Fellowship in Race, Law, and History

• Jennifer Playstead, PhD Candidate, History “In the Streets: Contesting and Enforcing Race in Colonial New York City Courts”
   
• Lopaka O’Connor, PhD Candidate, History “Proving Ground: Anthropologies of Land, Law, and Power in the Nuclear Pacific, 1946-1979”
   
• Shonita Black, Ross School of Business Fellow “Old Money and The Establishment: A Structural Take on Financing the American Dream via Bankruptcy”

• Meenu Deswal, Ph.D. Candidate, History
  “Uneven Terrains of Struggle: Caste, Class, Gender and the Everyday Experience of Law in Colonial South Asia, 1849-1940”
   
• Alex Burnett, Ph.D. Candidate, History, Women’s & Gender Studies
  “Trans of Color Organizing In The Shadow of The Service Economy: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and Antidiscrimination Law, 1969-1973”
   
• Gerson Rosales, Ph.D. Candidate, History
  “Feet People or Refugees?: Salvadorans and the Political Asylum process, 1980-1989”
   
• Jasmine Simington, Ph. D. Candidate, Public Policy, Sociology
  “Negotiating Ownership: Heirs’ Property in Charleston, 1970- Present”
   
• Brooke Simone, JD Candidate
  “Assessing Views of Nonwhite Citizens’ Membership in the American Polity Through the Voting Rights Act Language Provisions”

• Tamar Alexanian, J.D. candidate
  “Racism & The Child Welfare System: The Impact on Families from 1900-2008”
• Grace Argo, Ph.D. candidate, History and Women’s & Gender Studies
  “Constructing the American Family: Debates on Incest in US Law, 1870-1940”
• Marlee Goska, J.D. candidate
  “ ‘The Fight Brought to our Cultural Doorstep’: Tribal Access to and Co-Management of their Dispossessed Lands”
• Katherine Markey, J.D. candidate
  “Policing Interracial Relationships: Morals Law as Anti-Miscegenation in Progressive Era Chicago”
• Gianna May Sanchez, Ph.D. candidate, History
  “ ‘No physician within 14 miles’: Legislative Negotiation of Medical Practice and Traditional Healing in New Mexico, 1880-1940”
• Jonathan Quint, Ph.D. candidate, History
  “Natives, Newcomers, and the Formation of the US-Canadian Border in the Detroit River Region, 1760-1820”
• Reuben Riggs-Bookman, Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology and History
  “Emergency Management: Transformation in Democracy and Neoliberal Governance, 1970-Present”

• Allie Goodman, PhD candidate, History
  “Possession and Promises: Institutionalization, Nativism, and “Child Saving” in Chicago, 1870-1899”
• Nana Quarshie, PhD candidate, Anthropology & History
  “Thorazine and Terror in Early Independence Ghana, 1951-1966”
• Chao Ren, PhD candidate, History
  “Oily Arguments: Institutional Disputes and Native Property Rights in Colonial Burma”
• Jasmine Wang, JD candidate
  “Belonging and the Gendered Nature of Chinese Exclusion”

• David Helps, PhD Candidate, History 
  “Between ‘Tough on Crime’ and the Taxpayer Revolt: Los Angeles Police Expansion and the Origins of the Predatory State”
• Lamin Manneh, PhD Candidate, History 
  “Half Die: Conforming ‘Native’ Urban Quarters and Ecologies in Colonial Bathurst in the 19th Century” 
• Nicole Navarro, PhD Candidate, History 
  “In a State of Exception: Latino Migrations to Washington, D.C., 1970s-1990s”  
• Alexander Stephens, PhD Candidate, History 
  “Making ‘Criminal Aliens’ in the Magic City: Miami, the Mariel Boatlift, and U.S. Immigration Law in the 1980s” 
• James Sunshine, JD Candidate 
  “Fairness Not Leniency: A Review of President Obama’s Clemency Initiative” 

