Recovery & Community Presenter Bios
Nadiah Alyafai, UIC student
Nadiah Alyafai is a Yemeni American who was born and raised in the southwest suburbs of Illinois. She is a student at UIC and is majoring in Architectural Studies and Interdisciplinary Education of the Arts. She began understanding the struggles in which Arabs and Muslims face in 2017 when she started her journey as a youth organizer of the Arab community in the Chicagoland area. Participating in many town halls, direct actions, and community events she was able to rise to the scene of becoming a lead organizer. She currently takes part in politically educating youth in the Southwest suburbs, who were once in her position, and develops their organizing and leadership skills. She joined the Arab American Cultural Center with the intent to continue to serve her community on Campus and allow for others to take pride in fighting for liberation and representation.
Rachel Ida Buff, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Rachel Ida Buff teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has been the faculty coordinator for the Wisconsin CAN archive project since its inception in 2020.
Maria Cotera, Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas
Dr. Maria Eugenia Cotera is an associate professor in the Mexican American and Latino Studies Department at the University of Texas—Austin. She holds a PhD from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought, and an MA in English from the University of Texas. Her first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press, 2008) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 from the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). Her edited volume (with Dionne Espinoza and Maylei Blackwell), Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Feminism and Activism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018) has been adopted in courses across the country. Professor Cotera is the co-founder and project director of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, an online interactive archive of oral histories and material culture documenting Chicana Feminist praxis over the Long Civil Rights period. She has curated several public history exhibits, including Las Rebeldes: Stories of Strength and Struggle in southeast Michigan (2013) and Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos (2017) and currently serves as an advisor/consultant numerous large-scale digital public humanities projects focusing on the Latinx experience. Professor Cotera has served on the National Council for the American Studies Association (2007-2010), the governing board of the Latina/o Studies Association (2014-2015), the program committee for the National Women’s Studies Association (2017-2018), and the Arte Público Recovery Project Governing Board (2018-present).
Anna Guevarra, Associate Professor and Founding Director of Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago
Anna Guevarra is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research, teaching and community engaged work focuses on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of carework, the Philippine diaspora, and critical race/ethnic studies. She is the Founding Director and Associate Professor in the Global Asian Studies Program and a Co-PI of the UIC AANAPISI Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is currently working on projects that reflect a commitment to telling stories of migration, labor, and race and gender formations including those pertaining to robotics, food studies, and urban displacements. She co-founded a public history multi-media project with Gayatri Reddy entitled Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, which brings together scholars, students, and community members to trace a People’s History of Uptown, a northside neighborhood of Chicago intentionally shaped by multiple forms of displacement and urban renewal, as well as active resistance to it. Anna works and volunteers with Chicago based community organizations that focus on issues of racial and economic justice, immigration rights, and cross-racial solidarity work. Her teaching pedagogy is anchored by social justice and intersectional frameworks, alongside experiential and field-based learning. She previously served as a Public Voices Fellow in the OpEd Project. Her PhD is in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.
Hannah Huber, Digital Technology Leader for Southern Studies, Sewanee: University of the South
Hannah Huber is the Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator for the Center for Southern Studies at the University of the South at Sewanee, where she advises faculty on how to use dh tools in teaching and research, helps manage dh projects in southern studies, and attends to the day-to-day administration of the Center. She received her PhD in English from the University of South Carolina and served as the postdoctoral research associate for the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago (2019-2020) where she worked as a consultant on dh projects, organized the inaugural dh conference on campus, and conducted her own literary studies and dh scholarship. Her manuscript and digital companion on Progressive-Era U.S. sleep culture is currently under contract with the University of Illinois Press.
October Kamara, PhD Student in History, UIC
October Kamara (she/her) is a graduate student at the University of Illinois Chicago studying queer and black history. She received her Masters in public history at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. While at MTSU, she worked as a graduate research assistant for the Roberson Project on Race, Slavery, and Reconciliation which is a black history project at the University of the South at Sewanee. With the Roberson project she helped build the Save Sewanee Black History archive which is a digital community archive that preserves donated materials from the historically black neighborhood of St. Marks. She also helped create the Locating Slavery’s Legacies archive which will be a collaborative database that collects metadata on lost cause and anti-civil rights memorials on southern college campuses. Her own personal research looks at Black Power movements in the South.
Yena Lee, Doctoral student in the Media, Technology, and Society program, Northwestern School of Communication
Yena Lee is a PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern School of Communication. She is interested in studying the emerging forms and processes of networked social movement and the technological, political, and organizational conditions that enable or challenge the rise of such movements. Her research aims to better understand the changing logics of social movement at both levels of consciousness-raising and policymaking through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens. Her most recent research published in the Information, Communication, & Society journal looks at the role of leadership in feminist networked social movements in South Korea. She has previously written about the feminist activist chatbot in Brazil and feminist K-pop fan activism on Twitter.
Rahim Kurwa, Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice, UIC
Rahim Kurwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Department of Sociology (by courtesy) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on the policing of housing. He has published scholarship on this topic in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. His book project traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how pre-1968 methods of racial segregation in this region have been replaced today by policing. Other interests include the family implications of the policing of housing assistance, the interrelatedness of policing and segregation, and the history of policing in public housing and its successor programs. He currently serves as the chair of the Poverty, Class, and Inequality Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Lori Kido Lopez, Professor of Communication Arts and Director of Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Lori Kido Lopez is Professor of Communication Arts and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published many books on race and media, including Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora, and her latest book Race and Digital Media: An Introduction. Her research examines the way that minority groups use media in the fight for social justice, particularly focusing on Asian American communities and digital media cultures.
