Current Fellows Fall 2023
Faculty Fellows
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Kristin Oberiano
Assistant Professor of History
Read MoreKristin Oberiano is a historian of United States empire in the Pacific. Oberiano’s research project, tentatively titled Territorial Discontent: Chamorros, Filipinos, and the Making of the United States Empire in Guam, examines the evolution of the political, social, and cultural relations between Indigenous Chamorro people and Filipino migrants under the United States military empire on Guam over the twentieth century. Territorial Discontent engages in frameworks of race, settler colonialism, militarism, and migration within empire. Oberiano teaches courses in twentieth-century US history, the history of US in the World, US imperialism, Asian and Pacific Islander history, and Pacific history.
Now an islander living on the East Coast, Oberiano was born to Filipino immigrant families and raised in Guam.
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A. George Bajalia
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Read MoreA. George Bajalia is a sociocultural anthropologist concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier and Ceuta. He has held research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation-CAORC, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference. His courses at Wesleyan explore the relationships between anthropology, performance, and curation; migration and borderlands; endurance and the otherwise; and theories of cultural and social change.
Representative Publications:
Refereed ArticlesBajalia, A. George. 2023. “Doing Barzakh, Making Boza: Betwixt and Between Migration and Immigration in Tangier.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410103. (Open Access)w/ Batmanghelichi, Kristin Soraya, and Sami Al-Daghistani. 2021. “Introduction to the Special Issue Pluralism in Emergenc(i)Es in the Middle East and North Africa.” Review of Middle East Studies 54 (2): 162–73. https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.11.Bajalia, A. George. 2020. “Dima Africa, Daily Darija: Im/Migrant Sociality, Settlement, and State Policy in Tangier, Morocco.” The Journal of North African Studies, July, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2020.1800212.Online Media, Print Essays, and Talks:2023. "In and Out of Place in Tangier." Makan Journal of Culture and Space. (Forthcoming)2022. Documenta 15. Invited Panel Discussion. New Tribes: Revis(it)ing Historical Caravan Routes through Contemporary Territorial Perspectives of Cultural Initiatives.2022. "Review: Pièces Détachèes." K-oh-llective Reviews. https://kohllective.com/Pieces-Detachees (in Arabic here: https://kohllective.com/Pieces-Detachees_AR)2022. “What remains from al-Andalus?” CHERGUI, June 20, 2022. (https://www.academia.edu/98469311/What_Remains_From_al_Andalus)2021. “Waiting and Working: Shared Difference and Labors of Belonging in Immigrant Tangier.” POMEPS Studies, 44 Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach (September 16, 2021). https://pomeps.org/waiting-and-working-shared-difference-and-labors-of-belonging-in-immigrant-tangier.2021. “Borders/Breakdown.” In De La Dérive / On Drifting / ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿, edited by Justine Daquin, Zoé Le Voyer, Sanaa Zaghoud, and Manon Bachelier. Vilnius, Lithuania: JSC KOPA. (https://calypso3621.com/archive/frontiere-repartition/)Bajalia, A. George, and Aida Alami. “Podcast: Roots and Traces of Contemporary Cultural Life in Tangier.” Tangier American Legation Museum (blog), September 16, 2021. https://legation.org/podcast-roots-and-traces-of-contemporary-cultural-life-in-tangier/.w/ Francesca Masoero. 2020. “QANAT and The Art of Digging Holes in Water in Marrakech.” CHERGUI, February 20, 2020. (pdf downloadable at https://www.academia.edu/43331081/Larte_di_fare_buchi_nellacqua_QANAT_Chergui_)w/ Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. 2018. “Crossing into Ceuta.” Migrant Journal, no. 4, Dark Matters (June): 8–23. (pdf downloadable at https://www.academia.edu/43333630/Crossing_into_Ceuta) -
Saida Daukeyeva
Assistant Professor of Music
Read MoreSaida Daukeyeva is an ethnographer and historian of music in Central Asia and a scholar of Arabic music theory. Her research explores the intersection of sound with social and political geographies in Central Asia, focusing on Kazakh music and expressive culture across borders. Her book-in-progress, based on extensive fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, examines the impact of migration, socialist cultural policy, and national revival on dombyra (two-stringed plucked lute) performance among the transnational community of Mongolian Kazakhs. Her monograph Philosophy of Music by Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi (2002, in Russian) draws on archival studies in Syria to reconstruct the intellectual and cultural background to the music scholarship of Islamic polymath al-Farabi (c. 870-950). She has published on Kazakh traditional and contemporary music and medieval Arabic writings in edited volumes and journals such as Ethnomusicology Forum, Asian Music, and Review of Middle Eastern Studies, and co-edited the award-winning book The Music of Central Asia (2016). A trained harpsichord player, she has also studied the dombyra and the two-stringed bowed lute qyl-qobyz with master musicians in Kazakhstan.
