Yunina Barbour-Payne

Yunina Barbour-Payne is a multidisciplinary scholar/artist and Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Drama. Her interdisciplinary work encompasses Africana, Appalachian, and Performance studies. Her research and creative practice focus on Black women’s performance activism, with a particular emphasis on artists connected to the Appalachian region. 

Initially trained as an actor, Barbour-Payne is also a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in Shakespeare and performance. Barbour-Payne earned her Ph.D. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Performance Studies from Texas A&M University, and a B.A. in Integrated Studies from Northern Kentucky University. 

Her scholarship is featured in Appalachia Revisited: New Perspectives on Place, Tradition, and Progress (University of Kentucky Press, 2016). She is the founder of The Affrilachian Memory Plays (AMP), a performative inquiry that highlights the experiences of people of color in Appalachia. Her research and teaching have been supported by the Donald D. Harrington Fellowship Society and showcased at esteemed venues, including the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. 

Xanni Brown

Xanni Brown is a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in Race, Place, and Equity at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She studies racial and political attitudes in the U.S., with a focus on how people react to increasing diversity in various contexts. 

Currently, she is particularly focused on the relationship between attitudes toward increasing diversity and backlash against democratic institutions. She also studies how to confront bias effectively in a variety of contexts, including schools and workplaces. Brown received her PhD in social psychology from Yale University and was recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ren Capucao

Ren Capucao is a registered nurse and the inaugural Mellon Race, Place, and Equity fellow at the School of Nursing, where he received his Ph.D. in Nursing with a research focus on the history of nursing and medicine, and completed graduate certificates in American studies and digital humanities. Capucao is also a “triple Hoo,” earning his bachelor’s in history and his master’s in nursing at the University of Virginia. 

He explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses through the critical lens of (dis)ability to illuminate and redress systems of oppression affecting the global nursing profession and health equity. His research examines how Filipino nurses’ capacities from the early 20th century onwards have remained suspended in becoming human under racial capitalism despite nursing’s history as a normative career path. It also considers these nurses’ life-making practices illegible to capitalist exploitation as ways to resist, survive, and reimagine the good life amidst the inescapability of hegemonic forces.

From 2018–2019, Capucao was the project director for a Virginia Humanities grant awarded to the Philippine Nurses Association of Virginia to create a public exhibition on the history of Filipino nurses in the Commonwealth. He was recently a 2022–2023 US Fulbright scholar at the University of the Philippines College of Nursing, where he co-authored Raising Standards, Saving Lives: The History of UP Nursing.

Jade Conlee

Jade Conlee is a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She specializes in antiracist and anticolonial approaches to the history of American popular music, jazz, and music theory. Her research works broadly across the music disciplines and engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities to ask how music and sound mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Her current book project studies how background music facilitated the expansion of American empire in the Pacific from the 1950s to present. Drawing on archival and ethnographic methods, it explores how background musicians and listeners have used music to depict the feel of tropical space, and in doing so, forged and contested the spatial imaginaries of U.S. colonialism. Jade is also co-editor of the edited volume Insurgent Music Theory: Terminology and Critical Methods for Antiracist Music Studies, under contract with the University of Michigan Press’ “Music and Social Justice” series. Drawing on critiques of Enlightenment humanism from Black and Indigenous studies, the book reimagines music theory’s epistemic foundations by redefining and expanding the core terminology music scholars use to describe what music is and how it works. 

Trained as a pianist specializing in contemporary classical music, Conlee received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Music Studies from Yale University and holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and Yale University’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Isabel Felix Gonzales

Isabel Felix Gonzales is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Their work moves across political theory, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies to examine the crisis and crystallization of identity’s meaning, and those queer, trans, and nonbinary people of color who, through modes of illegibility, unruliness, and kin-making, refuse its capture. Isabel received a PhD in political science at the University of California, Irvine.

Hu Young Jeong

Hu Young Jeong is a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity postdoctoral fellow at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, he researches how individuals who have experienced collective violence make sense of their experiences and how these interpretations affect intergroup relations, conflict escalation, and resolution in global contexts. In addition, he investigates how perceptions of group power among racial and ethnic minority groups either facilitate or obstruct efforts to challenge unequal power structures.

Jeong received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Clark University and his M.A. and B.A. in Psychology from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. His research has been supported by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, American Psychological Association Division 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology Division), and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Rina Priyani

Rina Priyani is an RPE Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Architectural History, School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a book project entitled Building Bandung: Colonialism, Ethnic Identities and Architectural Practices in Indonesia, which examines the efforts of Indonesian intellectuals and visionaries of the postcolonial world who have been reinventing the city of Bandung in West Java, rupturing it from its colonial origin. This research foregrounds class, ethnicity, gender, and race in Bandung’s urban transformation that grappled with the legacies of late Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and Indonesian post-independence. She traced this lineage to the important moment in global history when the city hosted the anticolonial Afro-Asian or Asian-African Conference, known as the "Bandung Conference," in 1955 and became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Priyani obtained her PhD in Architecture: History, Theory and Society from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Architecture from the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. Prior to joining UVA, she taught at Bandung Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley.

Kristen Raney

Kristen Raney studies phenomena in and around organizations. She is particularly interested in the dynamics between organizations and stakeholders and the social and cognitive factors that influence organizational behavior and outcomes. Her work examines how the characteristics of entrepreneurs influence access to early-stage funding, particularly for underrepresented groups. Additionally, Raney is investigating the implications of identity signaling for small businesses owned by members of underrepresented groups and the factors that influence market perceptions and outcomes. Raney also delves into organizational change, analyzing how identity shifts—when previously held identities stemmed from the disproportionate treatment of women and members of BIPOC communities —affect organizational adaptation reputation management, and relationship repair with the affected groups.  

Dr. Raney graduated with a PhD in Business Management specializing in strategic management from Arizona State University in 2024. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she served as an instructor and the MBA Programs Assistant Director at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR. Originally from Arkansas, Raney holds a Master’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in Public Service from the University of Arkansas. In her free time, she enjoys all things outdoors. She also loves getting plugged into the community – attending local events and supporting local businesses.

Adrienne Resha

Adrienne Resha is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. She holds a B.A. in International Affairs and Anthropology from Florida State University, an M.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian representation and racialization in American popular culture, especially in the superhero genre. Her first book project, Arab and Muslim Marvels, combines cultural history of the genre and critical analysis of visual media (comic books, television, and film) featuring post-9/11 and post-Arab Spring superheroes.

Aaron J. Stone

Aaron J. Stone (they/them) is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Their primary research interests span queer and trans studies, multiethnic U.S. literature (C20–present), modernist studies, and narrative theory. Stone’s book project, Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life, explores the social crisis of form that Black and white queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America and the narrative strategies queer subjects employ in imagining what shapes their lives might take. The project makes two counterintuitive claims: first, that experimental queer texts often represent desires for traditional ways of life; and second, that ostensibly “conventional” narratives—a label most often applied to nonwhite modernists—have been equally essential to the project of queer worldmaking. These claims are explored by comparing realist narrative forms deployed by Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman to formal experiments by Djuna Barnes, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Taylor, and Gertrude Stein. At stake here is a queer and trans theory that accounts for both antinormativity and the longing for models that facilitate reimagined, nonnormative ways of being.

Stone’s published and forthcoming work includes articles on Nella Larsen and queer experimentalism (Modernism/modernity, forthcoming) and Black American novelists and/as American sexologists (GLQ, 2023), as well as book chapters on drag and genderqueer life writing (A History of American Gay Autobiography, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and the resurgence of punk and alternative aesthetics within drag performance (The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Intellect Books, 2021)