We are please to announce the incoming graduate cohort for 2013. We look forward to having Rose Miron, Mario Obando, Soham Patel, and Sasha Suarez joining us in the fall. Continue reading for brief bios.
Rose Miron is a senior in History with Honors at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of a Waller Scholarship and a UROP and Hedley Donovan Scholarship for undergraduate thesis project, "Hearing Their Stories: The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Tribal Nation of Wisconsin." For her dissertation, she plans to study how Native peoples, such as the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Tribe, challenge myths of extinction through efforts of self-representation and self-determination.
Mario Obando is a senior in U.S. History at Whittier College. He was a 2012 Summer Research Fellow at UC Irvine's Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and currently holds a Richard M. Nixon Research Fellowship at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. His article "A 'Firm' Myopia: Johnson's Gendered Policy towards the Cuban Revolution, 1963-1967" was published in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal.For his dissertation, he is interested in transnational history, specifically how narratives of becoming and unbecoming white and Latino amongst Costa Rican immigrants within the U.S. context can be used to redefine discourses that criminalize alienated populations within Costa Rica.
Soham Patel received his B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from UC Irvine in 2011. He served as president of Hip Hop Congress at UC Irvine and is currently working as a teaching assistant at Citizens of the World Charter School in Hollywood, CA. For his dissertation, he plans to study the racialization of the South Asian diaspora in post 9/11 America. By focusing specifically on hip hop culture and music, his work will look at how cultural production makes (im)possible solidarity across racial and ethnic lines.
Sasha Suarez is a senior majoring in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She currently serves as the Public Relations and Historian officer for the Circle of Nations Indigenous Association. Her senior thesis examines foundations of the Minneapolis American Indian community before the creation of the American Indian Movement. For her dissertation, she is interested in studying
transnational indigenous history and the urban Indian experience in Minneapolis and the Bay Area of California.