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Elaine Gan
Assistant Professor of Science in Society
Read MoreElaine Gan, MFA/PhD, is Assistant Professor of Science in Society. Teaching, research, and creative practice engage with the fields of feminist science & technology studies, multispecies anthropology, environmental/digital arts and humanities, and experimental media. As a transdisciplinary theorist-artist, Gan uses writing, drawing, installation, and time-based media to explore social relations and coordinations that emerge between species, machines, and landscapes, with a special interest in de/colonial botany, plants, and fungi.
Gan is co-editor of an interdisciplinary anthology titled Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and director of the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab which produces a podcast about climate change. She is currently working on two book projects about two different crops: the first focuses on multispecies temporalities and global transformations of rice (Oryza sativa); the second focuses on the extinction and transgenic revival of American chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) in eastern United States, including Connecticut.
Before coming to Wesleyan, Gan was a faculty member at New York University, postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and art director for the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene Project in Denmark. She actively collaborates on experimental projects that propose methods for multispecies living. More about her practice is online at elainegan.com
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Hassan Almohammed
Visiting Associate Professor of the Humanities
Read MoreHassan Almohammed is a Visiting Associate Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, where his academic pursuits span the fields of French, Francophone, and Intercultural Studies, Middle East Studies, Media, and Environmental Studies. He is not only an academic but also a journalist and digital artist. His multilingual abilities extend to English, Arabic, and French.
Previously, Hassan taught a seminar on the Arab Spring at Marburg University, affiliated with the Center of Conflict Studies in Germany. His academic experience also includes serving as a Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara and Brandeis University, along with being a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University (Columbia Global Centre| Amman). Additionally, he held the position of Professor at Sivas University in Turkey.
As a journalist, Hassan has significantly contributed to documentary filmmaking in Paris, collaborating with notable entities such as Capa Presse and Arte. He has authored numerous non-fiction articles in both French and Arabic languages.
His academic record includes multiple peer-reviewed articles, a book on Poetry and Ecology, and a Digital Art Book. Hassan has delivered talks at various international symposiums, spanning different countries including France, Tunisia, Algeria, the UK, Romania, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Cameroon, and Cote d'Ivoire.
Recently, Hassan completed a critical text in Arabic that delves into the intriguing relationship between Meteorology and Writing, focusing on narrating climate within the Arab Novel. The novels examined in this work include "The Blue Gerboa" by the Algerian Mohammad Baba Ami, "Endings" by the Saudi Abdel Rahman Munif, "The Sail and the Storm" by the Syrian Hannah Minah, and "The Gold Dust (Al Tibr)" by the Libyan Ibrahim Al Koni. He has also authored a novel titled "Papers of Love and Death: From Don Quichotte to Abu Khaizaran," which explores the impact of war in Syria.
Currently, Hassan is actively engaged in writing another novel that explores the theme of Sudanese immigration to Saudi Arabia, titled "The Immigrant's Coffin." Additionally, he is working on a book project: Poetic Meteorology and Eco-Writing, Analysis of Double Climate in Francophone Literature.
Hassan's Educational background includes:
- 1998-1999: BA and MA in French Studies from Aleppo University, Syria.
- 2002: MA in French Literature from Université Blaise Pascal, France.
- 2008: EHESS, Paris, specializing in the Theory and Practice of Language and Arts.
- 2009: Ph.D. in French Literature and Civilization from Université Blaise Pascal, France.
His diverse academic and creative pursuits showcase his commitment to the exploration and dissemination of knowledge across multiple disciplines and languages.
Andrew W. Mellon Fellows
Student Fellows
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Christopher Hadley
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Yohely Comprés
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Joshua Kleiman
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Ethan Park
Research Fellows
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Bethany Berger
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Valentina Ramia
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Maeve Doyle