Program

ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships, 2026

Project

Curriculum & Impact Research Manager

PhD field of study

PhD, English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Position Description

Destiny Arts Center is a leading creative youth development institution with experience working with Oakland children, families, and communities since 1988. Their mission is to inspire and ignite social change through the arts, bringing high-quality arts programming—grounded in culturally relevant movement—to young people from low-income and historically under-resourced communities for free, or at reduced cost. The Curriculum & Impact Research Manager to lead the codification of curriculum for Destiny’s slate of arts-based youth development programs. This role will clearly articulate the intended outcomes of their work, while mapping how young people progress and matriculate through our programs. The fellow will work closely with teaching artists, program staff, and organizational leadership to translate complex program pathways into clear, compelling frameworks that inform practice, communicate impact to funders and stakeholders, and strengthen long-term program design and evaluation efforts.

Program

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships, 2024

Project

Cultivating Caribbean Voices: Multispecies Gardens, Care, and Food Justice in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Department

English

Abstract

Bringing postcolonial studies into conversation with ecocritical approaches, “Cultivating Caribbean Voices” explores multispecies gardens in Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture from the 1960s to the present. Through investigations of kitchen gardens, market gardens, flower gardens, and therapeutic gardens, this study demonstrates how human gardening practices and multispecies rhythms relate to postcolonial food politics and responses to empire. The project constellates literary texts, visual culture, little-studied archival materials, and physical gardens to retheorize key problems in cultural study—including voice, rhythm, and spatiality. Ultimately, this analysis of Caribbean gardens develops a politics of postcoloniality that threads together human and other-than-human concerns in ways that bring together multispecies justice and human politics.