For the 2022-2023 academic year, we had two diversity fellows, identified through a competitive national search process in accordance with standard college procedures for all faculty searches.
Meet the 2022-2023 Scholars
Diversity Scholars 2022-2023
Nushelle de Silva
Nushelle de Silva received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. She holds a SMArchS, also from MIT, and a BA in Architecture from Princeton University.
Her work is broadly concerned with how culture is defined and deployed to further imperialism in the present. Past research topics include U.S. industrial exhibits selling capitalist development in non-aligned countries, dubious museum policies for accruing and disposing of collections, distortions of heritage discourse to maintain ethnic hegemony, and the institutionalization of counter-culture movements to majoritarian ends.
Her dissertation, "Moving Experiences: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Infrastructures of Cultural Globalization," examines how the ambitions of international organizations dedicated to cultural peacebuilding spatially reorganized museums to prioritize object exchange through traveling exhibitions in the mid-twentieth century, and argues that the uneven globalization facilitated by these exhibitions still augments rather than alleviates the coloniality of museums.
Her doctoral research has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Design History Society, among others.
Sayanti Mondal
Sayanti Mondal is a Doctoral candidate at Department of English Studies, Illinois State University. Her dissertation, titled "Illustrating Postcolonial indigeneity: Locating experimenting , Collaborative Indian Graphic Narratives in the Twenty-First Century", reassesses the genre of South-Asian postcolonial graphic narratives, particularly the Indian graphic narrative genre, as it experiments with autochthonous modes of storytelling in representing Indigenous epistemologies, while also examining these texts as 'glocal' cultural artifacts circulating within the contemporary twenty-first century global market. Her research interests include South-Asian literature, Children's Literature, Transmedia studies, Writing Studies, and Postcolonial Museum Studies. She has designed and taught both Composition and Literature/Literary Genres and Theory courses at ISU, where she also received the Diversity and Equity Teaching Award in 2021. Currently, at IC, she is teaching Academic Writing, and will be offering a course on Language, Literacy, and Writing Studies in Spring.