2026-27 Research Associates

Lucila Carballo (she/her) is an Argentinian scholar, artist, and doula living in Western Massachusetts. She has an academic background in anthropology, feminist theory, and filmmaking. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her Ph.D. research on Latinx reproductive experiences has been the recipient of the 2024 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Carballo works as a full-spectrum doula in association with Green River Doula Network and the Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts. 

The Spectral Landscape of the Womb: Latinx Stories of Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion in New England

For Black and Brown people, Roe was never enough. The current legal barriers to abortion access in the U.S. are linked with old colonial forms of exploitation and dispossession — genital mutilation, mass rape, unanesthetized womb surgery, and forced sterilization. Latinx populations in particular have been an epicenter of colonial violence; terror runs deep through their embodied memories and occupies a central place in collective narrative forms. The historicization of the Latinx merely as a wounded people, meanwhile, risks dispossessing them again, this time retrospectively, casting them within an ontology of victimization. Indeed, there are erotic aspects to these memories and experiences as well. "The Spectral Landscape of the Womb" looks at stories of pregnancy, birth and abortion within Latinx populations in the U.S. and asks how such fraught and fervent history manifests itself in present-day experiences. How is violence embodied, resisted, and transmuted? How does pleasure co-articulate with current and inherited forms of terror? What can erotic affects and memories reveal about intersecting temporalities, subjectivities, and political actions? Psychological anthropology, feminist theory, and experimental filmmaking are at the roots of this study, which aims to expand and complicate current understandings of reproductive care, subjectivity, and time.

Miranda Dotson is a sociologist of gender and qualitative scholar of daily life. She examines the experiences of the mundane to inform resistance to stubborn inequities. She theorizes how sexism can be reproduced on the margins of mainstream society; specifically in queer, nonbinary, and activist milieus. Dotson tackles questions at the heart of feminist struggle, theorizing the relationship between identity labels and relational practices. Their current research asks how nonbinary identities transform historically gender-segregated practices, like the division of household labor. Dotson developed the concept of “gender heritage” to address the ways in which patriarchal gender socialization form subtle habits and ways of being in relation with others that remain part of an individual’s subjectivity even as they transition away from their assigned gender. Her research shows that nonbinary identity does not automatically disrupt sexist inequities. She argues for attention to how one’s gender heritage predisposes an individual to certain advantages or disadvantages under the gender system so that sexist inequities that underlie nonbinary relationships are visible to resist.

The Shared Shift? Household (In)-Equity in a Century of Nonbinary Identities

This century, gender identity labels proliferate within a relentlessly sexist society. My research clears the path for a novel and publicly-relevant debate: to what extent does the expansion of  nonbinary gender identity impact the persistence of sexist inquiry? Scholars to date have not addressed how nonbinary identity is operationalized in relationships, in cases such as romantic partners dividing housework. From my fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with families across the United States, I introduce the concept of “gender heritage” to argue that one’s binary gender socialization remains a powerful determinant of behavior in relations with others. I find that people with female gender heritage shoulder the bulk of the mental load in ensuring the proper running of their household and relationships, even if they and/or their partner(s) identifies as nonbinary. I argue that gender identity has a weaker effect in determining relational practices  than previous theoretical claims suggest. Rather, it is gender heritage, the collection of habits and disposition accumulated from years of training in one’s assigned gender, that most strongly informs how an individual approaches group life.

Katie McMorris is a writer, scholar, and dancer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her MFA from Purdue University, where she won an Academy of American Poets prize, and recently graduated from Oklahoma State University with a PhD in English. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Passages North, cream city review, and elsewhere. As a dancer, she has performed at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and as a soloist with Ballet Vermont’s Farm to Ballet Project. Her writing and research focus on the relationship between language, movement, and the body.

Goof: Stories

"Goof: Stories" is a short story collection in the tradition of writers like Aimee Bender, Carmen Maria Machado, and Mariana Enríquez. It uses irrealism and absurdism to explore questions of desire, obsession, and bodily autonomy, often in both humorous and unsettling ways. A group of high school girls convince themselves they’ve been impregnated by God. Two sisters venture into an unkempt forest where breasts sprout from the ground like mushrooms. A graduate student undergoes an invasive gynecological procedure to save the declining bee population. An eleven-year-old girl cannot stop vomiting rubbery numbers. Each story in Goof supposes bizarre bodily experiences, forcing characters to reckon with their own identity in relationship to societal expectations and gendered norms. Centering on girls’ or women’s bodies, "Goof" approaches power and otherness from an unflinchingly feminist perspective.

Larrisa (Larri) Miller is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also pursuing graduate certificates in Statistical & Computational Data Science and Feminist Studies. Her research sits at the intersection of computational social science, feminist studies, and media studies, with dissertation work focused on conspiracy theorizing in digital spaces.

Beyond Us vs. Them: Digital Conspiracy Theorizing as Collective Knowledge Production

My dissertation is a mixed-methods exploration of r/conspiracy, r/conspiracy_commons, and r/conspiracy_memes. Using participant observation, network analysis, and text analysis, I explore conspiracy theorizing as a participatory meaning making process. My research focuses specifically on narrative and the interplay between conspiracy theorizing and other forms of media. For this fellowship I propose the completion of my methodology chapter, which addresses critical computational social science.

Claire Potter is a Professor of History emerita at The New School for Social Research in New York City, and a scholar of politics, media, and feminism. The author of two books, and two edited collections, she writes and produces the Political Junkie Substack and its weekly podcast. Potter has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Memo The Guardian, Politico, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, AlterNet, Dissent, Eurozine, DAME, and The New Republic. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), listed by the New York Public Library as an “Essential Read” for the 2020 election. During her 2026-27 residency, she will be finishing New York Media Woman, a biography of journalist and radical feminist activist Susan Brownmiller under contract to University of California Press.

New York Media Woman: A Biography of Susan Brownmiller

The first biography of radical feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller,  “New York Radical Woman” tells the story of a charismatic, controversial American feminist whose global bestseller.