Graduate Students – Visualizing Cities Lab

Spring 2022 Graduate Student Fellows

Mariko Azuma, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a first-year Ph.D. student. Her research focus is on the preservation and representation of Japanese vernacular architecture. She is particularly interested in how homes and their spatial surroundings in rural and urban Japan are reimagined through the act of physical and conceptual preservation. Through the VCL, she is interested in focusing on Tokyo’s dynamic spatial transformations as an Olympic city through a variety of mediums.

Felix Borthwick, Department of Cultural Anthropology, is a first-year Ph.D. student. He is broadly interested in the relationship between contemporary sociality in the post-growth city and the historical legacy of the built environment. His ethnographic research looks at these dynamics through the lives of residential communities in old suburban public housing projects (danchi) in Japan. Prior to coming to Duke, he earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tokyo.

Xinyue Gao, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, is a Master’s Student in Computational Media at Duke University. Her interest lies in exploring how to use the advanced techniques of digital media to show the diversity of the city. At the same time, she is curious about the cultural heritage and innovation of the city and hopes the Visualizing Cities Fellowship will help her analyze the economy, culture, and history of cities from comprehensive perspectives of different disciplines.

Kate MacCary, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, is a first-year student in the Digital Art History M.A. program. She is interested in integrating mapping and modeling into art historical scholarship. Kate received her B.A. in art history from Middlebury College.

Fall 2021 Graduate Student Fellows

Mariko Azuma, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a first-year Ph.D. student. Her research focus is on the preservation and representation of Japanese vernacular architecture. She is particularly interested in how homes and their spatial surroundings in rural and urban Japan are reimagined through the act of physical and conceptual preservation.  Through the VCL, she is interested in focusing on Tokyo’s dynamic spatial transformations as an Olympic city through a variety of mediums.

Xinqian Cai is a first-year M.A. student in the East Asian Studies Program. She comes from Shenzhen, China. The topic of her research is Chinese urbanization. Particularly, she is interested in urban villages and focuses on the collision of local culture and modern culture in the urbanization process.

Kate MacCary, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, is a first-year student in the Digital Art History M.A. program. She is interested in integrating mapping and modeling into art historical scholarship. Kate received her B.A. in art history from Middlebury College. 

Spring 2021 Graduate Student Fellows

Anvita Budhraja, Department of English, is a second-year Ph.D. student. She is from Mumbai, India. Her research interests include the Novel in the 20^th century, Anglophone writing, and literature of place and urban spaces. She is particularly interested in how cities are imagined, mapped, and written into text and how ideas of space and “home” intertwine.

Yiming Cai is a second-year M.A. candidate in the Program in East Asian Studies. His research interests lie in the media and film studies in Cold War East Asia. In particular, he pays attention to the transnational film cultures and the intersection between media and urban space. Growing up in Shanghai that has witnessed a rapid urban transformation in the past decades, Yiming was always intrigued by how cities are imagined and visualized and how such visualization works in collaboration with the emerging technologies and is entwined with national imaginary.

Andrew Carr, Department of Sociology, is a Ph.D. student whose research involves using Census data to identify sources of social inequality in U.S. cities. He also studies how inequality is patterned by differences across neighborhoods and other local geographic entities. He is an advocate of the R programming language for social science research and for spatial and statistical analysis.

Ian Erickson-Kery, Department of Romance Studies, is a Ph.D. Candidate. His dissertation, tentatively titled Urbanism from Below: Design and Environment in Mexico City and São Paulo, 1968-85, examines the design practices of architects, filmmakers, and visual artists who revised the precepts of modernism in light of political and theoretical engagements with marginal or subaltern urban zones. Prior to coming to Duke, he earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and worked at e-flux, a platform for contemporary art and theory in New York. He has taught in Spanish and Portuguese as well as English, and his pedagogical approach lies at the junction of Latin American cultural studies and urban studies in the Global South.

Ninel Valderrama Negron, Department of Romance Studies, is currently a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies department. Through the transpacific lens, my dissertation explores paintings, sculptures, urban plans, and religious iconography that portray Spanish colonialism as benevolent and convey a rhetorical intention to resurrect a global empire in the final days of Spanish control in the Americas and the Philippines. Also, I am interested in the uses of digital humanities inside the classroom, especially during these times, but also for the future. I currently working on a project with my former university to foster digital competencies in the university.

Bryan Rusch, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a first-year Ph.D. student in Duke in AAHVS Department. He focuses on Urban Planning and Architecture in the Middle East and North Africa. With a background in Mechanical Engineering and Arabic, he is combining cultural/area studies with digital humanities techniques in his research. In his first semester in VCL he worked in ‘Team Jerusalem’ on the reimagining of pedagogy and sources for a course on Jerusalem’s Urban Planning and Violence. He is excited for the possibility to continue working for the Lab as it evolves and takes on new and integrated challenges.

Fall 2020 Graduate Student Fellows

Anvita Budhraja, Department of English, is a second-year Ph.D. student. She is from Mumbai, India. Her research interests include the Novel in the 20^th century, Anglophone writing, and literature of place and urban spaces. She is particularly interested in how cities are imagined, mapped, and written into text and how ideas of space and “home” intertwine.

Andrew Carr, Department of Sociology, is a Ph.D. student whose research involves using Census data to identify sources of social inequality in U.S. cities. He also studies how inequality is patterned by differences across neighborhoods and other local geographic entities. He is an advocate of the R programming language for social science research and for spatial and statistical analysis.

Kimberley Dimitriadis, Department of English, is a Ph.D. student and serves as the Assistant Editor for NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature, politics, and culture; the history of demography and population science; and the novel and novel theory. She earned her M.Phil. and B.A.(Hons, H1M) from the University of Sydney, and a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Dana Hogan, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Sara Galletti. Specializing in Renaissance and Baroque art, her research interests focus on the networks and circulation of the women artists of Early Modern Italy. Dana completed her M.A. in Italian Renaissance Art through Syracuse University in Florence (2017) and received a B.A. (cum laude) in Art History and Comparative Literature from Williams College (2015).

Emily Mohr, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a Ph.D. student studying women and minorities in ancient art. Her multidisciplinary research focuses on the intersections between sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in ancient Greek art and literature. She is interested in topics concerning materiality and representations (mimēseis) of feminine and nonbinary bodies, with the aim to understand the lives of women, enslaved persons, and minorities in the ancient Mediterranean world more fully, including how they influenced, produced, interacted with, used, and perceived art throughout their lifetimes.

SaeHim Park, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, is a doctoral student in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Park is a graduate planning fellow at the Visualizing Cities Lab in Fall 2020, leading the Team Tokyo with Professors Gennifer Weisenfeld and Augustus Wendell. Park’s doctoral research examines the image cultures of representing sexual violence in East Asia. At Duke, she works toward graduate certificates in College Teaching, East Asian Studies and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies.

Bryan Rusch, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, is a first-year Ph.D. student in Duke in AAHVS Department. He focuses in Urban Planning and Architecture in the Middle East and North Africa. With a background in Mechanical Engineering and Arabic, he is combining cultural/area studies with digital humanities techniques in his research. In his first semester in VCL he worked in ‘Team Jerusalem’ on the reimagining of pedagogy and sources for a course on Jerusalem’s Urban Planning and Violence. He is excited for the possibility to continue working for the Lab as it evolves and takes on new and integrated challenges.