Oscar Oliver-Didier

Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice | Contact Oscar Oliver-Didier

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Oscar Oliver-Didier is an urban designer and researcher that—after 15 years as an educator and practitioner—became a PhD student in American Studies at New York University. His current research studies the role of fiscal incentives for urban development—and the nonprofit financial institutions that broker them—in fostering police-community developer partnerships. Oscar has published articles on public housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx, and the performative nature of urban protests. Before arriving at NYU, he served as the Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning. In this role he was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design, a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the public sector. He is a founding board member of the Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI)—an initiative that seeks to bring together organizers, activists, thinkers, cultural workers, and artists to develop new theories and practices of urban life. Oscar is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Natalia Shevin

Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice | Contact Natalia Shevin

Natalia Dubno Shevin is a doctoral candidate in the joint program between history and Hebrew and Judaic Studies, where she researches and teaches courses on New York City, housing, labor, and finance. Her dissertation follows organized labor’s housing initiatives from the 1950s to 1970s, which shifted from social housing to investment. She is excited to join the Urban Democracy Lab community.

Anisa Jackson

Anisa Jackson is a writer and organizer of exhibitions and programs from Seattle, Washington. Anisa is a third year doctoral student in American Studies at NYU. Their project examines squatting movements in Harlem from the 1960s through the 1980s. Anisa is a Urban Doctoral Fellow (2019-2020), NYU Cities Collaborative Urban Public Humanities Summer Fellow (2021), they are also a member of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project and the Relational Poverty Network.

Anna Stielau

Anna Stielau is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Her dissertation, “In a Present, Tense: Unsettling Times in South African Anticolonial Art and Visual Culture,” explores how South African artists and activists are using, reimagining, and hacking time to confront the legacies of colonization and apartheid, where once time perpetuated systems of oppression as an instrument of control. Combining interviews, archival research, ethnography, and aesthetic analysis, her doctoral project theorizes strategic disruptions of temporal convention in S.A.’s segregated cities as a decolonial method, activating forms of being, relating, and belonging that are not reducible to post-apartheid non-racialism. This ongoing research has received support from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust in South Africa and the Magnum Foundation in NYC. Previously, Anna worked as an educator and art writer in South Africa, where she is a two-time gold medalist in the BASA National Arts Journalism Awards. She currently serves as assistant editor of the journal Public Culture.

Luis Rincón Alba

Luis Rincón Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies departments at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University. As an actor, performer, and oral narrator, he has collaborated with different artistic collectives in his home country and also in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Italy. His creative and academic work centers on the performativity of festive and carnival performances. His scholarship traces the aesthetic and political genealogy of carnival practices in contemporary literature, performance art, and music and how this emergence troubles historical understandings of race, gender, and class. Rincón Alba is particularly interested in the transnational elements present in the festive performance traditions from the Colombian Caribbean coast and how they challenge notions of nationality and draw connections with the greater Caribbean. His academic research areas include Caribbean studies, critical race theory, contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, experimental ethnography, and Latin American and Caribbean theater and performance art history. Luis Rincón Alba is also the co-artistic director of the collective MUSA Presents, a musical and performance collective that explores the potential of ancestral Caribbean music to build community in New York City.

Luis’ project, Sonic Ancestralities: Music, Activism, and Mutual Aid, gathers musicians, activists, and scholars working on mutual Aid and community building in NYC and Colombia. The main goal is to allow music to guide a conversation on the current state of activism that would help us understanding how it has shaped both ancestral and current struggles for freedom and more just society. Luis’ supervising mentor is Malik Walker.

Sam Dinger

Sam is an ethnographer studying masculinities and migration in the contemporary Middle East. He is scheduled to receive my PhD from the NYU Department of Sociology in August 2022. His primary research examines how displacement and exile shape people’s gendered definitions of self and morality, experiences of agency, and orientations towards the future. A second project focuses on the political and epistemological tensions between vernacular and transnational approaches to humanitarianism in Lebanon. His research has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Max Weber Stiftung/Orient-Institut Beirut and his writing has been featured in Contexts and the edited volume Refugees as City-Makers.

