Student Profiles
Miabi Chatterji entered the American Studies Ph.D. program in 2003. Her research interests include immigration to the U.S., corporate-led globalization, comparative Ethnic Studies, labor and gender, and the history/evolution of capitalism. She has previously researched Asian American leftist activists from the 1940s and 1950s, and her future dissertation work will most likely investigate South Asian service-sector workers in New York City and the particular function of their racialized labor. She works with Youth Solidarity Summer, a political education program for radical South Asian American youth, and GSOC, the graduate assistants’ union at NYU.
American Studies Ph.D. student Dacia Mitchell is a writer and visual artist who studied painting and biochemistry at Carleton College, where she earned her B.A. in Studio Art in 1998. Dacia also studied Orientalist and Post-Colonial art history at L'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, which sparked her interest in race as a political identity. She later received her M.A. in Visual Studies from the California College of the Arts (CCA), where she wrote her thesis on representations of race in advertising. After graduating from CCA, Dacia served as a Scholar Assistant in the Research and Education department of the Getty Research Institute, where she worked closely with Getty Scholars on their varied projects and publications. Dacia is currently researching how representations of race during disaster frame the historical archive.
Adam John Waterman is completing an American Studies Ph.D. dissertation that examines the social history of law and U.S. sovereignty in the old Northwest through the events of the 1832 Black Hawk War. Tracing relationships between law, violence, sensation, and representation, it explores the production of property, individuality, and racial difference through the construction of a militarily fortified frontier society. Waterman’s other research interests include rural culture, economy and society; the relationship between European imperialism and American expansion; nineteenth century visions of pan-Americanism; and social theories of history, knowledge, and the nation-state. At present, he is beginning a project on crystal meth and the War on Drugs in the rural United States.
