Engaged Humanities Network Gradate Fellowships and Research Assistantships provide graduate students opportunities to apply their own research and teaching expertise to forms of action-based inquiry with partnering organizations and the communities they serve. Graduate students from all programs are encouraged to contact us at ehn@syr.edu to join an existing EHN project or to connect a publicly engaged project, program, or course to the EHN.

Current EHN Graduate Fellows and Research Assistants

Sandra Oduro is an international graduate student from Ghana, studying Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. Her research focuses on how the racialized and oppressed people, particularly, Blacks and African women, reshape narratives of oppression and foster liberation by using their literacy to destabilize systems of oppression. Her work with the EHN involves providing media and storytelling support for collaborating organizations within Southside Connections, a collective working to build stronger relationships and structures of mutual support across Syracuse’s South Side neighborhood through intentional planning, collaboration, and resource sharing.

Urmi Parekh is a fourth year PhD student and a Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, & Composition. Her research focuses on pedagogy grounded in translingualism, cultural rhetoric, and feminist decoloniality; looking at the impact of engagement between the human and the posthuman/more than human in a classroom space. Her work with EHN has included facilitation of the Narratio Fellowship, a storytelling and educational support program for resettled refugee youth, and the creation of supports for publicly engaged graduate work for students across the University. Urmi is an international student from Mumbai, India and is fluent in multiple languages.

Kirin Raynor Taylor is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where she serves as a teaching associate. She is a researcher, educator, and politically engaged pacifist with a strong background in peace and social justice education. One of her core passions is helping individuals recognize their roles as political actors and understand the importance of individual and collective action. Through the EHN's Graduate Fellowship, Kirin will complete a training with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and continue developing a public podcast with The Home Collective, a women-led, multidisciplinary initiative chronicling our changing conception of “home.”

Isabella (Bella) Corieri is a PhD candidate at the School of Information Studies. With EHN, she works on data management and the design of a spatial storytelling platform within the South Side Connections group. She was born and raised in CNY and has worked and volunteered with several nonprofit organizations in the city of Syracuse. These experiences, along with others held abroad during her masters in Migration and Intercultural Relations, have greatly influenced her research interests in feminist mapping, storytelling, design justice, and community infrastructuring.