Sam’s supervising mentor for the Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice is Gianpaolo Baiocchi.

Yasmeen Chism

Yasmeen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies. Her dissertation, “Tracing Black Movements: Chor[e]ographing Dis/placements in North Carolina’s Piedmont,” combines Black feminist theories, performance studies, archival assemblage, and visual analysis. Through the combination of these fields, Yasmeen critically interrogate four iterations of black displacement, or as she has termed it dis/placement, in North Carolina’s piedmont region. By way of regional comparative work, she demonstrates that black dis/placement has commonalities regardless of their location. Her work has been supported through fellowships with NYU’s Public Humanities Initiative and NYU’s Urban Doctoral Fellowship.

Yasmeen’s project, Through Their Eyes, [re]posits questions of housing, urban development, and city planning with a primary focus on photographs taken by children. Through visual analysis, this project argues that queries regarding accessibility, accommodation, and affordability might best be started with the needs of children. Yasmeen’s supervising mentor is Michael Dinwiddie.

Khaled Malas

Khaled Malas served as a 2020-2021 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. Khaled is an architect and art historian from Damascus. He is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where he is writing a dissertation on a class of medieval magico-medicinal bowls that feature the Kaaba in their cavetto. He is working with Bricks and Mortals, an organization that seeks to defend faith-based institutions in face of the pressures of gentrification in New York City. His project, entitled Harlem Charms, revolves around magic and talismans in his changing neighborhood. He will produce an ‘artist-book’ on “meanings and expectations of efficacious technologies in a contemporary urban context.” At Gallatin next Fall, he will be teaching a class entitled Medieval Mediterra

Sara Dima Abi Saab

Sara Dima Abi Saab served as a 2020-2021 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. Sara is an NYC and Lebanon based activist, and a PhD Candidate at New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies on the Cultural Studies track. Dima’s research focuses on municipal politics in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 to frame and understand the trajectory of municipalities. She is working with Minim – an international collective of urban activists, to produce a global directory of “municipalist” efforts and a physical publication, provisionally entitled “The ABCs of Municipalism” aimed at New York City-based community activists.

Kiana Karimi

Kiana Karimi served as a 2019-2020 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on the micropolitics of everyday life and the performance of gender in Iran. Her research interests include digital humanities, gender politics, the performance of everyday life, performance philosophy, immigration and transnational identity, and the Iranian diaspora. She has directed a series of digital publications for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and has moderated and taught online workshops for women in small towns in Iran about tools and techniques for participation in the city council elections. Combining her background in engineering, web design and her decade-long experience as a women’s rights activist, she has developed the first-ever eyewitness reporting and networking platform for Farsi speakers (TribuneZamaneh.com) as an alternative to commercial and insecure platforms such as Facebook. As part of Barzan Gender in Translation Program, she has translated over 30 journal papers from English to Farsi in an accessible language for grassroots activists. For her fellowship at the Urban Democracy Lab, she worked to develop a digital archive to showcase the music and musicians of the Bronx for the Bronx Music Heritage Center. Her writings have been published the London Review of Books blog, Women Learning Partnership, RadioZamaneh (fa) and We Change (fa) among other outlets.

Athanasia Nantina Vgontzas

Nantina Vgontzas served as a 2019-2020 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. She received her PhD in Sociology (2020). Her research investigates the organization of work in the fulfillment warehouses of large online retail firms.  By comparing both work organization and resistance in warehouses in the U.S. and Germany, she is illuminating how new technologies constrain workers. She won a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at AI-Now, where she will be for two years.  As a doctoral fellow, she worked with Amazonians United to support their campaigns, connecting health and safety campaigns across borders. During this work she moved topics from looking at retail logistics to the whole supply chain, as well as connecting her work more explicitly to climate justice.

