Fellowships and Awards

IRADAC Fellows

The IRADAC Fellowship provides institutional and intellectual support for seven Ph.D. candidates at the dissertation writing stage. Organized around an interdisciplinary seminar, the IRADAC Fellowship offers sustained support among scholars working on any area of the African Diaspora. During the academic year, fellows will have the opportunity to take advantage of mentoring, professional development, and editorial feedback on their dissertation projects while participating in a weekly seminar designed to keep the participants on a regular writing schedule.

Research Associate/Post-Doctoral Fellowship

As part of the Provost’s Diversity Initiative, IRADAC Research Associate/Post-Doctoral
Fellowships are granted to support the development of early career scholars from diverse backgrounds (with particular attention to historically underrepresented groups in the academy) who show promise as innovative scholars in the study of the African diaspora or the field of Africana Studies as it relates to the study of diasporas, migration and transnationalism.

For application details please email: IRADAC@gc.cuny.edu

2025–2026 IRADAC FELLOWS

Jordan Botello-Alcalá

PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at The CUNY Graduate Center. He also earned a certificate in Africana Studies under the direction of Nathalie Etoke. His philosophical interests are at the intersections of Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Social Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Africana Philosophy, and Latinx/Chicanx Philosophy. Under the supervision of Linda Martín Alcoff, Jordan’s current research involves theorizing conceptual tools to aid analysis of the epistemic environment shaped by the structures and social processes of racial capitalism; and how this environment produces patterns of ignorance that functionally sustain the unjust racial order. His current focus is on how this sort of racial ignorance manifests in marginalized racialized communities (e.g., the rise of the far right among U.S. Latines, the Black-Asian conflict trope, etc.). Jordan's approach is informed transdisciplinary and draws heavily on the Black Radical Tradition. Before that, he was a Talkington Fellow and Graduate Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas Tech University, where he earned an M.A. in Philosophy researching the linguistic appropriation of racial slurs under the supervision of Christopher Hom. Jordan also taught high school in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. This is part of what fuels his deep commitment to anti-racist and abolitionist pedagogy in higher education.

Rosa Angela Calosso

(she/her/ella) is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Urban Education Program. Born and raised in Queens, NY, to Dominican and Salvadorian parents, her upbringing informed a strong understanding of immigration issues, Blackness, and gendered politics, leading her to be part of a couple of immigrant-centered projects. Over the past four years, she has served as a participatory-action researcher in immigrant communities in the Bronx, facilitated information sessions for teacher educators and candidates on incorporating topics and immigration issues in the classroom. Most recently, she has co-curated an immigration literature guide for PK-12 students, highlighting the transformative power of immigration-centered stories. Additionally, she supports teacher educators on computer-integrated teacher education praxis and tools through projects such as CUNY Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CUNY-CITE). Rosa’s dissertation research explores how Black Dominican women utilize social media as a tool for community-building, educational space, and critical reflection and resistance. Rosa’s work highlights Black Dominican women’s ability to teach, cultivate community, and resist institutional ‘isms in an age when mainstream media uses social media users’ content to discuss global political discourses and explicate sociopolitical events.

Omawu Diane Enobabor

is a PhD Candidate in Earth and Environmental Studies at the Graduate Center CUNY. Her dissertation examines social reproduction and contemporary racialized mobilities of African Migrants throughout the Americas- with case studies in São Paulo, Brazil, Tapachula, Mexico and New York, New York. Her research has been supported by the Graduate Center and the Fulbright-Hays Program, and her writing appears in Society and Space. As a social practioner, Diane situates praxis concerned art practice, spatial theory, and social movement organizing strategies as an operational technology toward a liberatory insurgent or 'future planning' in migrant and diasporic communities.

