Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows

Launched in AY24 as a biennial opportunity, the Humanities Center, in partnership with the Engaged Humanities Network, supports two postdoctoral fellows whose work combines publicly-engaged research, programming, curriculum development and teaching within their 2-year appointment.

Meet the current postdoc fellows

Lauren Cooper, Ph.D. - English
lacooper@syr.edu

Bio: Lauren Cooper (she/her)

Lauren Cooper (she/her) received her PhD in English from Syracuse University in May 2024. She is currently working on a book project, Climate Justice Before the Anthropocene: How Inclement Weather Shaped British and Irish Romanticism, which uses climate history to trace emergent conceptions of environmental justice in canonical and lesser-known works of British and Irish Romantic literature. Her research examines colonialism and the slave trade, class, gender, landscape aesthetics, changing conceptions of wastelands and wildernesses, and crucially, early discourses of environmental justice. She serves as a Community Program Director for Write Out programming at Girls Inc. and a collaborator with Environmental Storytelling Central New York. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to continue to develop these engaged humanities initiatives within the Syracuse community as an Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and to take on a new role helping to grow EHN undergraduate research.

Miryam Nacimento, Ph.D. - Cultural Anthropology, City University of New York (CUNY)
mdnacime@syr.edu

Bio: Miryam Nacimento's doctoral dissertation, "Coca Mestiza: Small Farmers, Multiculturalism, and the War on Drugs in Colombia," provides the basis for her first book project, exploring the political struggles of impoverished small farmers who cultivate illicit coca in Colombia. Specifically, Nacimento follows these farmers as they advance their demands for cultural recognition, resist state criminalization, and attempt to survive the Colombian agrarian crisis. Nacimento’s future research will continue exploring illicit agrarian economies by focusing on how the expansion of illicit coca affects the Ticuna people, an Indigenous group living in the Peruvian Amazon. She aims to shed light upon the different experiences of dispossession the Ticuna must endure as international organized crime spreads into the Amazonian Forest, threatening Ticunas’ ancestral lands and territories.

During her postdoctoral fellowship at Syracuse, Nacimento will contribute to the Environmental Storytelling Series, organizing public forums highlighting the food justice initiatives of local communities in Central New York and Latin America. She plans to apply her ethnographic knowledge and experience with community-engaged research to elevate these stories as part of the Engaged Humanities Network. She looks forward to learning from community partners while helping them to address their problems and social needs.

Read Miryam's article: The Russia-Ukraine War and the Peruvian Agrarian Crisis (8/5/24 - Wiley Library)