Graduate Student Affiliate

Amaya Parks is a first-year Sociology Ph.D. student at Washington University–St. Louis. Her research interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, and inequality. As an undergraduate, she conducted research on the relationship between hair styling choices and social mobility–examining the agency and othering of African American women through their hair stories. Throughout her graduate […]

Samuel Papa Arthur is a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis, where he reads English and American Literature, and is a member of the A&S Public Scholarship Cohort 25. He is a graduate of the University of Cape Coast and Iowa State University, where he had his B.Ed. and M.A. in English studies.   […]

Lacey Ramirez is a transdisciplinary public scholar and member of the CREATES cohort, working at the intersection of academia and public health. As a second-year PhD student in French, Lacey’s research interests include representations of midwifery, witches, and healers in French and francophone literature. Lacey also worked as Program Assistant in 2025 for WashU’s Healthcare […]

Matthew Moore is a PhD student in English and American Literature studying the intersection of infrastructure space, ecology, and post-war American literature. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University where he wrote about his upbringing in the rural Midwest and the interactions of whiteness and masculinity within the post-industrial […]

Anna Wood and is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at WashU. She studies the intersections of culture, gender, race, technology, and the biopolitics of reproductive and sexual health. Her doctoral research investigates how assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) stratify reproductive labor vis-à-vis the global surrogacy industry. Wood seeks to understand how transnational surrogacy markets affect […]

Ben Wexler is an academic pursuing a PhD in History at the Washington University in St. Louis. He works primarily on Jewish history in France and the German states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His research concerns the entanglement of religion, nationalism, and race/racism, the role of religion in economic thought, and […]

Katherine Tilghman is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies with a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary novels by Mexican and Argentine women and how they engage with feminist approaches to care. Katherine is the editorial assistant for the Object Lessons book series, run jointly by the Office of Public […]