2019-2020 Postdoctoral & Dissertation Fellows

MYCAH L. CONNER
Harvard University

2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Dissertation Fellow
Mycah is a PhD Candidate in History at Harvard University. She is a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States who specializes in the history of slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. She holds broader interests in social histories of the South, the Midwest, and the ways in which a westward shift of focus can change generalities and conventional metaphors in histories of emancipation and subsequent freedom struggles. Her dissertation, “‘On this Bare Ground’: The Ordeal and the Aftermath of ‘Contraband Camps’ and the Making of Emancipation in the Civil War West,” is a history of the battle for freedom and self-determination in the Western and Trans-Mississippi Theaters of the war. Mycah interprets the camps as sites of pressure and warfare in their own right for families who fought in the face of re-enslavement schemes that were as outlandish and outsized as they were intricate. To the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Mycah brings the Civil War’s lessons about the violent and coercive character of movement and migration; the character of freedom or independence when family members are lost or confined; the maintenance of oppression through the targeting of children; and familial responses to surveillance and social intervention. Her work has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. In 2011, Mycah graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York with an A.B. in History. She earned her A.M. in History at Harvard in 2014.

MARY MCNEIL
Harvard University


2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Dissertation Fellow
Mary McNeil is a PhD candidate in the Program in American Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation examines black women's space taking and place making practices in Boston during the long Black Power era; it incorporates methods and disciplinary concerns from black feminist thought, black political thought, history, literature, urban studies and geography. At Harvard, Mary has worked on issues of diversity and inclusion as a graduate student admissions representative for the American Studies program at Harvard, as a graduate student mentor for Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and Summer Research Opportunities at Harvard (SROH) students, and as a co-founder of the Harvard Race and Ethnicity Working Group. At Tufts, Mary is a research assistant for the African American Trail Project.

VICTORIA M. MASSIE
University of California, Berkeley


2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Dissertation Fellow
Victoria is a writer and Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, “Assembling Genetic Ancestry: Race, Return, and the Materiality of Belonging in Cameroon" examines how the mobilization of genetic ancestry testing in Cameroon is not only a new form of diasporic return, but also a new mode of reconfiguring postcolonial African politics. Her work has been supported through the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and National Science Foundation, as well as awards from the UC Center for New Racial Studies, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender, and the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. Massie is also a freelance journalist and essayist, whose work has been featured on The Intercept, Vox, Complex Magazine, GeneWatch Magazine, and Catapult.

MEGHA SHARMA SEHDEV
Johns Hopkins University


2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow
Megha received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Her current book project, entitled "In the Interim," examines routine legal artefacts or "legal debris" produced by the apparatus of gender violence law in Delhi. The book approaches kinship though an analytic of irresolution, arguing that the interim phases of law are some of its most unstable and generative. Megha's upcoming research is entitled “The Intoxication of Kinship: Psycho-activity, Violence, and Memory in Punjab." Drawing on family histories, colonial archives, and poetic genres, she explores drugs as the literal substance of Punjabi collectivity. Megha's research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, among others. In addition to her ethnographic writing, Megha is an occasional photographer and works with concepts such as frontality and nazar enabled by South Asian visual aesthetics.

2019-20 Seminar Members

Kendra Field, History, Tufts University (Co-convener)

Sarah Pinto, Anthropology, Tufts University (Co-convener)

Megha Sharma Sehdev, Anthropology, McGill University (postdoctoral fellow)

Victoria Massie, Anthropology, UC Berkeley (dissertation fellow)

Mycah Conner, History, Harvard University (dissertation fellow)

Mary McNeil, American Studies, Harvard University (dissertation fellow)

Amahl Bishara, Anthropology, Tufts University

Alex Blanchette, Anthropology, Tufts University

Kerri Greenidge, American Studies, Tufts University

Kareem Khubchandani, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Tufts University

Sarah Luna, Anthropology, Tufts University

Tiya Miles, History, Harvard University

Durba Mitra, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Jyoti Puri, Sociology, Simmons College

Kristin Skrabut, Urban and Environmental Policy, Tufts University