Blog

Hello! My name is Vivian Feldblyum, and this Fall I’ll be starting my seventh (!) year as a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy. My main research interests lie at the intersection of moral psychology, metaethics, and Ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle). I am also interested in the hist...
Nozomi Saito (English) discusses her Curated Immersive Fellowship with Bellingcat.  
Nozomi Saito 
English
July 2022
 
Learn about all the Pitch Your Own Summer ...
Hello! My name is Elizabeth Kurtzman and I am entering my fourth year as a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Pitt. My main areas of research are horror, immersive experiences, and affect theory, with a particular focus on the ways in which the various elements of a production work to...
When I first wrote about my Spring 2022 Humanities Engage Immersive Fellowship, I had just begun to...
Howdy! I’m Ike. This fall I’ll be starting my fourth year as a PhD student in History of Art and Architecture. My dissertation will focus on antinuclear art from the 1970s and 1980s, but I’m also interested in art histories of gender and sexuality. In summer 2020 I was lucky enough to work as the Gr...
Hello! My name is Yujin Jang, and I am a PhD student in Pitt’s Literature program in the Department of English. With the support of the Humanities Engage’s Curricular Development Opportunity for Ph.D. Stu...
My name is Yacine Chemssi and in Fall 2022 I will be a fourth-year graduate student in the Film and Media Studies program with a concentration in French. I am working on beur and banlieue cinema in France, and, in particular, I am analyzing Franco-Maghrebi identity manifestations in films about the...
My name is Jess Batychenko, and in the spring of 2022, I completed an immersive fellowship with Rivers of Steel, a local non-profit with a goal of preserving and sharing the industrial history of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. As a 5th y...
I'm Josh Brew, a second-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh. As an ethnomusicologist, my main research interest focuses on the relationship between music and sustainability. My recent master's thesis emphasized an under-appreciated aspect of sust...
Hello! My name is Sebastian Leal-Arenas, a third-year doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Linguistics Department with a specialisation in Spanish Linguistics. I am really passionate about language acquisition, especially that of L2-L3-Ln speakers, and their attainment of intonation pa...
Hello, I am Celena Todora—a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English Department (Composition Program) and a recipient of the Immersive Dissertation Research Fellowship for the 2021-22 academic year. My dissertation, “Liberatory Education in Anti-Liberatory Spaces: Rhetorics of Freedom in Prison Educa...
My name is Manuel Robles; I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the History department. My dissertation focuses on the contemporary history of Afro-Mexico. I examine how Mexico went from largely ignoring its Afrodescendant population to officially recognizing them as a distinct ethno-racial group with...
My name is Brittney Knotts and I am a recently defended PhD student in English! My dissertation “Labor, Play, and Futurity of the Twenty-First Century Girl Coder” explored both the cultural narratives of the girls’ coding movement as well as the creations of actual girls in the Pittsburgh area. I de...
My name is Celena Todora, and I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English Department. My dissertation, “Liberatory Education in Anti-Liberatory Spaces: Rhetorics of Freedom in Prison Education,” examines my role as a participant-observer working with two prison education initiatives coordinated b...
It may sound odd to hear that a medievalist in an English PhD program would have overlapping interests and goals with a multimedia art studio that produces fine art grounded in African cosmologies. But when I was introduced to Mikael Owunna, award-winning artist, filmmaker, and engineer, I was impre...