Current Graduate Students

Lisa Doi

Graduate Student

• edoi@iu.edu

Lisa Doi’s research focuses on memory and memorialization of Japanese American World War II incarceration. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic engagement with Japanese American pilgrimages to World War II incarceration sites. Lisa’s work is highly engaged, bridging her academic work with her co-directorship of Tsuru for Solidarity, a collective of progressive Japanese Americans engaged in abolitionist and racial healing work. Together, these interests allow Lisa to both theorize and practice a Japanese American politic that is rooted in history but that is also aspiring towards a more capacious future. Lisa is also a curatorial assistant at the Japanese American National Museum, the President of the Japanese American Citizens League Chicago, and a 2021-2023 Sacred Journey Fellow with Interfaith America.

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.

Peper Langhout

Graduate Student

• pelang@iu.edu

Peper Rivers is a second-year Ph.D. student in American Studies 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, medical experimentation in US prisons, public health and public safety discourses in the postwar period, medical humanities methodologies, and the social history of medicine. Her dissertation will examine the history of substance use programming and therapeutic communities in U.S. prisons, exploring the broader conditions of care within the carceral system. She is a graduate affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year to teach English in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India. Peper has been teaching and learning 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 with the Women’s College Partnership, a Bard Prison Initiative consortium college which offers associate’s and bachelor’s liberal degrees at the Women’s Prison through Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns

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.

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).