People

Antonio J. Arraiza-Rivera is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. His research explores how seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese lyric poetry was shaped by the shift from manuscript to print and by continental and transatlantic travel. His work has appeared in such journals as Hispamérica, Romance Notes and the Boletín de la Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española.

As a Newhouse Summer Fellow, he will be working on his book manuscript, Impresas ansias, a study on how depictions of writing enable three poets—Villamediana, sor Juana, and Melo—to address issues related to artistic autonomy and geographical displacement. A significant portion of this project examines the role of Luso-Castilian bilingualism in the poetry of Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-66) in relation to the politically fraught arena of pre- and post-Restoration Portugal.

Genevieve Clutario specializes in gender and Filipinx history, Asian American Studies, history of U.S. empire, and transnational feminist approaches to the study of beauty and fashion

She is working on two research projects. This summer she will be completing her first book, Beauty Regimes: Modern Empires, the Philippines and the Gendered Labor of Appearance (Duke University Press, forthcoming), a book that examines the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of fashion and beauty systems that lay at the heart of modern empire and Philippine nation-building projects. She is also beginning a new historical project, The Taming of Tarhata Kiram: Colonial Experiments of Discipline in the Philippines’ Muslim South and the U.S. Heartland, tracks the United States’ efforts to subdue the “Moro [Muslim]” resistance through an extended colonial experiment of training and controlling a Muslim women in the 1910s and 1920s. The narrative of the book examines the almost soap operatic story of Kiram, documenting early surveillance of Kiram as a young teenager, her training is a “Filipino” in schools in the Philippine capital of Manila, “modernization” at a midwestern American University, and her eventual rebellion against Filipino and U.S. colonization upon her return to Sulu.

Elena is the author of Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NYU Press 2004) and the coauthor of Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road (University of Washington Press 2008). Her teaching and research straddles Asian American visual culture and contemporary Native American representation.

As a Newhouse Fellow, she will be working on a photo-essay, “Remembering the Battle of Greasy Grass (aka Little Bighorn) with the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Victory Riders.”

Since 2017, Elena has been traveling every June with members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe on an annual horse ride that ends at the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana.  The Lakota celebrate June 25 every year as the day they famously defeated General George Armstrong Custer and five battalions from the 7th Cavalry in one of the most mythologized battles in American history. 

Elena’s photo essay commemorates the historical memory of this battle from its Native victors’ perspective. Respectful of the protocol that there are some things that cannot be recorded by the camera, the photographs in this essay will include only those moments in-between prayers featuring participants who have given their permission to be part of this public humanities project.

I am currently working on a collection of poems centered on the theme of limerence, with the working title “Limerence: The Wingless Hour.” The title is drawn from one of Nella Larsen’s unpublished (and lost) novel manuscripts, which itself was an echo of a line from a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Limerence is a psychological term for passionate romantic infatuation, which differs from other (more hallowed or respected/respectable) forms of love, including platonic, but also filial, mature romantic, and religious. This collection has been on the back burner while I completed my monograph and other critical essays, and I want to use this coming summer to finally get this manuscript into shape to send out.

Some of the works in the collection are in prose, with a series of memoir vignettes based on family and other personal photographs. This series within the collection can be called an ekphrastic memoir, a genre that I think I’ve invented. Two of the sonnets from “The Wingless Hour” have been published; one appears in the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, and the other in Anomaly journal. Other poems from the poetry manuscript appear in my first chapbook, The Book of Ours (Momotombo Press, 2009). The first chapter from the ekphrastic memoir series, “In the Photo,” appears in the inaugural issue of The Latino Book Review.

Brief Biography
Octavio R. González is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. His monograph, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel, is forthcoming from the Refiguring Modernism Series at Pennsylvania State University Press (October 2020). His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of the chapbook series at Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame (Momotombo Press, 2009). He is currently working on a second poetry manuscript, tentatively titled "Limerence: The Wingless Hour." Some poems from this collection appear in Lambda Literary's Poetry Spotlight (shorturl.at/bgxKN), Anomaly Literary Journal, La Guagua, and the "Taboo" series at La Casita Grande, as well as an anthology of Dominican poets in the diaspora (Retrato íntimo de poetas dominicanos, https://amzn.to/2Sz051V). Other poems appear in Puerto del Sol, OCHO, and MiPoesias, among other journals. González is also at work on what he calls an "ekphrastic memoir," the first part of which appears in the inaugural issue of the bilingual Latino Book Review. He is also at work on a closet drama (or dramatic dialogue), "Q & A." You can follow him on Twitter @TaviRGonzalez.

Erich Hatala Matthes is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. His research concerns moral, political, and aesthetic issues surrounding art, cultural heritage, and the environment. He has published papers on a range of topics in these areas, including on cultural appropriation, repatriation, authenticity, historical injustice, environmental heritage, and the ethics of historic preservation.