Dasharah Green

was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She uses experiences growing up in her, pre-gentrified, Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood as a backdrop to explore the intersections of race, gender, and storytelling. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in English honors, with a double minor in Africana Studies and Political Science, from John Jay College and graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s degree in English. As a PhD Candidate in the The Graduate Center’s English department, her dissertation Possibilities of Being: Black Women’s Storytelling As Archival Reckoning follows a genealogy of Afro-diasporic/Caribbean women writers from the early twentieth century to present. It explores how we can look to Caribbean women writers as having ruptured our historical understanding and positioning of the archive through storytelling. Each chapter serves as a critical destabilization of the elitist privatization of the archives by demonstrating how knowledge persists in all of this despite the colonial project of erasure. As a Presidential Research Fellow with The Center for Humanities, Dasharah is currently working to implement a Public Scholarship Certificate to The GC. She is currently an adjunct in Baruch College’s Black and Latino/a Studies Department.

Sharifa Hampton

is a professor of Black Literature Studies. She has taught at several New York City colleges including Baruch College, College of Staten Island and Pace University. To further the mission of these institutions, Hampton has worked with several university wide programs that seek to increase, encourage, and support the inclusion and educational success of students from groups that are severely underrepresented in higher education, in particular African, African American/Black, Caribbean and Latino/Hispanic students. For several years, Hampton also coordinated the Pipeline Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. This program seeks to diversify access to and representation in graduate school education. Sharifa is currently a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where she also received her M. Phil degree. She has a M.A. degree in English from the College of Staten Island and a B.S. from NYU in Organizational Behavior and Communication. She currently teaches at Pace University where she was awarded Teacher of Excellence 2024.

Leslie K. Haynes

A vocalist and social dancer in AfroLatin and ballroom genres, Leslie K. Haynes is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, whose current research interests are spawned by the life and career of her father, internationally-acclaimed jazz drummer Roy Haynes, where she examines the intersections of Afrocentric rhythm and dance as cultural expressions of existential freedom (Gilroy, 1993; Etoke, 2022), resistance (Kelley, 2002; 2022), and community-building (Wilson, 1974). Previously, as a language educator at St. John's University, Leslie engaged international students from various programs like the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program, Friends of Fulbright-Argentina, EducationUSA Academy, as well as several community-based organizations in New York and Cuba, facilitating language acquisition often using music, optimizing linguistic and cultural sensitivity, even with students from as far away as Haiti and Palestine. Leslie has presented her research at the New York State-TESOL Applied Linguistics Winter Conference at Teachers College, the Historic Brass Society’s International Conference, “Making the Jazz Gumbo,” commemorating the music of Lieutenant James Reese Europe, and the VII Symposium of Interconnected Arts and Music Performance presented by the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. As Graduate Teaching Fellow, Leslie has taught, “Music in Global America,” and “Music: Its Language, History, & Culture” at Brooklyn College (2021-2024), and “Intro to Music History: Latin America,” at Fordham (2022, 2024).Leslie earned her B.A., Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Hunter College; M.A.T., Rossier School of Education, USC; and M.A., Jazz History and Research, Rutgers University-Newark.

Vallerie Matos

is a writer from New York City. She is an English PhD Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center with research interests in Sound Studies, Glossolalia, and Afro-diasporic literature and epistemologies. Vallerie is an Adjunct Professor in both the English and Black & Latinx Studies departments at Baruch College. She holds an MA in literature from Hunter College and a BS from New York University. Vallerie currently serves as Associate Director for Black & Latinx Publics at Baruch and the Mellon Foundation. Prior to CUNY, she was a Program Director for an arts and social justice youth development program for 5 years. Vallerie is a Literary Fellow with VONA Voices and Lambda Literary, Research Fellow with The Center of the Humanities' Lost & Found archival initiative, Dissertation Fellow with The Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, and a Graduate Center Futures Initiative Fellow.

