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 is a PhD Student in American Studies curious about the intersections of hip hop culture and whimsy. Mia is particularly interested in thinking through world-building created through music, alter egos, play, and performance – and if these practices of embodiment act as subversive theatrics for hip-hop practitioners. Mia is also interested in museum studies and the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector broadly. Mia recently earned a Master of Arts in American Studies with a thesis that focused on the legibility of disability in hip hop practitioners, specifically Black men. Mia is also a McNair Graduate Fellow and a CRRES graduate affiliate. 

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).