Andrew Mellon Faculty Diversity Initiative

Supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the faculty diversity initiative offers diversity enhancement research fellowships to junior faculty members conducting research in any area supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation: Anthropology and Archaeology, Area/Cultural/Ethnic/Gender Studies, Art History, Classics, Geography and Population Studies, English, Film, Cinema and Media Studies (theoretical focus), Musicology, Ethnomusicology and Music Theory, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Linguistics, Literature, Performance Studies (theoretical focus), Philosophy, Political Theory, Religion and Theology, Sociology, Theater (theoretical focus). The purpose of these grants is to amplify and support the research of tenure-track assistant professors whose research addresses the subject of diversity understood broadly.

2023-2024 Mellon Fellows:

Dr. Yinxian Zhang

(Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology)

Project title: “The Political and Cultural Biases in GPT Multilingual Models”

Project description: As ChatGPT, one of the latest and most popular AI technologies, goes viral, studies on biases in GPT and other large language models (LLMs) are also growing rapidly. There is increasing evidence showing that the information provided by LLMs is prone to errors and biases (Abid et al. 2021; Li and Bamman 2021; Hartmann et al. 2023; Santurkar et al. 2023). Studies show that these models not only exhibit gender, racial, and political biases, but they can also inadvertently spread misinformation or “hallucinated information” (Perez et al. 2022; Ji et al. 2023). These pioneering studies, however, have solely focused on GPT or other LLMs trained on English corpus. LLMs were trained and fine-tuned on large corpora, i.e., text data from multiple sources such as web pages and published books. GPT models, in particular, were trained on multilingual corpora to cater to a global audience. While this helps disseminate the latest AI technology beyond English-speaking populations, it also raises an understudied question – Considering that the training corpora in different languages may represent distinct cultural and political values, do multilingual GPT models convey consistent information and values, or do they present inconsistent or even contradictory information, depending on the language used? This question has profound implications for human communications. GPT presents itself as an objective AI assistant that provides undistorted summaries based on a comprehensive search of all available information. This makes average users more credulous about the accuracy and credibility of GPT answers. However, if GPT models exhibit a systematic bias pertaining to a specific language, users speaking different languages may unknowingly be exposed to different information. With the growing popularity of GPT, this implicit bias may reinforce rather than ameliorate existing conflicts and cultural gaps between different populations, hindering the inclusion of multilingual and multicultural communities and countries, and even impeding communication and collaboration between nations.

This project investigates the cross-language inconsistency and biases in GPT multilingual models. It chooses Simplified Chinese and English as the main languages of interest. The reason to focus on these languages is two-fold. First, the two languages represent two vastly different cultural and political systems – the English training corpora of GPT mainly come from the United States (U.S.) and the Simplified Chinese texts are largely from China. This juxtaposition helps reveal cultureand language-specific biases in GPT models and enables a comparative study on cross-language inconsistency. Second, GPT models were primarily trained on information scraped from web pages. However, due to the rampant censorship in China, the Chinese training corpus may be selective and biased. Comparing Chinese GPT answers to the English ones will allow us to assess the impact of censorship in large language models built on the “open internet”.

Dr. Claudia Cali (Assistant Professor) and Dr. Jennifer Eddy (Associate Professor)
Music & World Languages

Project title: “Making music with young children & families: honoring and celebrating cultural diversity through arts-based educational research”

Project description: This project investigates intercultural music and art activities, performance, observation, and interviews with parents to understand its impact on social integra􀆟on and cultural identity. Through the study of sound, concept, and behavior through music performance and language, we will expand research in this area of intercultural competence and honor the different cultures present in the borough of Queens and in the student body of our college.

Young children of immigrant families often do not have easy access to musical experiences, either from their own culture or other cultures. Through age-appropriate musical and language tasks, young children, families and university students will share a space where they can engage together in an exploration of each other’s cultures and different languages through artistic activities such as singing, creative movement, dance, interpretive language tasks (Eddy, 2006; 2022), improvisation, and instrument playing. 15 to 20 families, identified as being low-income and culturally diverse, will be invited to participate in a 10-weeks (March to May 2023) weekly music classes, facilitated by the principal investigators and 6-8 students. Throughout the term, children and families will be asked to bring songs, dances and other artistic traditions to the class, which will become a space for artistic exploration, free-play activities and meaningful sharing for children and their parents/caregivers. As facilitators of these artistic experiences, the principal investigators and students will listen to children and parents’ musical/artistic contributions and design musical activities that honor and celebrate different traditions, languages, and artistic practices represented in the class.

