RPE Postdoctoral Fellows - Cohort 1

Access links below for full biographies.
Mauricio Acuña wearing dark glasses and smiling
Photo courtesy Mauricio Acuña

Mauricio Acuña

Mauricio Acuña is a scholar of Afro-Latin American Studies, and his work focuses on the literatures and cultures of the African Diaspora in the Americas, especially Brazil and Cuba. His research interests includes World Festivals of Black Arts, poetry, fiction, performances and the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira. Mauricio taught three courses in the Global Studies Program and Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, on themes like “Black Global Festivals: Literature and Performance,” “Images of Afro-Latin American Worlds, ”and “Exuzilhar: Crossroads in Afro-Diasporic Cinema,” in which students engaged with artists and created performances, and curated images for a visual exhibition.

Mauricio is now an Assistant Professor and Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

Ernesto Benitez in blue shirt standing outside in front of white columns.
Photo: Dan Addison

Ernesto Benitez

Ernesto Benitez holds a PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies with a concentration in Sociocultural Anthropology from Florida International University (2021). His long-term research is grounded in a decade-long ethnographic engagement with the Amazonian Kichwa (also spelled Quichua) people of Ecuador’s Napo province. He has paid particular attention to the ecotourism boom that occurred in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon in the early 1990s and the impact it has had on the livelihoods and identities of Kichwa people, many of whom have gradually shifted from agricultural and subsistence-based activities to service-based work in ecotourism. 

After his Postdoctoral Fellowship, Benitez was invited to join the UVA Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor, where he has taught undergraduate courses in anthropology such as “Contemporary Indigenous Peoples in Latin America” and “Topics on the Anthropology of Tourism”.

Kat Cosby wearing gray shirt standing in front of a brick wall
Photo courtesy Kat Cosby

Kat Cosby

Kat Cosby was a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Department. They are an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on Black women and their geographies in Brazil in the post-abolition era. Their book manuscript interrogates how the presence and contributions of Black women and the attempts to erase them historically from geographies in São Paulo were essential to the formation and development of the city. Kat examines how criminalizing Black women's presence was crucial to whitening ideology and practices in the early twentieth century.

Kat Cosby is now an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI), with an emphasis in Modern Latin America, Black Feminist Studies, African Diaspora, Black Geographies, as well as Black women and their geographies in Brazil in the post-abolition era.

Siddhant Issar (Sid) wearing blue button-down shirt.
Photo: Dan Addison

Siddhant Issar (“Sid”)

Siddhant Issar was a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests lie in modern and contemporary political theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the politics of race, class, and settler colonialism in the US. His work has been published in Contemporary Political Theory, Race & Class, The Black Scholar, and in an edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Currently, Issar is working on a book manuscript, titled Theorizing Racial Capitalism in the Era of Black Lives Matter. Issar holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, respectively.

Issar is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville.

Janet Kong-Chow wearing off-white v-neck top standing outside
Photo: Dan Addison

Janet Kong-Chow

Janet Kong-Chow was a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies and English at the University of Virginia. Her teaching and research are broadly concerned with diaspora, imperialism, and North American culture, examining overlapping processes of racialization, power, and language. She is committed to interdisciplinary research, specializing in theories of racial capitalism, the environment, disability, postcolonialism, the African diaspora, transnationalism, and legal studies. Kong-Chow earned her B.A. in English and History from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Her work has been supported by the Andover Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) and the Mellon Foundation. 

Kong-Chow is now an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. 

Head shot of Alexa Rodriguez smiling, wearing black top and glasses
Photo courtesy Alexa Rodríguez

Alexa Rodríguez

Alexa Rodríguez was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Education and Human Development. She completed her Ph.D. in History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Crafting Dominicanidad, a transnational and intellectual history that examines how Dominican stakeholders used public schools to articulate and circulate competing notions of Dominican racial, class, and national identity during the early twentieth century.

Rodríguez is now an assistant professor of education and a faculty affiliate for the Center for Race and Public Education in the South at UVA's School of Education and Human Development as well as at the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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