THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Scholars in Residence
2025-26 Graduate Student Fellows
Andy Archer
he/they
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; Residential Fellow
Andy Archer is an interdisciplinary researcher and community organizer. He is currently a doctoral student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where his work explores how surveillance technologies mobilize biomedical and carceral constructions of addiction, care, and criminality. Grounded in trans feminist and abolitionist politics, his practices interrogate how gendered, racialized, and dis/abled subjectivities are shaped through regimes of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and carceral health governance.
Andy is a Health Policy Research Scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and draws upon his theoretical work to guide social policy research. He also coordinates the interdisciplinary Medicine and Its Objects Workshop at UChicago as a forum for critically thinking about the plurality of medicine and health.
Andy also holds a Master of Divinity from Yale University. His thesis, Disciplinary Drives, Liquid Lives: Financialized Labour and Stimulant Use, examined how working conditions impose market values upon the worker and are expressed through consumptive practices. His work continues to build toward a labor theory of addiction that centers the role of labor in subject formation and substance use/abuse. In a previous life, Andy worked in feminist performance art as Studio Director for artist Carolee Schneemann, and received a BFA from the film conservatory at SUNY Purchase.
When he’s not thinking about these things, Andy tends a vegetable garden and spends much of his time chasing his toddler, Cosmo, around the neighborhood.
Peyton Cunningham
she/her
Sociology; CSGS-CSRPC Joint Residential Fellow
Peyton Cunningham is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She is an Institute for Education Sciences fellow with the Committee of Education. Broadly, her work engages theories of prejudice reduction, education, stratification, and identity-based preferences. Her research examines how intergroup contact and institutional structures shape bias and social preferences in educational settings. Her dissertation investigates the role of assigned college roommates in shaping students’ attitudes toward race, class, and sexuality, using original conjoint experiments, longitudinal survey data, and in-depth interviews. She holds a BA in Sociology from Princeton University and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.
Bret Klein Hart
Cinema and Media Studies; Residential Fellow
Bret Klein Hart is a PhD Candidate and Neubauer Doctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Their dissertation considers how social media and videogames collectively influence contemporary life, from social media gamifying how we relate to one another, to the way games change what we do with our time and how we socialize. Using gender as a cross-disciplinary bridge, the dissertation examines social media influencers and mobile/casual videogames as interrelated phenomena that grew in relation to one another across the 2010s. Moving from Kim Kardashian’s mobile game to influencers ‘gaming the algorithm’, the project argues that videogames and social media are deeply interwoven, producing a highly gendered digital culture in tandem.
Bret holds a BA in Statistics and Media Studies from UC Berkeley. They are also a film programmer and founding member of the Degrowth Game Design Project.
Soo Young Lee
she/her/hers
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; CSGS-CSRPC Joint Dissertation Fellow
Soo Young Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Grounded in an Asian American and Women of Color feminist praxis, her research engages critical storytelling methods to explore experiences and meanings of political awakening, identity, and solidarity with Asian American and other young people of color.
Her dissertation is guided by inquiry into how young, politically engaged Asian American women in the Chicagoland area spanning a range of ethnic backgrounds, immigrant legacies, political histories, and social locations are moved to work towards addressing the conditions of inequity that impact people’s lives. She draws on reflexive group-based storytelling as both a data collection method and feminist practice of critical care ethics. How do Asian American women’s journeys of politicization illuminate possibilities for critically interrogating, turning from, and healing the racialized and gendered harms of model minority subject formation? How do their political praxes shed light on sites and strategies for building Asian American solidarities that are dynamic, intersectional, and sustainable? Through these explorations, she seeks to illuminate sites of possibility within young people’s social contexts to develop their critical consciousness while tending to their wellbeing.
Fabien Maltais-Bayda
he/him/his
English and TAPS; Residential Fellow
My dissertation examines a range of aesthetic media—film, literature, performance, and photography, among others—to trace how these materials reveal the temporal dynamics immanent to two socio-cultural problems—HIV/AIDS and climate change—that accrued particular urgency throughout the 1990s, and which continue to shape how we understand our present. On the one hand, the AIDS crisis began to slow in the twentieth century’s final decade thanks to advancing antiretroviral therapies; on the other, environmental science evidenced the intensifying and accelerating threat posed by climate change. These oscillations between cataclysmic abbreviation and extension conditioned aesthetic experiments generated by artists concerned with queer survival and environmental sustainability. The objects I study present a catalogue of tactics for articulating and renegotiating how bodies come into contact with histories of somatic and environmental disintegration. They teach us that, whether at the scale of the body or the landscape, there is always endurance in what wastes away, and disintegration in what lasts. This dissertation research is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, and a UChicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality Residential Fellowship.
I also work extensively on dance and performance theory, analyzing how contemporary choreographers and performers generate novel concepts of virtuosity, relationality, and ecology in their work. My writing can be found in ASAP/Review, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Canadian Theatre Review, Chicago Review, esse, GLQ, Momus, and publications from the Art Gallery of York University, Berghahn Books, Blackwood Gallery, and Le Lieu.