Dr. Megan Victor

(Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology)

Project title: ” The Molly House Project: An Archaeological Examination of Molly Houses and the Underrepresented Eighteenth-Century LGBTQ+ Community”

Project description: This project will advance knowledge about the daily life of queer individuals in the eighteenth-century English Colonial World, through an examination of the materiality of molly houses, beginning with an analysis of the assemblage associated with New York City’s Lovelace Tavern, which opened in 1670 and operated into the eighteenth century until it was torn down under mysterious – and conflicting – circumstances. Molly houses, located as they were in back rooms and upper floors of eighteenth-century taverns, contribute to a deeper understanding of sociability, commensality, and use of space in the English Colonial World (Norton 1992; Trumbach 1999, 2007). Taverns were integral places of meeting and served as locations for social and economic transaction; as a result, they were fundamental to local political economies. As the “most numerous public institution in colonial America,” taverns had a prominence on the social landscape of the eighteenth-century, especially due to their status as often the only large, secular buildings available for gatherings (Conroy 1995: 2; Salinger 2002; Smith 2008; Tlusty 2021; Victor 2023, 2021, 2020). These institutions were already predominantly male spaces in the eighteenth century and yet they were one of the few establishments that a woman – especially a widow – could own without damage to reputation (Meacham 2009; Sismondo 2011). That places of such mixed gendered encoding were also the sites of molly houses, or places for gay men, transgender individuals, and cross-dressing individuals to meet, interact, and act in ways that were considered worthy of capital punishment makes an examination of these spaces necessary for studies of social negotiation, gendered performance, and the role of alcohol within social interactions.

Within the tavern, patrons experienced a lack of accountability and, due to the ‘alcosocial’ environment, could act in ways deemed unacceptable outside of a drinking space (Conroy 1995; Smith 2008; Tlusty 2021; Victor 2023). Because of this, taverns were liminal spaces, that lay “betwixt and between” classifications set by a community’s “law, custom, [and] convention” (Turner 1969:95). However, as inherently social spaces, taverns were also “centralized social anchors” for their communities (Smith 2008:67; Victor 2023). Tavern drinking played a role in a “larger social performance,” such as creating a sense of community and inclusion (Smith 2008:63).

Dr. Robin Naughton
(Assistant Professor, Cultural & Information Studies)

Project title: “Actions Matter: Shifting from Ally to Accomplice”

Project description: In the current conversation about diversity, the term “ally,” used to categorize a group of people that support marginalize people in the fight for justice is very active and well-known. An ally is “anyone from a dominant or majority group that is working towards ending oppression by supporting and advocating for those in marginalized and oppressed groups” (Brown & Ostrove, 2013). The term “ally” has a positive connotation and as such people are comfortable being an ally. They can support marginalized people without getting too involved or experiencing any trouble with their own life or profession. Marginalized people can know that there is support and there will be allies in the fight for justice. However, allies are not enough to truly fight for justice.

In the fight for justice, people need to have accomplices. An accomplice is “someone who assists others in creating a space of inclusion, equity, and safety for all, often at the risk of their own social and/or professional standing and physical well-being.” Few people have accomplices, someone who will fight with them while the fight is happening, someone who will not stand idly by while injustices are being committed, and someone who will be an active partner and conspirator in the fight against racism, microaggressions, and injustice even if it means a threat to that their own livelihood. The term “accomplice” has a negative connotation and as such people shy away from it and remain “allies.” However, marginalized people need accomplices that are willing to partner with them on simple and complicated issues.

