2022-2023 HASTAC Scholars

Dhakir Abdullah

PhD Candidate, African American and African Diaspora Studies

I'm originally from Alabama where I attended the University of Montevallo where I majored in Psychology and minored in Philosophy. My research focuses on the intersections of the administrative role of Dr. Herman Hudson in conjunction with the Bloomington Black studies movement of the late 1960’s and their concatenated significance in helping to found the Afro-American Studies department at Indiana University. Additional areas of intrigue include: postcolonialism, Africana critical theory, Africana existential thought, critical race theory, Marxism, racial capitalism, the epistemology of Whiteness and how that intersects with slavery, colonialism, and modernity.  

David Axelrod

PhD Student, Department of Informatics

David’s research ranges from historical analyses of propaganda texts to identifying and characterizing agendas and misinformation campaigns on major social media platforms. Recent work has focused on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation at the margins of platform interactions between Twitter and YouTube.   As a HASTAC Scholar, David hopes to bridge his initial work in the humanities with his more recent work in the computational social sciences area by identifying methods that will allow for scalable comparisons of these different types of content.

Elijah Beaton

PhD Student, Department of History

Elijah Beaton is a Doctoral Student in American History specializing in late twentieth-century urban space, the built environment, and material culture. Their research examines the relationship between fashion, architecture, and ideology and ways that capitalism produces aesthetics. Their previous research during their M.Arts in History and Material Culture at Mississippi State University explored the racial dynamics of erasure and consumption in the Beale Street redevelopment project in Memphis during the 1980s. Elijah became fascinated with architecture, art, and material life during their undergraduate degree at Colorado State University, where they majored in History and Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts. They are originally from Fort Collins, Colorado, and enjoy making websites, zines, and other graphic design projects in addition to collecting and fretting over their plants. 

Andreina Colina-Marin

PhD Student, Spanish and Portuguese

Andreina Colina-Marin is from Caracas, Venezuela. She enjoys exchanges of multicultural music, ideas, and culture. She holds a master's in violin performance from SELU and a master’s in Hispanic studies from LSU. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics while teaching Spanish at IUB. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology, and second language acquisition. 

Narmeen Ijaz

PhD Student, The Media School

Narmeen Ijaz is a doctoral student in Media Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington where her research focuses on non-fiction film cultures. In particular, she studies how patriarchal and heteronormative power dynamics in colonial histories and political power regimes have led to the emergence of new female subjectivities and politics of representation in non-fiction film cultures. Moreover, Ijaz’s interests in documentary studies are largely inspired by her practical experiences of working as documentary filmmaker for international human rights organizations such as UNICEF-ROSA and Youth LEAD which have led to her interests in questioning the role of ethics, impact and change through documentaries. She has presented her work at various platforms such as the Women and the Silent Screen (2022) and Visible Evidence (2022).   Narmeen’s research and practice are inspired by her interests in experimenting with the approaches to decolonizing representation through her practical documentary works by incorporating participatory, self-reflexive and interactive approaches in documentary to shape gender representation. She is also a fellowship recipient of the Decolonizing Representation of Muslim Women in Media program at UC Davis and the HASTAC scholarship (IU) for her virtual documentary installation, Self in a Portrait. 

Mallika Khanna

PhD Student, The Media School

Mallika Khanna is a PhD student at IU's Media School working on diasporic selfhood narratives in digital media spaces. Her Ma thesis looked at South Asian diasporic cultural entrepreneurs’ self-presentation online to tease out negotiations around the commodification of diasporic trauma in digital media’s “first person marketplace.” She is increasingly interested in exploring diasporicity online through digital food media. 

Rossmary Marquez Lameda

PhD Student, School of Public Health

I am  a Latin American researcher currently pursuing a doctoral program in Health Behavior at Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington. My work focuses on forced migration, refugee health and reproductive health, with a particular emphasis on the recent displacement of Venezuelans across Latin America. 

Oluwanifemi Ologunorisa

PhD Student, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. I am interested in how digital technologies can be better designed with users in mind to accelerate digital inclusion, gender equity, and women’s economic empowerment. Through my HASTAC project, I intend to conduct a social media analysis that examines the potential of Instagram to truly meet the digital demands of Nigerian women entrepreneurs. I hope to understand how Nigerian women entrepreneurs have been interacting with the digital platform, patterns of digital exclusion based on the presence and absence of certain region-locked digital features and functionalities, and how the intersections of race, gender, culture, location, and other systemic inequalities further contribute to the digital exclusion of women of African descent. My goal is to create a digital archive to answer the question: How do algorithmic biases affect Black and African women entrepreneurs?

Haining Wang

PhD Student, Department of Information and Library Science

My name is Haining Wang (he/him/his), a doctoral student from the Department of Information and Library Science. My research focuses on innovating responsible artificial intelligence that one can rely on to communicate with natural language in public channels without identity concerns. I am glad to join the HASTAC program and will be working on the project Leveraging Small Humanities Datasets with Deep Learning: A Case Study in Stylometry. 

Claire Woodward

PhD Candidate, Germanic Studies

I am a PhD candidate in Germanic Studies with a minor in Jewish Studies. My research focuses on narrative empathy, implication, violence, morality, and side-taking. I've been a member of the Experimental Humanities Lab at IU for the past five years and am interested in empirical studies in literature. I am currently working on my dissertation, which explores reactions to suffering in modern German literature. As part of this project, I am doing a textual analysis of the German word Mitleid (roughly translated as compassion) as it appears in a few 20th century texts. I suggest that depictions of suffering draw observers in as narrative bystanders, who then feel implicated alongside the feelings of compassion evoked from trauma stories. There are, however, different connotations associated with Mitleid that I hoping to explore and visualize through digital humanities tools.