Heather Draxl

Heather Draxl is a doctoral student in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Iowa. Her passion is teaching first-year composition and studying civically engaged pedagogy in first-year composition programs.

Lukas Stormogipson

Lukas Stormogipson recently transitioned from Brooklyn, NY, to Oakland, CA, and is a graduate student working towards synthesizing critical/queer theory with his passion for drag-art and radical sociosexual ideologies to compose a performance piece/scholastic catalog of contemporary LGBT art and visual culture in select pockets of America. He teaches yoga, spins fire, and dances Butoh regularly in public spaces as a way of engaging the audience with “high/low” artistic processes that challenge personal, political, and even practical paradigms.

Enger Muteteke

Currently, Enger Muteteke is pursuing an MA in Social Responsibility and Sustainable Communities at Western Kentucky University. She also serves as assistant pastor at a church in Glen Burnie, MD. She hopes to be able to teach other faith leaders and communities about social justice issues, and to inspire them to mentor others to be agents for social change in whatever setting. Enger resides in Glen Burnie with her husband and three daughters.

Alyssa Greenberg

Alyssa Greenberg is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and a recipient of the University Fellowship. She is a former education assistant at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Her research interests include museum pedagogy and the museum as a site of activism. Her research has been presented at Tufts University, the University of Sussex, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Statens Museum for Kunst, and other venues. She serves as a member of the UIC’s Art History Graduate Student Association and the UIC Graduate Employees Organization. She received a BA from Oberlin College in 2009 and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center in 2011.

Lydia E. Ferguson

Lydia E. Ferguson is a PhD candidate in the Auburn University English Department, where she researches nineteenth-century American literature and cultural studies. She earned her BA in English from Ball State University and her MA in Literature from Clemson University. Her research focuses on performances and representations of cultural identity, and her dissertation examines the roles and representations of elderly slaves in the popular culture and literature of nineteenth-century America. Lydia is an avid proponent of service-learning pedagogy and civic engagement, and is cocreator of the Virtual Education Project (VEP), a nonprofit public education resource facilitating the study of historical and contemporary landmarks relevant to the arts and humanities.

Katherine Lennard

Katie Lennard is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She studies the objects that populated everyday life in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century America in order to understand how these goods mediated the production of social and political identities. Her dissertation explores this question through a study of a particularly charged body of garments: the industrially produced regalia worn by members of the second Ku Klux Klan.

Stephanie Sparling Williams

Stephanie Sparling Williams is a doctoral candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC). She has an MA in American Studies and Ethnicity and a Certificate in Visual Studies from USC, and a dual BA in Fine Art and Ethnic Studies from Colorado University, Boulder. Her dissertation is titled “Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums.” As a scholar/artist, Stephanie is drawn to work in the visual semiotics of people of color, especially women. She has recently presented her work at the annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University, the Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora Conference at Emory University, the University of Virginia’s African American History Conference, and San Jose State University’s annual Art History Association Symposium: Art and Art’s Publics. Stephanie has been a recipient of a Dornsife Doctoral Fellowship (USC), a Diversity in Graduate Education Fellowship (EDGE/APD, USC), a Visual Studies Institute Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, and an Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellowship.