Two History Scholars Among the 2020-21 Dean's Fellows Program
Doctoral students who either recently completed or are nearing completion of their dissertations now face an increasingly uncertain academic landscape in the wake of COVID-19. To help mitigate the effects of the pandemic on the academic job market for these scholars, Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences has launched the Dean’s Fellows Program. The program provides one-year lecturer appointments; this fall, nine graduates from across the school will support teaching and research initiatives.
Madihah Akhter earned her doctorate in history in 2020, with a minor in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research and teaching examine gender history in modern South Asia, the British empire, and the Muslim world. She has designed and taught courses on modern South Asian history, gender and feminist studies, comparative partitions, and South Asian immigration to the United States.
Additionally, Akhter remains committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education. She spent five years working as a graduate mentor for the vice provost for education’s Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) program and as a graduate mentor and residential coordinator for the Stanford-CCNY Exchange. As a dean’s fellow, Akhter plans to work on her manuscript-in-progress, titled, In Her Own Right: Sovereignty and Gender in Princely India. She will also teach two classes in the Department of History and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and help launch a new first-year undergraduate course on citizenship. She is looking forward to adapting inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy to remote learning classrooms.
Mateo J. Carrillo earned his doctorate in Latin American history in 2019. His research focuses on post-1940 Mexican migration and modernization. Specifically, Carrillo is interested in how rural industrialization, infrastructure, and environmental change intensified transnational Mexican migration and contributed to the racialization and criminalization of Mexican and Latinx mobility. His current article manuscripts explore the transformation of rural space and land tenure on small private and communal (ejido) landholdings in western Mexico.
As a dean’s fellow, Carrillo, along with colleagues from Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), will examine how the postwar urbanization of nominally agricultural ejido lands resulted in the production of landscapes of inequality on the periphery of Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. As a lecturer in the history department, he looks forward to teaching Stanford’s diverse undergraduates and mentoring fellow Latinx and first-generation students.