Dr. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer is an Associate Professor at Lehman College in the departments of Latin American & Latino Studies, Africana Studies, Women & Gender Studies, Macaulay Honors College, and Masters of Liberal Studies, co-directs the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Lehman College, and serves on several editorial boards: Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), and the Publication for Afro-Latin American Research Association (PALARA), and on the CUNY Futures Initiative Advisory Board. You can access her work here. Her interdisciplinary work and courses in Afro-Latin American Literature and Gender Studies tackle topics related to spirituality, critical race theory, and cultural studies. With two U.S. Fulbright Fellowships, she published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, PALARA, Confluencia, InterFACES, Evoke and the Zora Neale Hurston Forum. In 2021 & 2022, and co-edited: Solidão for Women’s Studies Quarterly Journal (WSQ), and AfroDiasporic Protest for the Publication of Afro-Latin American Research Association (PALARA). Her first book, Keloids of Modernity, is forthcoming with University of Illinois Press.
Sophia Hsu teaches a range of courses, covering such topics as nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, and the medical humanities. She is currently working on a book project about the Victorian novel and its relation to histories and theories of the population, a project that has been supported by a 2021–22 AAUW American Fellowship. Research from this and other related projects has been published or is forthcoming in SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Review, and English Language Notes. Prof. Hsu is also the co-founder and co-developer of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, a digital humanities project that reimagines how to teach Victorian studies through a positive, race conscious lens.
Austin Bailey is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a WAC Associate at Lehman College. He is currently completing a dissertation called “American Becomings: Ontology as Critique in the Nineteenth Century,” which considers how authors in the nineteenth-century United States reflected on and speculated about the nature of being as a foundation for socio-political critique and counter-hegemonic resistance. Austin also researches in, as well as thinks a lot about, writing pedagogies—specifically, alternative assessment practices like ungrading. Austin teaches classes in first-year composition and American literature at Hunter College, where he will serve as a Doctoral Lecturer in English starting in Fall of 2024.
