Past Affiliates

Priyanka Sen is a second year Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. Her research investigates architectural entanglements with spatial geographies, institutionalized inequalities, human migration and environmental histories. She interrogates several major themes throughout her work, including ecological disasters that promote and perpetuate geological and spatial violence; migration and the immigrant experience in the United States; and the landscapes of memory. She has previously taught design studios at the University of Cincinnati and worked as an architectural designer across the United States, including in Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati; a M.A. in Architectural History and Theory from the University of Texas – Austin; and a B.A. in Art History and Architectural Studies with a minor in Women’s Studies from Boston University. She is genuinely thrilled to be bringing her design skills to the Public History Initiative!

Lyrianne González, PHI Graduate Fellow, Fall 2021
Lyrianne González is a fourth-year History Ph.D. student minoring in Latino Studies and served as a PHI graduate fellow in Fall 2021. She graduated from California State University, Northridge in 2019 with a double major in Psychology and Chicana/o Studies. As an HSI Pathways/Mellon Student Fellow, she examined the trajectories of children of Braceros by putting archival material concerning education into conversation with oral histories. At Cornell, her research has expanded to investigating the racial and generational legacies of U.S. agricultural guestworker programs. In 2020, she was selected to take part in the University of Texas at Austin’s Voces Oral History Summer Research Institute, where she learned how to conduct oral histories effectively and ethically and make her research publicly accessible. She has worked with Black Farmers United of New York State by collecting oral histories of Black farmers to bring attention to the disparities they have faced. In the summer of 2021, Lyrianne was awarded the Cornell Summer Graduate Student Fellowship in Digital Humanities. Through this fellowship, she created a publicly accessible digital humanities project that maps guestworker migratory flows: their origin countries and receiving U.S. states, you may visit the project here. Most recently, she was a 2021 Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program fellow, where she honed in on her Latinx Studies and Public History interests. As the Fall 2021 Public History Initiative Graduate Fellow, Lyrianne is thrilled to bring the skills she has gained from her past public history experience and guide undergraduates interested in the field.

Stephen Vider, Director, Public History Initiative, 2019-2024
Stephen Vider is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. He was previously Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, and founding director of the Public History Initiative from 2019 to 2024. His research examines the social practices and politics of everyday life in the 20th century United States, with a focus on intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. His first book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces how American conceptions of the home have shaped LGBTQ relationships and politics from 1945 to the present. Vider has also contributed to a range of public history projects. At the Museum of the City of New York, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (May to October 2017), exploring how activists and artists have mobilized domestic space and redefined family in response to HIV/AIDS, from the 1980s to the present.

Abikal Borah, ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow, 2021-2022
Abikal Borah is a Public History Initiative Fellow in the Department of History at Cornell University, a position that he holds as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow. His research examines entangled histories of race and violence in modern South Africa. He is currently working on a book project titled, Aftertaste of Empire: Amandiya and Racial Violence in South Africa, 1843-1949. It narrates a history of migration, land, and labor in the century leading to the 1949 race riots between the indigenous Zulus and migrant Indians in the port city of Durban. Moving beyond the binary of state violence and popular resistance, it tells a history of racial violence between two historically oppressed communities. Abikal Borah is now an assistant professor of history at San Diego State University.

David Marantes, Web and Program Assistant, 2021-2022
David Marantes is a senior from Boerne, Texas, in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is double majoring in Government and History, and was a 2020-2021 Oral History Undergraduate Fellow. He focuses on international and American comparative politics and history in his studies, and has always loved listening to the stories of people. In the fellowship, David greatly enjoyed working with community members and fellows to document different experiences and looks forward to assisting the program in the future. David Marantes is now a law student at Duke University.