Anne Ruelle
she/her
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; Residential Fellow
Anne Ruelle is a PhD candidate in Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her research aims to better understand the lived experiences of people affected by community and state violence through a gendered lens. Her dissertation, “‘Now only good people live free’: Insecurity, Gender, and Care,” focuses on the impact of El Salvador's State of Exception on the family members of people incarcerated under an emergent dictatorial regime. Through study of the new and displaced daily care practices of these families, she highlights relationships of power between the state and its citizens and interrogate how these affect greater progress towards peaceful societies. Through her scholarship, she strives to build more robust, situated knowledge about gendered experiences of violence and how security responses are experienced in the most affected homes and communities. Her work has been funded by the Fulbright Program and numerous internal grants. She has over 10 years of research and work experience in El Salvador and holds a master's in social work from the University of Chicago and a BA in Global Studies and Spanish from Providence College.
Michael Stablein Jr.
he/him
English and Performance Studies; Dissertation Fellow
Michael Stablein Jr. is a joint PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies and English Language and Literature. His research and teaching expertise is in theater and performance studies, alongside queer, feminist, psychoanalytic, and literary theory, with a special focus on the studies of masculinity and whiteness. His dissertation, “Boys Will Be Men and Other Consequences,” traces the violence of contemporary masculinity and its crises through its narratives, performances, and the compulsory imperative to come of age across the 20th/21st centuries.
He was one of ATHE’s 2022 Emerging Scholars in Performance Studies; a 2022 Fellow in the University of Chicago’s Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative; and a founding member of UChicago's Movement Theory Lab, fellowship-funded by the Neubauer Collegium. His writing can be found in ASAP/Journal and GLQ with a peer-reviewed article recently published in TDR/The Drama Review.
In addition to his scholarship, he maintains a performance practice which deploys (and digitally tracks across social media) choreographies of masculinity as an experiment in repetition, normativity, and identity-formation. He has exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and Berlin. He holds a BFA in Theater from Florida State University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University of New York.
Burak Tan
he/him
Political Science; Residential Fellow
Burak Tan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, specializing in political theory and comparative politics. His dissertation investigates how authoritarian regimes appeal to citizens when standard indicators such as economic performance and political stability do not explain their popularity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in Turkey, it demonstrates how the control of state apparatuses and the physical and virtual public spaces enable authoritarians to produce support by shaping the context in which political judgments take place. The work conceptualizes these authoritarian strategies in the context of neoliberal crisis, the Kurdish conflict, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the rising political homophobia in Turkey.
Burak’s work has been supported by the Global Relations Forum (Istanbul) and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights (Chicago). He was a visiting fellow at Koç University’s Center for Research on Globalization, Peace, and Democratic Governance in 2022-23. He won the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award in 2023 and received a Davis Grant for Peace in 2024.
He holds an MA in Social Sciences and an MA in Political Science, both from the University of Chicago, and dual BAs in Political Science and Sociology from Boğaziçi University in Turkey.
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows and Lecturers
Katrina Roze Myers
she/they
Divinity; Divinity Teaching Fellow
Kat Myers is a Fellow in the Divinity School and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD in Religious Ethics in 2025. She researches and teaches at the intersection of environmental ethics and religious ethics, bringing them into conversation with feminist theory, philosophy, human rights law, and environmental studies. Her work explores how ethical theory can be grounded in lived experience and made responsive to pervasive structures of suffering.
Her first book project develops a conceptual framework for addressing the moral and structural consequences of climate displacement. Drawing on Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, feminist vulnerability theory, and prefigurative practices of mutual aid, she argues that displacement reveals how law and social isolation are major sources of suffering. The project further explores how legal systems, religious traditions, and grassroots communities, when reoriented by compassion, can become resources for an ethical response. Her broader research examines how metaphysical reflection and moral psychology can inform practices of community-building and mutual aid in contexts of ecological disruption.
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
he/him/his
English Language and Literature; Humanities Teaching Fellow
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and scholar, currently working as an Arts & Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on gay men’s literary and media cultures, with a specialty in the aesthetics of gay pornography. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the journal Porn Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the volume The Sex Scene: Space, Place, Industry from Edinburgh University Press. As a poet, his most recent book is Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022).
His monograph in progress, "The Gender of Gay Men: Identification, Sexual Cultures, and the Afterlives of the Inversion Model," studies how gay male sexuality has provoked gendered positions, conflicts, and identifications through the 20th and 21st centuries.
Omar Safadi
he/him/his
Political Science; Social Sciences Teaching Fellow
Omar Safadi is an academic, writer, and researcher and holds a Ph.D., MA, and BA from the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science. His dissertation and first book project – “The Queer Enemy in the Sectarian Order: Homophobia, Religion, and Stalemate in Lebanon” – draws on more than two years of on-site ethnographic fieldwork that he conducted between 2019 and 2023, a time of social movement protest, fiscal collapse, state breakdown and regional war. It investigates how homophobia blocks democratization and reproduces sectarian rule in the wake of the 2019 Lebanon Revolution. Specializing in the modern Middle East, Omar’s research converges on the inter-disciplinary study of sexuality, geopolitics, civil war, and political transition. He is currently a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.