Gayatri Reddy, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago
Gayatri Reddy is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research, teaching and community engaged work explore the politics of subject and community formation at the fraught intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and class in India, and the Indian diaspora. Her earlier work focused on hijras, the so-called transgender community in India, locating such figures of sexual difference, and the domain of sexuality, within a broader field of intersectional social difference. More recently, her work explores the contextual meanings of blackness in contemporary India through the lens of east “African” migrations to India in the wake of slavery’s abolition. Tracing these historical routes and geopolitical mappings through the prism of masculinity, this project historically and ethnographically explores the complex ways in which race, blackness, and masculinity are constructed through global and local contours of difference to shape contemporary belonging. In Chicago, she also co-founded a public history multi-media project with Anna Guevarra titled Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, which visualizes the displacements of people and struggles over land, housing, and education stemming from urban renewal policies in the northside neighborhood of Uptown.
Pilar Cary Sharp, UWM student, Public Health
Pilar Cary Sharp is a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student pursuing a B.S. degree in Public Health with a certificate in Cultures and Communities. Her interest in Public Health and community-based research started from a young age volunteering and organizing with Black and Brown communities like the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee. Pilar has done extensive research documenting and archiving social justice movements like the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city of Milwaukee, working with community organizations and local activists to document these historic events. Through research with Wisconsin CAN (Community Activism Now), she has been able to create a public digital archive for the community to help ensure that when it comes time to write the history of this movement, the story is told by its participants and not by those who seek to rewrite it. In the future, Wisconsin CAN plans to archive other movements and utilize the digital platform as a catalyst for education in the community.
Kellee E. Warren, Assistant Professor and Special Collections Librarian, UIC
Kellee E. Warren is Assistant Professor and Special Collections Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. Warren’s most recent article “Toward an Afro-Asian Hip-Hop Dance Pedagogy,” was published in Conversations Across the Field of Dance, a special issue on anti-Asian hate. The article is a critical reflection highlighting her collaborative pedagogical approach to working with disciplinary faculty, teaching an oral history workshop, and holding and preserving a collection of student-created oral history interviews. Her 2020 article, “Reimagining Special Collections Instruction: A Special Case of Haiti” was published in The American Archivist and documents a perspective on delivering archival instruction with colonial collections. In 2016, Ms. Warren’s article, “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Profession, and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles” was published in Library Trends. Ms. Warren’s research interests include critical pedagogies, digital humanities, and oral history.
Bryan Winston, Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University
Bryan Winston is a postdoctoral fellow for the Carceral Connecticut Project at Wesleyan University. Winston specializes in migration history, oral history, and digital humanities, and is currently completing his first book: Mexican Corridors: Migration and Community Formation in the Lower Midwest, 1900 to 1950. The book is a transnational account and analysis of ethnic Mexican life in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska during the first half of the twentieth century. Complementing the monograph in progress is a digital history project, titled “Mapping the Mexican Midwest,” that visualizes Mexican migration routes, institutions, and social networks in the region.
Prior to his arrival at Wesleyan, Winston was the project manager and postdoctoral fellow for the Dartmouth Digital History Initiative, a digital humanities project that launched open-source tools that make oral histories more searchable and accessible. He was also the Associate Director for two oral history projects: the Dartmouth Vietnam Project and Dartmouth Black Lives.
Jewon Woo, Associate Professor of English, Lorain County Community College
Jewon Woo teaches African American literature, American literature, Women’s literature, fiction, humanities, and compositions at Lorain County Community College, Ohio. Her research includes topics about Black Print Culture, Black periodicals, performance, 19th century American culture and literature, community-based pedagogy and pedagogy for under-represented students, and digital humanities. She recently published a digital project on 19th-century Black newspapers in Ohio, on which she presents today.
Zeina Zaatari, Director Arab American Cultural Center and Adjunct Faculty in Anthropology
For over 20 years Zeina Zaatari, a feminist from South Lebanon, has worked on gender and racial justice in Arab and Arab American communities both within academic and non-profit spaces in programming and producing knowledge. Before joining UIC in January 2019, she worked as Research Director at Political Research Associates, an organization that studies the US Right (including religious Right, Political Right and far right groups). Previously, she worked as the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women (2004-12) where she managed a diverse grantmaking program to support women’s and trans movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Zeina joined the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC in January 2019 and is also adjunct Faculty in the department of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow in the Honors College.
Zeina earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from the University of California at Davis, with dissertation fieldwork focusing on women’s groups and activists in South Lebanon. Zeina serves as the Associate Editor for the Middle East and Africa (northern and sub-Saharan) for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She is a trainer and mentor for The Muslim Women in the Media Training Institute supporting journalism graduate students and junior journalists in better coverage and representation of Muslim women and their issues. She is a co-founder and member of the Training to Engaged Research Group that provides training and mentorship to junior faculty and graduate students in mostly national universities in the Arab region on how to conceptualize research projects, draft research proposals, conduct the research, analyze the data, and get published.