Current Fellows
Dissertation Fellows
Rimliya Tariq Telkenaroglu
Dissertation Fellowship
Rimliya Tariq Telkenaroglu is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University, Québec, Canada. Her research explores the contemporary theological and religious debates surrounding Quaker views and attitudes, illuminating the intersections among gender, religious identity, and spiritual possession in Early Quakerism. She can be contacted via email at rimliya.telkenaroglu@mail.mcgill.ca.
Priyanka Zylstra
Dissertation Travel Award
Priyanka Zylstra is a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research examines the history of South Asian women’s activism in 1970s-1990s Britain and the various collaborations between South Asian women and Black women in activist communities. She is currently conducting archival research in community archives in the United Kingdom.
Julia Burke
Dissertation Travel Award
Julia is a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on abortion in nineteenth-century Britain with two goals. The first is to explore the effects of industrial capitalism on abortion’s availability, methods, and criminality through a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century abortion trials, whose evolution speaks to the commodification of the practice, the motives behind its criminalization, and the profits made – then and today – in offering women “choice” as consumers, but not as citizens. The second goal is to remedy the omission of individual women from existing historiography: the unsuccessful, and therefore visible, abortion that wound up in the courtroom or hospital is too often conflated with the successful, routine contraceptive practice, undetectable by contemporaries and historians, alike. By contextualizing abortions in the lives in which they occurred, the dissertation attempts a history of abortion as it might be told by the people who actually had them.
Nell Klinger
Pre-Dissertation Travel Award
Nell Klinger is a PhD student in history at the University of Chicago. Her work investigates petitioning in the British Atlantic during the early modern period. Her research has been supported by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Brenda and Earl Shapiro Scholarship, and the North American Conference on British Studies.
Zoe Neubauer
Pre-Dissertation Travel Award
Zoe Neubauer is a third-year PhD student at McGill University, working with Professor Brian Lewis. They received their BA from Boston University, where they wrote an honors thesis under the supervision of Professor Arianne Chernock, and their MA from York University, where they wrote an MRP examining the role of gender nonconformity in the Gay Liberation Front under the supervision of Professor Stephen Brooke. Zoe's research (tentatively) focuses on the development of trans identities and communities across the UK from 1970 to 2004, with a particular focus on the language members used to construct these identities and communities. In their spare time, they enjoy reading, baking, and a variety of fiber arts.
Diversity and Inclusion Fellows
Olivia Wyatt
Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship
Olivia Wyatt is a final-year PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London and an incoming Visiting Fellow of the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). She is currently completing her thesis as the Justin Champion doctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. She has a particular interest in the experiences of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, and her chapter on Caribbean women’s community activism in Leeds was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize. Alongside Deanna Lyncook she organised The Issue of Truth: Representing Black British History: a multi-funded, international conference which brought emerging and established academic historians into conversation with artists and community practitioners. She also works with Harewood House Trust to represent the Lascelles’ connections to enslavement in the Caribbean within the estate’s informative displays.
Jamey Jesperson
Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship - Honorable Mention
Jamey Jesperson (she/her) is a Vanier Scholar and PhD Candidate in History and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. Trained in ethnohistorical and counter-archival research methods, Jamey’s work unearths trans histories of Indigenous and colonial Western North America before the twentieth century. Her writing has received a growing number of awards, including from the Oral History Association, the LGBTQ+ History Association, Gender & History, and the Royal Historical Society, who named her MA Queer History thesis from Goldsmiths College the “best MA thesis in the UK” in 2022. Through oral history, ‘storywork’ collaboration with Two-Spirit Knowledge Keeper Saylesh Wesley, Jamey’s dissertation endeavors to re-story trans Indigenous lives and worlds on the Northwest Coast across the first century of ‘contact’ with foreigners. Jamey’s published works can be found in History Workshop, Spectator, Gender & History, The Graduate History Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and more.
Frankie Chappell
Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship - Honorable Mention
Frankie Chappell is a PhD student at UCL, researching the transnational history of the activist group Black Women for Wages for Housework from the 1970s to the 1990s. She is interested in global histories of organising and resistance by women of colour, and radical and community-focused archives. She volunteers in this capacity in the Black Women for Wages for Housework archives at Crossroads Women’s Centre, the home of the Global Women’s Strike.