Current Graduate Students

Paul Garza

Graduate Student

• garzap@iu.edu

Paul Garza (He/Him) recently graduated with a B.A. in both History and Sociology. Paul participated in the Ronald E. McNair program in undergrad and continues with a McNair Fellowship at Indiana University. Paul’s research focuses on United States Latine populations while delving into themes related to higher education, race, class, and gender. Paul’s latest research project explores the representation of Latine faculty members across Texas Universities via oral histories. Paul’s research goals include decolonizing the American narrative and academia by continuing to tell strategically untold stories of marginalized people. His research will include public history practices that prioritize shared authority with the community.

Remy Levy

Graduate Student

• remylevy@iu.edu

Remy Levy (she/her) is a graduate student in the American Studies department. Her research focuses on the American South with a particular interest in how the South and Southerners are deemed and portrayed as icky in literature, film, and media. She is currently working on developing a theory of icky/ickiness that establishes it as a complex aesthetic emotion that combines disgust and anxiety to provide a framework for her research. Remy holds a Master of Arts in English with a concentration in literature and minor in American Studies, a Bachelor of Arts in English, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

Mia Moore

Graduate Student

• mm302@iu.edu

Mia Moore graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois in Fall 2023, after majoring in History with minors in Social Justice Studies and Sociology. As an undergraduate student, Mia was active in several honors and scholarship initiatives, including the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program. Mia will continue participation in the McNair Scholars Program at Indiana University with a McNair Fellowship. Mia is interested in researching the intersections of popular culture/creative expression, global power, and positionality – especially as it relates to how the United States has used various modes of artistic expression as a means of soft power and cultural hegemony, particularly during war times. Mia is also interested in museum and exhibition studies.  

Jeff Moscaritolo

Graduate Student

• jmoscari@iu.edu

Jeff’s fiction and other writings have been published in Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review, Carve, Paper Darts, Lincoln Journal Star, and Herald-Times Bloomington. He has worked in various corners of the publishing industry and also taught undergraduate English in Nebraska for six years before beginning his PhD in American Studies at IU. His research combines ethnographic and historical approaches to study race and gender in West Coast Swing, a type of swing dance that evolved out of Lindy Hop, of which he is a longtime practitioner.

Peper Rivers

Graduate Student

• pelang@iu.edu

Peper Rivers is a doctoral student in American Studies at Indiana University with research interests at the intersection of addiction, criminalization, and medicalization in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her work engages critical prison studies, the institutional histories of disability, court reform of the US prison system, public health and public safety discourses in the postwar period, and the history of juvenile justice.
   
Peper has been teaching and learning with students in prison since 2017. As a volunteer faculty member with the Indiana Women’s Prison Higher Education Program, she compiled archival research and assisted the incarcerated scholars in their book, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920 (New Press, 2023). She continues to work and teach with the Women’s College Partnership, a campus of Marian University located at Indiana Women’s Prison.

Sasha Weiss

Graduate Student

• weiss5@iu.edu

Sasha (they/he) researches breast cancer as a form of colonial violence. They are particularly interested in the complex interplay between environmental, structural, and biomedical racism and how respectful disease prevention and treatment for Indigenous people is often deprioritized in the contemporary North American medical landscape. Sasha’s MA thesis focused on This Place:150 Years Retold and its position and function as speculative futurist resistance work. He is particularly interested in how Indigenous futurist texts explore embodiment as a locus of state violence and site of resistance, especially the works of Métis authors Chelsea Vowel and Cherie Dimaline.Outside academia, Sasha is a poet, and has written a chapbook, autumn is when the ghosts come out (Blanket Sea Press, 2022).