM's special issue, Corona Conversations: East & West. She is a grant awardee and lab member of the 2021-2 Cross/Currents H-Lab, funded by the NYU Center for the Humanities.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project - Project Manager

Meg Jianing Zhang

Meg Jianing Zhang

Project Coordinator
The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (ZCMP)

Meg Jianing Zhang (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Toronto, St. George. Her current research and teaching interests include eighteenth-century transatlantic anglophone literatures, travel and life writing, and the health humanities. Her writing on navigating higher education as a first generation immigrant and woman of colour has appeared in The Resolve. Going forward, she hopes to take part in more public humanities projects like ZCMP.