• Daniel Fryer, JD Candidate
  “Phantom Trials”
• Jessica Garrick, PhD Candidate, Sociology
  “Puzzling Through Precedent: Immigrant Workers and the Right to Organize in the Post-Hoffman Era”
• Sauda Nabukenya, PhD Candidate, History
  “Ethnic Balancing, Racial Bargaining, Political Exclusions and Constitutional Development in Uganda, 1950-1967”
• Andrew Walker, PhD Candidate, History
  “Flight of the Firefly: Navigating Antislavery in the Haitian Admiralty Court”
• Tara Weinberg, PhD Candidate, History
  “Land, Law and Apartheid’s Legacy: The Role of Communal Property Associations in South Africa”

• Katherine Brausch, JD Candidate
  “Equal Protections and Guns: The Black Panther Party and Constitutional Rights”
• Zachary Kopin, PhD Candidate, History
  “The Case of Lt. Hooe: Race, the Naval Courts and the Performance Practice of Citizenship in Antebellum America”
• Andres Pletch, PhD Candidate, History
  “Isle of Exception: Slavery, Law, and Governance in Cuba, 1825-1856”
• Matthew Woodbury, PhD Canidate, History
  “Humanitarian Governance, Aboriginal Protection, and New Zealand’s Native Reserves (1835 - 1872)”

• Emad Ansari. JD candidate, Law, and MA candidate Ford School of Public Policy
  “Policing the Postcolony: Colonial-Era Rules for Contemporary Challenges in the Indian Subcontinent”
• Ángela Pérez-Villa. PhD candidate, History and Women’s Studies
  “Race, Law, and the Moralizing Role of Catholicism in Early 19th­Century Colombia”
• Richard Hoffman Reinhardt. PhD pre-candidate, History and Anthropology
  “Missionary Interventions: Religious Authority and the Law in Haiti, from L’Affaire de Bizoton to the US Occupation”
• Amanda Rowe Tillotson, MSW. PhD candidate, Political Science
  “Restrictive Racial Covenants, Racialized Constructions of Property Value, and the Legal Order”

• Ananda Burra. JD candidate, Law, and PhD candidate, Global History
  “Anticolonial and Antiracist Solidarity in Early Cold War International Law: The Trusteeship/Mandates Debates of the Late 1940s and Early 1950s”
• Garrett Felber. PhD candidate, American Culture
  “ ‘The Trial’: Performing Black Unity and Courts as Political Theater”
• Karla Johnson. JD candidate, Law, and MPH candidate, Public Health
  “Reducing Incarceration among African American Young Men through a Mental Health and Trauma-Informed Approach”
• Nora Krinitsky. PhD candidate, History
  “To Serve and Neglect: Street Policing and the Racialization of Crime in Interwar Chicago”
• Ezekiel Rediker. JD candidate, Law
  “Gang Violence in Three Rust Belt Cities: A Study of Policing, the Legal System, and Community Response”

• Pedro Cantisano. JPhD candidate, History
  “Is Freedom Divisible? Law and Slavery in 19th-Century Brazil”
• Jesse Carr. PhD candidate, American Culture
  “Lynching and the Legal Order”
• Andrew Dalack. JD candidate, Law
  “Special Administrative Measures and the War on Terror: The Consequences of Harsh Pre-Trial Detention”
• Ashley Mitchell. JD candidate, Law
  “Disabilities, Race, and the Co-existing Fight for Educational Rights”
• Joost Van Eynde. PhD candidate, History
  “A Slave’s Good Character: Local Justice in a Kentucky Pardon Case, 1808”

David Helps. “Neighborhood Nightmares”: Drug Dens, Finance, and the Political Economy of the Crack Crisis, October 7, 2022

Former RLH Fellow Alexander Stephens’ peer-reviewed article drawing from research he did for the Race, Law and History proseminar paper has been published in a special issue on the Mariel boatlift in Anthurium, a digital journal based at the University of Miami.

Stephens, Alexander. Reagan’s war on drugs also waged war on immigrants. Washington Post,  October 27, 2021

Goska, Marlee. The Fight Brought to our Cultural Doorstep: Tribal Co-Management of Dispossessed Lands. ABA Environment, Energy, and Resources, October 12, 2021

Cantisano, Pedro. Legal Reasoning in a Slave Society (Brazil, 1860–88). Law and History Review, 36(3), pp. 471-510.

Dalack, Andrew. Special Administrative Measures and the War on Terror: When do Extreme Pretrial Detention Measures Offend the Constitution?, 19 Mich. J. Race & L. 415 (2014).

Felber, Garrett. The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New. Boston Review, June 25, 2020.

Felber, Garrett. Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 2019.

Fryer, Daniel. Race, Reform, & Progressive Prosecution, 110 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 769 (2020).

Helps, David. Covid-19 Outbreaks at Jails and Prisons Should Make us Rethink Incarceration. Washington Post, June 25, 2020.

Helps, David. When Conservatives Called To Freeze Police Budgets. The Metropole. 

Pérez-Villa, Ángela. Amistades Ilícitas en el Periodo de la Independencia. El Tiempo (Bogotá, Colombia), December 17, 2019.

Stephens, Alexander. Governments and Corporations Have Deemed Immigrant Workers Expendable During the Pandemic. Jacobin Magazine, May 11, 2020. Reagan’s war on drugs also waged war on immigrants The Washington Post, October 27, 2021.

Sunshine, James Russell (2020). President Obama’s Misunderstood Clemency Initiative. Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, 25(1).

Walker, Andrew (2019). Illegal Under the Laws of All Nations? The Courts of Haiti and the Suppression of the Atlantic Trade in African Captives. Law and History Review, 37(2), pp. 539-569.

Alexander Stephens, Ph.D. Candidate in History, RLH Fellow 2018-2019, is the 2022-2023 recipient of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Alfredo D. & Luz Maria P. Gutierrez Dissertation Award for his dissertation titled, Excludable: Cubans, Migration, and Carceral States, 1959-1996. This award is administered in partnership with the Rackham Graduate School. (LACS offers one Ph.D. candidate the Gutierrez Dissertation Award each year to support dissertation write-up.)

Nana Quarshie (R, L & H Fellow 2019-2020) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. His book project, “An African Pharmakon,” examines the place of psychiatric care in processes of social stratification and in the production of national, regional, and ethnic diversity in West Africa

Chao Ren (RLH fellow 2019-20) is awarded American Society for Legal History summer research grant.

Starting August 2020, Nicole Navarro (RLH fellow 2018-19) will be a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC, as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship Program. 

Having completed his clerkship for the Honorable Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Daniel Fryer (R, L & H Fellow 2016-2017), is now a Research Scholar at UM Law. He is finishing his dissertation on reparative justice in the Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania.

Andrew Walker (R, L & H Fellow 2016-2017) has been awarded a 2021 postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute, where he will work on his book, “Strains of Unity: From Emancipation to Separation in Haitian Santo Domingo.” 

Ángela Pérez-Villa is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History at Western Michigan University.

Nora Krinitsky is a Lecturer III in the Residential College, the Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project, and a faculty affiliate of the U-M Carceral State Project. At the Carceral State Project, she conducts research on prison conditions and the role of creative expression in forging alternative visions to incarceration and criminalization.

Ananda Burra (R, L & H 2013-2014) is an Associate with the New York firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel (ECBAWM). Attorneys in the firm practice in the fields of civil rights and civil liberties, fighting for the rights of incarcerated people, people marginalized by powerful institutions, and plaintiffs seeking to make lasting social change. Ananda is currently working on a case brought by the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, against several oil companies, seeking to hold them responsible for their contribution to climate change. See Hoboken v. Exxon Mobil Corp., et al.

Andrew Dalack (RLH fellow 2012-13) is an attorney for the Federal Defenders of New York. 

Marlee Goska (R, L, & H Fellow 2020-2021) has won the ABA’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER) 2021 Public Land and Resources Student Writing Competition for her article, “’The Fight Brought to our Cultural Doorstep’: Tribal Co-Management of Dispossessed Lands,” written during her fellowship year.