Maurice Restrepo

is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also holds advanced certificates in Women & Gender Studies and Critical Theory. His research interests include jazz studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical studies in men and masculinities, and Afro-diasporic musical traditions from the Americas and the circum-Caribbean. Maurice’s dissertation employs ethnographic research methods to investigate the constructions, understandings, and negotiations of masculinities among early-career jazz musicians in New York City, applying an intersectional lens to examine the intersections of masculinity with gender, race, sex and sexuality, class, age, politics, and geography. His work has received support from the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), Provost Enhancement Fellowship, Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, and Dr. Benno Lee Scholarship. Maurice is currently a Graduate Fellow at the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music (HISAM) and serves as Managing Editor for the institute’s biannual publication, American Music Review. He has taught introductory ethnomusicology courses at Hunter College, presented his research at the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (MACSEM), and served as both Co-Chair and committee member for the CUNY Graduate Center's annual Graduate Students in Music (GSIM) conference. Before pursuing graduate studies, Maurice worked in development at prominent non-profit music organizations in New York City, including as Jazz at Lincoln Center and Bloomingdale School of Music, where he secured and stewarded grant funding from various government agencies, local elected officials, and major charitable foundations. Maurice holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from Hunter College and a BA in Music and Sociology from New York University.

Jah Elyse Sayers

(they/them) directs their creative energy toward liberatory placemaking through research, writing, artmaking, teaching, and building. You can find their writing in Wagadu, BRICLab Essays, Deem, and Society & Space Magazine. They prioritize participatory and action-based methods in their research and argue against methods that conscript particular people to particular places, instead calling for attentiveness to embodied relationalities and mobilities as people make place. Their research offers theories of placemaking, experimental methods of place-based study, and activated praxes of protecting a place and its constituent placemakers and methods toward liberatory ends. They work as research associate with the Place, Memory & Culture Incubator at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York and are formerly managing editor with Women’s Studies Quarterly. jah is currently a PhD candidate in Earth & Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and recipient of the Marilyn J. Gittell Dissertation Fellowship in Urban Policy and an Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and a Caribbean (IRADAC) Fellowship. They are the initiator and a member of the People’s Riisearch Group, a team of community-based researchers caring for histories, futures, and the now of riis and broader coastline ecologies, and that has grown into the Riis Beach Bloc Association.

Marybeth Tamborra

(she/her) is a PhD candidate in Modern European and American Black Intellectual History at the Graduate Center. Her research examines theories of fascism generated by the Black Radical Tradition during the moment of emergent fascism, and particularly the 1935 Invasion of Ethiopia. This transnational intellectual history weaves the interconnected protests in the West Indies with the demonstrations in Harlem, and the use of history and political theory as radical political change. Her prior research was concerned with the Fascist built environment in public housing from the outskirts of Rome to the Libyan farmsteads, and the political deployment of the home as a means to attain labor, gender and political controls of the regime. Marybeth has taught Global History at Brooklyn College, served as a writing fellow at the City College of New York. She holds an AB in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Outside of academia, Marybeth is an ever-in-awe mother of a three-year-old and a resident of Harlem. She is also an esteemed chef in New York and Italy.

2025–2026 IRADAC Dissertation Fellowship

Michel Mendoza

is a Cuban editor, translator, and scholar. He majored in religious studies in Havana and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His primary research interests include science fiction, neo-baroque poetics, and Afrodiasporic spiritualities in the Hispanophone Caribbean. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the aesthetics of technological resurrection and recycling strategies in literature, outsider art, film, and virtual worlds within 21st-century Cuban culture. As an editor at Rialta Ediciones, he coordinates Curare, a book series dedicated to works in anthropology, philosophy, and history. As a translator he focuses primarily on French to Spanish translations. In recent years, he has translated El esoterismo (Rialta, 2022) by Antoine Faivre and Ars Industrialis: un Vocabulario (Rialta, forthcoming) by Victor Petit. Michel Mendoza has also published several anthologies and critical essays on the work of cuban poet José Kozer. In 2023, he served as an Invited Curator for the exhibition “Sacred Roots, Earthly Memories: Lydia Cabrera's Legacy, Diaspora and Community” at Rutgers University.