At the Newhouse, Matthes will be completing a book titled Cancelled: When Good Artists Do Bad Things, under contract with Oxford University Press. The book, intended for a general audience, explores what we should do, think, and feel, when artists whom we love behave in morally objectionable ways. Does it affect the aesthetic quality of their artwork? Is it morally acceptable for us to engage with or enjoy that work? Should such work even be available for consumption, or should it be “cancelled”? In short, can we separate the art from the artist?

Jennifer Musto is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research utilizes qualitative methods and a feminist approach informed by intersectional and social science theories to explore sex trafficking, sex work and carceral responses to violence, exploitation, and punishment in the United States. An animating question that shapes her research on these topics is how laws, technologies, and collaborative modes of governance are leveraged to respond and to what effect. Her book, Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States (University of California Press, 2016) examines state, non-state, and technology responses to domestic sex trafficking situations in the US. Her research has contributed to empirical research on the impact of anti-trafficking efforts in the United States and she has lectured and published widely on these topics. She recently co-guest edited the Special Issue "Technology, Anti-Trafficking, and Speculative Futures" for the Anti-Trafficking Review.

As a Knapp/Newhouse Summer Fellow, she will work on a new book project tentatively titled The Afterlife of Decriminalization: Networked Harms, Shadow Punishments, and Trauma Justice. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of judicial and child welfare efforts to respond to sex trafficking in the United States, the project investigates how technology and trauma-informed judicial approaches are being leveraged to identify and assist youth deemed “at risk” of sexual exploitation in the United States.

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She has a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in African American Studies from Harvard University. Dr. Rivera-Rideau is the author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas with Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has published articles in journals such as Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others. Her 2018 article “If I Were You: Tego Calderón’s Diasporic Interventions” published in Small Axe won the inaugural Blanca G. Silvestrini Award for Outstanding Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Puerto Rico section of the Latin American Studies Association. Dr. Rivera-Rideau’s work has received support from a Ford Fellowship, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and the Social Science Research Council. She is currently working on two projects: one about the construction of Latinness in the Zumba Fitness program, and a second on the operations of Latino whiteness in the Latin urban music scene.

Project Abstract:
My book manuscript, tentatively titled Fun, Fitness, Fiesta: Constructing Latinness in Zumba Fitness, examines how Latinx cultures and identities are represented, negotiated, and challenged in the Zumba Fitness program. Zumba is a dance-fitness program that uses mostly Latin music such as reggaetón, salsa, and merengue, along with other world music genres like Bollywood, dancehall, and Afropop. Zumba boasts 180,000 classes in 200 countries, including regular Zumba classes (sometimes called Zumba Basic) and variations like Aqua Zumba, Zumba Gold, and Zumba Kids.

Fun, Fitness, Fiesta shows how Zumba Fitness creates a specific brand of “Latinness” that draws from and informs a wider set of values and assumptions about Latinx people and cultures in the United States. More specifically, Zumba Fitness promotes a tropicalized Latinness that reinforces stereotypes of the exotic, foreign, Latin other. Fun, Fitness, Fiesta demonstrates how Zumba’s tropicalized Latinness reproduces racist stereotypes of Latinx populations, contradicting the company’s message about cultural tolerance and acceptance. I use an interdisciplinary approach that combines different sources including media coverage of Zumba, advertisements, products and videos produced by Zumba, and interviews that I conducted with Zumba instructors. Taken together, these sources tell a complex story about how Zumba represents and disseminates ideas about “Latin culture,” and how these representations are interpreted on the ground. I argue that it is critical to unpack the lessons, images, and ideas about Latinx cultures that circulate in the Zumba universe. Doing so unearths much deeper and entrenched understandings of the relationship between race, belonging, citizenship, and Latinidad.

Jay Turner has taught at Wellesley since 2006. He received his PhD from Princeton University and his undergraduate degree at Washington and Lee University. His teaching and research at Wellesley are at the intersection of US environmental history and environmental policy. He is co-author of The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (2018) and The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics Since 1964 (2012). 

This summer he will be working on his book, Charged: An Environmental History of Batteries and Prospects for a Clean Energy Future. From disposable AA batteries in remote controls to the lithium-ion batteries powering a new generation of electric cars, the history of batteries offers a window into the challenges of achieving a just and environmentally sustainable future.  By focusing on the environmental history of a ubiquitous, but understudied, consumer product essential to a modern culture of mobility, this project aims to inform current debates and plans for a clean energy future.

His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I am an anthropologist who specializes in feminist and ethnographic methodologies. My work lies at the intersections of feminist technoscience and medical anthropology. I teach courses on gender, race, and science to bridge the gap between the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields. My teaching and research attend to how histories of violence and racism are enveloped into scientific knowledge production.

As a Knapp/Newhouse Summer Fellow, I will revise my book manuscript titled Weighing the Future: Epigenetics and Pregnancy in Late Capitalism. Weighing the Future is the first ethnography of ongoing prenatal trials in the United States and United Kingdom. Studying prenatal trials reveals larger processes of late capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction in a postgenomic era. I make the case that science, and how we translate and imagine it, is a reproductive project that requires anthropological and feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, the book brings attention to how the present—the here and now—is at stake.