As Digital Pedagogy Librarian at the University of Michigan, Kush Patel employs queer feminist methodologies to develop and support community-engaged initiatives that enrich the academic practices of cultural and digital citizenship. His teaching and service work are informed by questions of participatory politics, shared expertise, and care-based labor. Prior to joining the library, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities and the Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, a Rackham-Mellon Fellow at the U-M Detroit Center, a Public Humanities Fellow with Rackham Arts of Citizenship, an Engaged Pedagogy Initiative Fellow with the Center for Engaged Academic Learning, and a Project Assistant in the U-M Architecture Library Special Collections. Kush received his PhD in Architecture from the University of Michigan in 2016. He remains active in the Imagining America (IA) community, and currently serves as codirector of IA’s PAGE Fellows Program.
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.