Blog

My name is Jess Batychenko and I’m a 4th year PhD student in the English department on the Composition and Rhetoric track. My research is concerned with the possibilities for place-based learning and the way oral histories offer a richer and more nuanced representation of communities than public dis...
My name is Manuel Robles. I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the History department. My dissertation seeks to illuminate how Mexico went from largely ignoring its Afrodescendant population to officially recognizing them as a distinct ethno-racial group with full constitutional rights. In this study,...
My name is Brittney Knotts, and I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate working in the field of English Critical and Cultural Studies. My dissertation project involved work at two research sites in Pittsburgh, The Ellis School and Assemble, where I met with girls involved in computer coding and STEAM curr...
My name is Alexus Brown, and I am a third-year doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Linguistics Department with a concentration in Sociolinguistics. My research interests include utilizing interdisciplinary methodology and theoretical bases to explore linguistic, rhythmic, and social p...
I am a fourth-year PhD student in Film and Media Studies with a Concentration in Slavic. My research is concerned with contemporary Russian cinema, film and new media audiences, popular culture and neoliberalism, and cult and horror film. My research explores specifically Russian ways of formi...
My name is Alexus Brown, and I am a third-year doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Linguistics department with a concentration in Sociolinguistics. The digital technological age has contributed state-of-the-art research tools to many fields of study. There are constantly new improveme...
I am Sreemoyee Dasgupta, a final year graduate student in the Department of English currently finishing my dissertation. My dissertation project lies at the intersection of childhood studies and postcolonial studies, while my broader interests lie in Victorian literature, popular culture, global lit...
My name is Taylor Waits, and I am a 3rd-year Critical and Cultural Studies PhD student with a focus on Critical Literature and Pedagogies. I am interested in analyzing storytelling campaigns on social media organized by undergraduates in response to institutional policies of their campuses and measu...
The Black archive is a space where the past and the present meet to point the way to a new and radical imagining of the future. The lure of the archive – which led Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s to document her people’s history and folktales in Mules and Men and inspired Alice Walker to excavate Zo...
The Public-Facing History Laboratory has been a project that I have been thinking about for a long time. Public history is a well-established subfield within History. Rather than create a course that surveyed the greatest hits from Public History though, I wanted to create a course that was project-...
As I was placing a face mask on my son in the car outside his daycare center on the morning of 31 August 2021 and went through my daily thought process of weighing his possible exposure to COVID-19 against my need to work, I heard a story on WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR news station, that announced Pittsb...
I’m Emilee Ruhland, a fifth-year PhD student in the English department, and I spent ten weeks in the summer of 2021 working with the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, informally referred to as Pitt Research. I am a medievalist...
I am Luana Reis, a poet, educator, and a Black feminist scholar. I was born and raised in Bahia, Brazil, and I am currently a fourth-year PhD student in the department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, where I also teach Portuguese. Aside from Nigeria, no other c...
My name is Mehul Bhushan. I am a third-year PhD Student in the Department of Communication at Pitt, and I am also an international student from India. In my research, I focus on how marginalized indigenous communities can leverage the latest tools and technologies, such as natural language processin...