Current Fellows

Current Fellows

Dissertation Fellows

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Sreya Mukherjee

Dissertation Fellowship

Sreya Mukherjee is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of History at Washington State University, working under the supervision of Dr. Ashley Wright. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in History from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research examines how liquor became a central site of debate and negotiation in late colonial Bengal- between the colonial governance, elite Indian reformers, Christian missionaries, and late 19th century Bengali society itself. Her project argues that drinking and its associated behaviors constructed, renegotiated, and politicized social and cultural identities, with liquor discourses serving as a pivotal site for these intersectional dynamics.
Sreya’s work has been supported by university fellowships, including the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Graduate Fellowship, the Morris Reed Scholarship in History and Political Science, and the Cooney Family Graduate Fellowship in History. She has presented her research at major conferences, including the Association for Asian Studies and the Western Association of Women Historians. At WSU, Sreya has been recognized with the GPSA Excellence Award for Graduate Teaching Assistant and has also served in leadership roles within the History Graduate Student Association, including as Vice President, and has been active in mentoring and service initiatives across the department.
Beyond her academic work, Sreya has held a Sahapedia-UNESCO Fellowship, documenting Bengal’s craft and material heritage, and completed an internship at the National Museum in New Delhi. She also trained in museum management and exhibition development at DakshinaChitra Museum in Chennai, India.

Julia Barr

Dissertation Travel Award

Julia is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Her dissertation project aims to put multiple routes of mobility and migration into conversation with one another, and explores both overseas and intra-island migration patterns across the twentieth century. Julia's research conceives of these various mobile populations as elements of a broader workforce -- one shaped and reshaped by empire-wide economic shifts, and informed by an imperial logic.

Fisayo Akinlude

Dissertation Travel Award

Fisayo Akinlude is a 6th year PhD candidate in the history department at Yale University. She is a scholar of law in the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation, "All Our Laws Become English: Imperial Reform in Nineteenth Century Mauritius" is concerned with the laws of slavery in Mauritius, and throughout the British Empire as a means to reorganise and more closely control the lives of colonial subjects from the metropolitan centre, but also law as an arena in which enslaved people expressed sophisticated and strategic politics. She is interested in the histories of law, race, and colonialism not only in the Indian Ocean, but also in the Atlantic and wider world.

Sarah Ahmed

Pre-Dissertation Travel Award

Sarah Ahmed is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Brian Cowan. Sarah’s research centers on the intersection of religion and medicine in Enlightenment Britain and the British Empire, especially Ireland and the North American colonies, and concerns the relationship between Methodist healing and counseling practices and the emergence of psychology as a specialized field of inquiry. She holds an M.A. in Modern European History from Boston College (2023) and an M.S. in Psychology from the University of North Florida (2019).

Niveditha Senthivel

Pre-Dissertation Travel Award

Niveditha (Nive) Senthilvel is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in History at Boston University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of indigeneity, environment, and criminalization. She is currently working on her dissertation which investigates forced settlements and institutionalization which arose in South Asia due to the Criminal Tribes Acts of 1871, 1911, and 1924. Prior to graduate school, she spent 3 years working at various management consulting firms and government contractors in Washington, DC after graduating from George Washington University with a dual degree in History and International Affairs. Outside of work, her interests include listening to podcasts, knitting, baking, and spending time with her rescue dog, Simon.

Diversity and Inclusion Fellows

Rolake Osabia

Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship

Dr Rolake Osabia is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist with a PhD in English Literature from University College London. Through a Black feminist lens, her doctoral research explores isolation and kinship in contemporary Black British women’s literature, drawing on works by Yrsa Daley-Ward, Bernardine Evaristo, Winsome Pinnock and Zadie Smith. She examines the role of race, gender and class in relation to how Black British women writers use history, art, culture, geography and technology to construct depictions of loneliness and elective and consanguineal kinships in their texts. During her PhD, she combined her painting practice with archival research methodologies to produce the first illustrated thesis in UCL’s English Department. Her artwork was selected for a Tate Collective billboard exhibition in London and has been commissioned by Lucy Writers for an article by author Irenosen Okojie. In November 2025, she will exhibit some paintings from her PhD at the Bernardine Evaristo Symposium at the University of Reading, where she’ll also present her research. Osabia’s postdoctoral research outputs extend her practice of combining art, literature and literary criticism; with the support of the NACBS award, she will curate two community-oriented shows, a group exhibition, Supplying the Colour and a solo show, Isolation and Kinship. She is currently writing and illustrating her first monograph – an extension of her doctoral research – which examines how contemporary Black writers (re)animate real and imagined ‘third places’ in their fiction.

Breanna Moore

Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship - Honorable Mention

Dr. Breanna Moore is a 2025 Ph.D. History graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Her monograph examines the disparities in indemnities - monetary compensation, territorial concessions and land redistribution, recognition of sovereignty, and legal protection - distributed by Britain to European powers and West African sovereigns for slave trade abolition compliance from 1807 to the mid-nineteenth century, and analyzes the moral and legal discourses surrounding redress and compensation for liberated African recaptives and sovereigns in West Africa. Breanna is an interdisciplinary scholar, public-facing historian, and policy-oriented researcher and consultant. You can learn more at breannamoore.com.