Noah Crawford | PhD candidate, History

Noah F. Crawford is a PhD candidate and graduate assistant lecturer at Texas A&M University who studies refugees during the American Civil War—who they were, how they lived, and the ways in which they influenced the course of the war. His master’s thesis—“’A Matter of Increasing Perplexity’: Public Perception, Treatment, and Military Influence of Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley During the American Civil War”—won the Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award at Virginia Tech.  His subsequent study of Unionist refugees in Texas earned him the Gary Chandler Graduate Student Award from the Houston Civil War Round Table.  He has held research fellowships with the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, the Texas State Historical Association, the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.  This research yielded conference presentations with the Society for Military History, the East Texas Historical Association, the Texas State Historical Society, and the Center for Civil War Research.  He has published an article with the Journal of the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era and given lectures for the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, Save Texas History Symposium, Houston Civil War Round Table, and Fort Worth Civil War Round Table. His research demonstrates how refugee studies can serve as a vehicle for synthesizing disparate aspects of Civil War history including race, diplomacy, gender, and military operations. 

Seulgiye Kim | PhD candidate, English

Seulgiye Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Texas A&M University, where she specializes in contemporary American literature and critical theory. Her broader scholarly interests include postmodern fiction, labor studies, and feminist literary criticism. Her research focuses on the political implications of work, particularly in today's highly financialized, post-industrial economy where traditional boundaries between labor and leisure have increasingly dissolved. 

She is currently writing her dissertation on contemporary novels and their antiwork politics, examining how the recent ideology of authenticity facilitates and legitimizes work within the context of the historical marginalization of women and people of color. Drawing on feminist theory and critical race studies, her work analyzes how authors like Ottessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler challenge conventional narratives about productivity, self-improvement, and career fulfillment. She seeks to reframe experiences of workplace alienation and economic precarity as potential sites of antiwork resistance rather than personal failures. 

Pujarinee Mitra | PhD student, English

Pujarinee Mitra (she/her/hers) is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, College Station. Her research focuses on the mobilization of anti-fascist affects in South Asian English literature and Hindi commercial cinema from 1990-present. She has published her work in Humanities, Feminist Encounters, and Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. Her public-facing writing has appeared in Film Companion and Live Wire. Her areas of interest include Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Literature and Cinema, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cultures of Fascism and Anti-Fascism, and Affect Theory.