The goal of this research study is to explore what it means to be an ally or an accomplice in librarianship, how marginalized librarians perceive allies or accomplices, and how librarians can shift from being an ally to becoming an accomplice. Librarians are great allies to marginalized people, but in librarianship, the need for allies to become accomplices is great. Marginalized people in these professions need more than allies to fight against the daily injustices, microaggressions and racism that they experience. This study will explore the perceptions of “ally” and “accomplice” in librarianship and develop tools to help librarians shift from being allies to becoming accomplices so that they can better help in the fight against daily injustices.

Dr. Dwayne Baker
(Assistant Professor, Geography and Population Studies)

Project title: “Does Light Rail Transit Create Diverse or Segregated Neighborhoods? Assessing the Long-Term Neighborhood Impacts of LRT in the United States”

Project description: This study analyzes the long-term impact of light rail transit (LRT) on changes in neighborhood socio-economic characteristics. Large-scale transit investments like LRT are expected to enhance accessibility, encourage mixed-use development, and alter land use patterns to create denser, mixed-use spaces that encourage transit use (Litman, 2007). Despite such benefits, research has suggested that LRT has the potential to increase housing and property values, seemingly creating the unintended consequences of displacing residents that need increased transit access and neighborhood upgrades the most and contributing to increases in income segregation (Bardaka, et al., 2018; Heilmann, 2018, Weinberger, 2001).

Even with this paradox in transit neighborhood impact studies, three issues emerge. First, much research examines short-term change – that is change within approximately the first decade after the opening of a LRT station (Bardaka, et al., 2018; Boarnet, et al., 2018). While such research is useful in examining the immediate impacts of LRT, it is problematic given that large-scale transit investments like LRT alter land use and residential patterns over the long-term. With these short term studies, research suggests that gentrification is not necessarily common or widespread (Dong, 2017; Padeiro, et al., 2019) and that LRT does not necessarily increase the likelihood of a resident moving out of a LRT neighborhood (Nilsson, et al., 2020). Instead, it is more likely that households experience changes in discretionary income but are not immediately displaced (Baker and Kim, 2020). In this case, the shock of the new investments may not be immediately felt by vulnerable households. Another potential drawback to new transit investments is that higher housing prices may block lower-income households from moving into the neighborhoods. Assessing changing neighborhood socio-economic characteristics over a longer period may better assess whether LRT station neighborhoods are prohibitive to households that actually need such neighborhood improvements the most. Finally, quantitatively based, transit-induced neighborhood change research omits connections with LRT station-area and transit-oriented (TOD) plans. Plans shape urban spaces and, thus, the way neighborhoods are developed. Yet, quantitative studies do not include or account for LRT TOD or station area plans and policies in assessing how LRT influences neighborhood change.

Dr. Robert Nyamushosho
(Assistant Professor, Anthropology)

Project title: “Reconstructing complexity and governance in Iron Age southern Africa”

Project description: This project historicizes present struggles about social justice content in university education within a much larger continuity of systematic backlash against progressive social movements. Specifically, I argue that backlash against social movements including the Civil Rights movement, Black nationalism, Chicano nationalism, the American Indian Movement, and anti-war protests took place both at the level of the criminalization of protest and coordinated state repression of movement leaders as well as within conservative “reform” projects in the academic humanities and the use of soft power, NGOS, and nonprofits to contain and redirect the energy of social movements. Thus far, I have drawn on the resources of literary theory, rhetorical theory, Black Studies, Latinx Studies, and Indigenous Studies to explore how state and non-state actors used specific rhetorical moves and framing strategies to manufacture consent for the repression and rollback of the gains of social movements, up to and including the end of affirmative action, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and mass incarceration. My monograph will of course not be completed by the end of 2024, but I detail it here to show the broader thrust of my research program and provide context for two journal articles which will be completed by Oct. 1st 2024 and will be retooled as sample chapters when I send the book proposal out in May of 2025.

Dr. Sawyer Kemp
and Dr. Miles Grier

(English and Gender Studies)

Project title: “Early Modern Trans Drama”

Project description: This research project aims to integrate ethnohistorical records with archaeological evidence, fostering an Afro-centric understanding of complexity and state formation which helps in mitigating the influence of Euro-American neo-evolutionary theories which limits the representation of the diversity of socio-cultural, economic and political practices that existed in ancient southern Africa. Additionally, the project will also serve as a training opportunity for students from Queens College in archaeological fieldwork methods, offering them hands-on experience in supervised excavations and exposure to African archaeology.