Ayasha Guerin

Ayasha Guerin served as a 2018-2019 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis in 2020. She is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and curator who lives between Berlin and Vancouver. She is an Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Studies at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English. For her fellowship, she developed educational materials for CAAAV, a Chinatown-based anti-gentrification and tenant’s rights organization. She credits her fellowship with deepening her engagement with New York City, and her dissertation, which begun as a historical examination of New York’s waterfront, grew into a more contemporary project.

José Soto-Márquez

José Soto-Márquez served as a 2018-2019 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. He is a PhD candidate in Sociology. He researches and teaches on the topics of migration, race/ethnicity, gender, theory, cities, work, inequality, health, and the family.  His dissertation focuses on one of Europe’s so-called “lost generations” and draws on two years of ethnographic observations of and 135 in-depth interviews with young and high-skilled Spanish immigrants, who left Spain after the 2008 global financial crisis. His doctoral work explores Spanish immigrants’ divergent and gendered social mobility, assimilation/integration, and ethnoracial identification across New York City, Buenos Aires, and London. As a doctoral fellow, he worked with NYU’s Prison Education Project developing survey materials, and for him, the fellowship allowed him to fully see the impact of research as it was being developed.

David Sugarman

David Sugarman served as a 2018-2019 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice. He earned his PhD in English from NYU in 2019. His research and teaching focuses on 20th and 21st century American studies, urban theory, and literary theory. In addition to teaching and advising at Gallatin, he teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. As a doctoral fellow, he worked with the Baltimore Housing Roundtable and YES – the Youth Empowerment Society, a service organization for homeless youth. He worked on a zine with narratives of homeless youth. David remains actively engaged with the UDL, currently serving as steward of UDL’s Student Organizers.

Sara Duvasic

Sara Duvasic served as a 2017-2018 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice, and as a UDL Visiting Scholar in Spring 2020. She received her PhD in Sociology in 2019, and is currently a Research & Policy Advisor at Oxfam America and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellow. She has remained actively engaged with UDL,  and recently co-authored the November 2020 white paper, The Case for a Social Housing Development Authority. As a doctoral fellow, she worked with Crown Heights Tenants Union and Right To The City developing qualitative research on precarious housing conditions on a project that involved Gallatin MA and undergraduate students. She describes her fellowship as giving her the opportunity to “ learn and practice community engage research, working collaboratively with housing rights activists and practitioners and helping to manage a research team.” This helped her “ build the skills needed to conduct research that has academic salience while also being accountable to community stakeholders.” She decided, after the fellowship, to pursue a career in engaged research rather than a tenure-track academic position.

Maysam Taher

Maysam Taher served as a 2017-2018 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice.  She is a doctoral candidate in MEIS’s Culture and Representation track. Her dissertation “Borders in Disrepair: Archival Excavations and Present Crises at the Hinges of the Mediterranean” takes a treaty of colonial reparations signed by Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2008 as a point of departure to examine how such a document came to perform a dual contradictory function: that of compensating Libya for colonial crimes committed by Italy between 1911 and 1947 through $5 billion in infrastructural investments, and that of formalizing an extraterritorial infrastructure of European border policing located in Libya. Rather than repairing a history of conquest, deportation, and confinement, the treaty inscribes into law the reproduction of extractive and carceral orders, now appearing under renewed postcolonial forms. Her project restages the binational efforts in research and historiography that articulated the claim for reparations in order to demonstrate how colonial archives, their postcolonial rearrangements, and their counter-archival off-shoots are themselves institutions of border-making and unmaking, with material effects that can shape the present and open up multiple futures. She was a recipient of the 2018 Robert Holmes Travel/Research Award for African Scholarship and a 2019-2020 Doctoral Research Fellow at NYU’s Center for the Humanities. She is a current contributing editor at The New Inquiry.