Fellowships

Marcus Anthony Allen is a historian of African American History and Business History.  His research interests include Nineteenth Century American History, the History of American Capitalism, North American Slavery, Labor History, and the American Presidents.

Allen is currently an Assistant Professor in the History Department at UW-Milwaukee.  Allen has taught at a number of different PWIs and HBCUs, namely, Morgan State University, James Madison University, NC A&T State University, Miami University and Case Western Reserve University.

His current book project, under contract with the University of Georgia Press, is an examination of African-American savings accounts before and after the Civil War.  Allen triangulates bank, land, census and property tax records, death certificates, and San born insurance maps in the process of understanding black economic life in Baltimore’s nineteenth century black community.

Most recently, Allen was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and a Postdoctoral Scholar of African American History at Case Western Reserve University.

For leisure, he enjoys spending time with his family, cooking, reading, running, and eating at Chick-Fil-a.

Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Sally Mead-Hands-Bascom Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A fourth generation Chinese American from the Bay Area, she earned a PhD in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001) She is the editor of Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012); a scholarly edition of Fiona Cheong’s novel, The Scent of the Gods (Illinois University Press, 2010); and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature (2022). Her research for the Center follows from her most recent book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke 2022).

Kyoung Ae Cho is a fibers artist who is engaging in a conversation with nature, respectfully incorporating natural elements, recycled matter as well as low-valued materials, mostly which she has gathered. The outcome of her creative research results in various visual formats such as Fibers construction, Quilt, Collage, Weaving, Sculpture, Photography, Drawing, Installation and so on. Cho’s work, has been exhibited in national and international venues in WI, WA, UT, TX, TN, PA, SD, OK, OH, NY, NV, NJ, NH, NE, MS, MO, MN, MI, ME, MA, LA, KS, KY, IL, IN, IA, GA, CA, AL, Germany, France, Belgium, Finland, Netherland, Guam, Sri LanKa, Taiwan, South Korea. Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications such as American Craft; Surface Design Journal; Fiberarts Magazine; Fiber Art Today (Schiffer Publishing Ltd); Masters: Art Quilts (Lark Books); The Ultimate Guide to Art Quilting (Sixth & Spring Books); Quilting with a Modern Slant (Storey Publishing LLC); The Best of Contemporary Quilts (Lark Books); Fiberarts Design Book IV, VI & VII (Lark Books); Art Textiles of the World: USA (Telos Art Publishing, England);  and No: Nouvel Object (Design House, South Korea) and the monograph Portfolio Collection : Kyoung Ae Cho (Telos Art Publishing, England.)  Cho received numerous awards including the Lillian Elliott Award, the Quilt National Award of Excellence, the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the UWM Foundation and Graduate School Research Award, and Wisconsin Arts Board Award Fellowship.  

Kyoung Ae Cho earned her Master of Fine Art from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and her Bachelor of Fine Art from Ducksung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. She is a Professor of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Elana Levine is professor of media, cinema, and digital studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History (Duke, 2020), Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke, 2020), co-author of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012), and editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (Illinois, 2015). During the 2024-25 fellowship year, she will be working on a new book, Soap Opera: Romance, Politics, and Scandal in the Lives of Daytime Drama Writers Frank and Doris Hursley, a combination biography and cultural history written for a general readership.   

As a cultural anthropologist in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, my research has centered on the intersection of migration, citizenship, race, and gender. I have conducted research in the Caribbean, where I examined the implications of Bahamian notions of citizenship for the integration of Haitian immigrants, and Southern Europe, where I have analyzed the relationship between the social integration of West African immigrants in Spain and their involvement in activities that tie them to their countries of origin. In recent years, my research has broadened to explore the implications of race, gender, and class in shaping identity formation among middleclass African Americans in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. My research on the Black middle class in Milwaukee is a collaborative effort with Robert S. Smith, director of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach and associate professor in the Department of History at Marquette University, and Kitonga Alexander, PhD candidate in History at UWM. The oral history interviews for the Living for the City: The Black Middle Class in Milwaukee project is housed at UWM Libraries.

Peter Sands has been teaching at UWM since 1997 and directing the Honors College since 2014. He primarily teaches utopian and dystopian literature, science fiction, and American literature courses that incorporate non-canonical works by women and writers of color, non-U.S. world literatures, and challenges to traditional literary texts and histories. His research includes work on white representations of Native American otherness in nineteenth-century literature, utopian and dystopian responses to racial and class divides from the nineteenth century to the present day, and work on the slow food and related slow movements as alternatives to contemporary social and economic frameworks that particularly empower non-dominant communities to resist global inequities and imagine possible worlds.

Rimi Zakaria, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She earned her doctorate at Florida International University. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying organizational outcomes at the crossroads of strategy, sustainability, and international business. Specifically, she examines inter-firm cooperation, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, non-profits, and socio-environmentally responsible for-profit organizations. As a teacher, she focuses on incorporating hands-on and multicultural experiences into her courses, encouraging students to apply theoretical knowledge at the intersection of business and society. 

Dr. Zakaria’s teaching and research received numerous campus and external recognitions. She actively contributes to the leading professional organizations of her disciplines (e.g., the Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business). Rimi was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh.  

Carson Pittman is a second-year MA student in the Rhetoric and Professional Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research focuses on disability studies, exploring themes of embodiment, language, and community. Carson is dedicated to enhancing the understanding of disability as both an individual and communal identity, while continuously seeking ways to promote inclusivity in academic and public spaces. While supporting C21’s programs as a graduate fellow, she plans to maintain these goals. At UWM, Carson has taught English 102 and is currently teaching English 100. Passionate about community work, she has also held several internships, including a recent grant writing position at Sherman Phoenix, a nonprofit organization in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. In her free time, Carson can be found outdoors, running, cycling, seeking out new restaurants to try, or spending time with friends and family.

Jamee Pritchard is a doctoral candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her educational and professional background is in library and information science (MLIS, 2017) and public history (MA, 2020), focusing on the research, organization, and curation of archives and special collections that center the histories and cultures of women and girls from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Other research interests include Black women’s writing and literary activism and Black readerships of popular romance and speculative literatures. Ms. Pritchard is currently working on her dissertation project that examines Black girls’ engagement with speculative fiction (e.g. science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels) and considers the potential of Black women’s speculative fiction storytelling as an alternative archive for the study of Black girlhood.

Russell Star-Lackis a coordinated master’s student in Urban Studies and Library and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a UWM Distinguished Graduate Student Fellow, and a former Fellow at UWM’s Center for Economic Development, where he worked with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council on fair lending and community reinvestment issues. Russell’s interests include housing inequality (past and present), the spatial dynamics of race and ethnicity, the relationship between housing and the carceral state, and the role of nonprofits and community organizations in urban governance. His work has been published in e.polis, the Journal of Urban History, and TC Jewfolk.

Yuchen Zhao is a PhD Candidate from Urban Studies Program at UWM. His general interest lies in exploring the ways of seeing, describing, interpreting, and speculating on how everyday built environments have given shape and meaning to social life. He is also interested in how food culture, food traditions, and food-related practices both shape, and are shaped by, the nature of the landscape and people’s relationship with it.