Life/Story Fellows

Hwisang Cho specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. His major work-in-progress is  Irresistible Fabulation: Moral Imagination and Storytelling in Korean Confucian Tradition.

Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author and has penned four novels, most recently An American Marriage. While in residence at the Fox Center, Jones will work on OLD FOURTH WARD, a composite novel set in an East Atlanta neighborhood in flux. 

Kristin D. Phillips is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, where her research and teaching currently focus on energy, poverty, and inequality in East Africa and the United States. During her fellowship year, Phillips will draft a book manuscript, Light Bills & Black Lives: Energy Violence & the Struggle for Justice in the Deep South.

Susan Reynolds is an Associate Professor of Catholic Studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. Her research examines Catholic practice on the peripheries of church and society. As a Fox Center Faculty Fellow, Reynolds will be completing the manuscript of her second book, Ways of the Cross.

Héctor Alvarez is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar working in performance, theater, film, and contemporary opera. For the Fox "Life/Story" Fellowship, he will be developing a performance-lecture exploring the execution of his great-grandfather by Fascist troops at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Islamic studies scholar whose areas of expertise include religious authority, Islam and feminism, and contemporary engagements with the Qur’an. Her work-in-progress explores how Muslim American women in interfaith marriages challenge traditional interpretations of Islamic law.

Lucas Koutsoukos-Chalhoub (PhD, University of Michigan) is a historian of Latin America specializing in the intersections of race, politics, and populism in Brazil. At the Fox Center, he will develop a manuscript that positions Fortunato’s life at the heart of Brazil’s racial and political imagination.

Victoria Bergbauer is a cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements (PhD, Princeton University, July 2025). At the Fox Center, Bergbauer will revise her dissertation into a monograph that exposes dynamics of migration, empire, citizenship, and space through the prism of individual experiences.

Jeff Williams (PhD, History, University of South Carolina) studies the work of local lawyers to advance African American rights before Brown v. Board of Education ended legalized segregation in 1954. He will be working on a book entitled Colored Lawyer, Topeka: The Legend and Legacy of Elisha Scott.

Katie Dimmery is an anthropologist of language, poetics, and more-than-human relation in Southwest China. Her current book project, Narrating Heartache, explores how poetic genres in an indigenous Naish-speaking community have been reworked across 20th- and 21st-century Chinese state projects of revolution, modernization, and heritage revival.

Alizeh Ahmad is a PhD candidate in Religion at Emory University, where she explores the intersections of Islam, anti-imperialist thought, and aesthetics. In her dissertation, she blends historical and textual analysis with personal narrative to ask what it means to carry, translate, and transform an ancestor’s ideas across time. 

Alejandro Guardado is a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Emory University. His dissertation, "Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn (1968-2000),” examines how Indigenous activists developed political networks to bolster self-determination movements in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Sooyoung Kim is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her dissertation project investigates the counter-history of trans and queer communities in East Asia during the Cold War with a focus on the lives of trans entertainers and sex workers in Seoul. 

Abby Brown is an English and Creative Writing major and Global Development Studies minor at Emory. Her thesis project "Out of Sight, Out of Mercy: Georgia’s Death Row Through the Eyes of Loved Ones" illuminates how Georgia's carceral system and implementation of the death penalty impact those who have loved ones behind bars.

Anita Osuri is a senior studying Quantitative Sciences with a track in Biological Anthropology. Her thesis titled "Uncommon Illness, Unequal Burden: Rare Disease at the Intersections of Identity" examines how the lived experiences of individuals with rare diseases are shaped not just by medical symptoms, but also by their intersecting identities.

Claire Burkhardt is a double major in Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies and Computer Science from Denton, Texas. Her thesis project traces the development of modern Syrian jihadist political movements through a micro-history of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim President of Syria.

Isabel Buyers is a senior studying Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology and Spanish. Her research explores how dementia is represented in Latin American literature and film, with a focus on how it shapes the way life stories are told, remembered, or forgotten.

Leo Raykher is a senior majoring in History. His thesis titled “Economics, Espionage, and Exile: the Surveilled life of David Drucker, esq.” examines the life of his great, great uncle David Drucker.

Olivia Gilbert is a senior from Montevallo, Alabama completing majors in both Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies. Her honors thesis will explore how women’s stories were told in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, with focus on the “unruly woman” trope.

Samuel C. Chao is a senior studying Psychology and Religion. His thesis, tentatively titled “Chinese American Christian Voices in the Chinese Exclusion Era (1882-1943),” aims to uncover the experiences of Chinese American Christians during a period of pronounced anti-Chinese discrimination in America.

Thiên Thanh Nguyễn is a senior double-majoring in Sociology and Economics. His thesis project will examine how first-generation college students (FGCS) understand work, given their higher likelihood of employment during college to meet their financial needs.

Thora Jordt is a History and Art History major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her project examines the artist Alexandra Exter’s contributions as a costume and set designer for theatre and film between 1915 and 1925, with a focus on the 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars.

Kate Richardson is a Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology major at Emory University on the Pre-Genetic Counseling Track. Her thesis investigates how historical exclusion of women in neuroscience has resurfaced in today’s political climate.

Eunjae Thompson is a senior studying Philosophy and Religion with a minor in History. Their honors thesis titled “Beyond Capture: Blackened Piety & the Politics of Refusal” will interrogate how the life-writing genre not only illuminates but draws the boundaries of the human condition.