2021-2022 HASTAC Scholars

Kane Ferguson

PhD Candidate, Hispanic Literature

My project analyzes recipes included in the memoirs of Cuban-American authors through an investigation of cookbooks published on the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a PhD candidate in Hispanic literatures, my research follows an anthropological interest in food to analyze its representation in contemporary US Latina/o/x narratives. My dissertation, “Culinary Negotiations of Migration and Exile: Belonging and Foodways in Diaspora Literature of the Spanish Speaking Caribbean" analyzes the ways in which protagonists engage with foodways to assert or undermine notions of belonging. Outside of research, I spend as much time as possible outside on the mountains and waterways of New Hampshire.

Drew Heiderscheidt

PhD Student, Geography

Drew Heiderscheidt is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at IU Bloomington. Previously, Drew attended the University of Northern Colorado, receiving a B.A. in History and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and a graduate certificate (GISci) in Geographic Information Science. He is interested in how the state, corporations, and others use geographic information systems (GIS) to surveil, control, and subjugate people. His previous research focused on how contact tracing apps for COVID-19 are a form of GIS-based surveillance that is legitimized by public health concerns. Drew is in the early stages of researching his dissertation project. His dissertation will investigate the intersections between crime mapping's utilization by police departments and border enforcement agencies historically, compared with prison industrial complex abolitionist countermapping. Outside of his research, Drew enjoys live music (especially jam bands), biking, reading fiction, and spending time with his partner, their dog, and 2 cats.

Amelia López López

PhD Student, Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Elizabeth Spaeth

PhD Student, United States History

Elizabeth Spaeth is a Ph.D student in United States History researching international students, migration, and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs and Anthropology at The George Washington University. She taught abroad for several years in the Federated States of Micronesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. In 2017, she received her Master of Arts from the University of Chicago’s Program in the Social Sciences with a thesis centered on the visual representation of race and violence in the Philippine-American War. She then taught special education in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood for two years while studying for a Master of Arts in Teaching Special Education. She is in her third year of IU’s PhD program in US History.  

Brandon Stokes

PhD Student, African American and African Diaspora Studies

I am currently a PhD student in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. My research focuses on African American migration to Chicago focusing on family through the oral history of families. My goal is to create a narrative that details the successes and challenges of families as they formed Black Chicago, a city within a city. I want to create a digital space that allows the story of Black Chicago. 

José Luis Suárez Morales

PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

My name is José Luis Suárez Morales, and I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. My research focuses on the intersections of Latin American contemporary culture, cinema, politics, and literature with Critical Theory and Continental Philosophy. My dissertation Crisis as Form: Literature and Culture beyond the Post-dictatorship in Latin America looks at 21st-century contexts of social and political turmoil in Spanish American to critically revise the limits and possibilities of the concept of crisis during late modernity. My HASTAC project Monumentalizing Memory: Symbolic Struggles and Urban Landscapes in San Salvador maps the rise of monuments and memorial sites built after the end of the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) and the first years of democracy in San Salvador. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, running, watching sports, and traveling to new cities.

Ellen Taraskiewicz

PhD Student, History

My name is Ellen Taraskiewicz and I am a second-year PhD student in the History Department. My research focuses on Zionist youth organizations and their existence at American universities in the early twentieth century. I am particularly interested in the silences produced by the exclusion of these organizations from institutional archives and how the activities of said organizations did and did not contribute to the Americanization of Zionism. Due to the dearth of archival materials, my project for HASTAC is focused on gathering, analyzing, and cataloguing what archival materials do exist and producing a database containing disparate materials available across the country.

Zuoyu Tian

PhD Candidate, Linguistics

I am a Ph.D. student from the Department of Linguistics working on using computational techniques to investigate language issues. This project is part of my dissertation investigating the language change in Chinese with a computational method. Admittedly, Chinese historical texts are resourceful, but the shortage of open-access diachronic datasets hinders the research process of language change study. Our primary goal is to develop open-access corpus or language change detection tasks for diachronic studies. Different textual genres such as Biji, Buddhist texts, and local gazetteers are supposed to be covered. Then, we will design machine learning systems for language change detection and publication period classification. The final goal is to interpret the results from automatic systems and see how these can shed light on language change studies.

Hayley Trickey

PhD Student, Gender Studies

My name is Hayley Trickey, I am an International Student from the United Kingdom, and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. My research centers around the socio-cultural aspects, societal consequences, and politicization of grief. From a sociocultural perspective, I am interested in understanding how contemporary western culture affords and sanctions grief through the lens of mothers who have experienced the death of a child. I focus on grief that is often misunderstood or incomprehensible. For example, the grief of mothers who commit infanticide, mothers of perpetrators, specifically the grief of mothers whose children have been convicted of heinous or egregious crimes, and mothers whose children's deaths have been politicized; therefore, death and grief become simultaneously appropriated by society at large.

Christina Yang

Undergraduate, dual major in Management + Human Organization and History

My name is Christina Yang, and I am a junior expecting a double major in Management + Human Organization and History. My research focus lies in Asian Americans and their fight for political justice by going back in history to identify the roots of Asian American activism as well as analyzing current trends in the community. Specifically, I am interested in better understanding the racial and gender challenges facing Asian American communities and how they ultimately attempt to achieve racial and reproductive justice. To do so, I first hope to better understand the relationship between the Asian American and other people of color (POC) communities, as its nature affects the ways in which Asian Americans reach their goals. Thus, for this project, I aim to explore Chinese Americans' perceptions of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black community through a topic modeling of articles published in The World Journal, a Mandarin-based newspaper published for Chinese-speaking populations in the United States.