The data generated has the potential to enrich the teaching of our recently introduced course, “Archaeology of Africa,” which I am responsible for convening within our department. This research aims to fill gaps in African archaeology, particularly in understanding the dynamics of early state formation, which are often lacking in current textbooks. Thus, it will contribute to the expansion of knowledge and the diversification of the knowledge base in archaeology. Furthermore, understanding early state formation in Africa can provide insights into contemporary issues related to governance, conflict, and social development in the region, making it relevant beyond the academic realm.

Lastly, as an emerging scholar dedicated to building a strong record of research and teaching excellence, the Mellon fellowship offers a valuable opportunity to foster growth within my field. It will also support the development of impactful publications based on my project, contributing to a better understanding of cross-cultural variability in early complex society organizations. This will increase the number of well-studied examples from sub-Saharan Africa, addressing the chronic underrepresentation of this region in contemporary archaeological literature on complex societies. Additionally, the project encompasses a commitment to public outreach. As the Principal Investigator, I will engage in presentations to various project stakeholders, including the Queens College community.

Dr. Walter Lucken
(Assistant Professor, English)

Project title: “Caverns of Fear: Rhetorics of Crisis and Containment in the New American Century”

Dr. Johnathan Thayer

(Assistant Professor, GSLIS, History)

Project title: “Cultural Preservation and Public Engagement at the Margins of Maritime New York City”

Project description: Like many other nonprofits, maritime heritage organizations, through the stories they tell and the ways they serve the public, have increased attention paid to people who don’t fit old stereotypes. They are working to build audiences among women, people of color, and poor and working class people. They are seeking out and highlighting stories about those same demographics, which also serves to build those audiences. Organizations like Rocking the Boat, Brooklyn Boatworks, and the Billion Oyster Project are using boat building and vessel operation for youth development and job skills training for communities of color and lower and middle income kids. Organizations like Friends of Sherman Creek, Portside New York, and Gowanus Dredgers include traditional vessel types and historic vessels in organizing their communities in the face of challenges from rising sea levels, gentrification driven by waterfront development, and major projects to mitigate the pollution left behind by our industrial heritage. Organizations like the Sandy Ground Historical Society, the Waterfront Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection, the Seamen’s Church Institute, and South Street Seaport Museum highlight the contributions of people of color and women on the waterfront. These include the Black oystermen of the Sandy Ground community, the female and Black longshoremen who handled freight on the waterfront, Black and Queer seafarers and their shoreside lives, and the female lighthouse keepers who minded the lights with their families.

Following up on the Floating Conference on NYC Digital Maritime Heritage that I co-organized in January 2019, I propose an edited volume that will make connections between a public readership, NYC maritime heritage, and the diverse and inspiring group of people and institutions that are keeping it alive and accessible. The book will continue the development of my research and scholarship in the areas of social and cultural maritime history and local public history. Cultural Preservation and Public Engagement at the Margins of Maritime New York City will be an overdue synthesis of fieldwork being done towards a public maritime history for NYC, with framing introductory and concluding chapters to address emerging trends and challenges and to situate contributions within the larger socioeconomic and environmental forces. Chapter authors will include maritime historians, as well as voices from museums, libraries, archives, stewards of historic vessels and lighthouses, artists, and other keepers of the historic NYC waterfront. This volume is intended primarily as a public-facing book, meant to reach a wide audience with an interest in maritime history and ecological present while addressing how to make connections between New Yorkers and their waterfront, past and present, in 2023 and beyond.

Dr. Sara Alvarez
(Assistant Professor, Department of English)
Dr. Khánh Lê
(Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders)

Project title: ““What does it look like when our students tell us what to teach?” A student-centered curriculum project”

Project description: New York City has a remarkable diversity of languages. Queens College is located in the heart of that language diversity, our student body reflects that language diversity. Recent surveys
conducted by Survey Research & Assessment in conjunction with professors Sara Alvarez, Khánh Lê, Marco Navarro, and Amy Wan to better support emergent bilingual and multilingual students shows that the college does not do enough to support the needs of emergent bilingual and multilingual students. Currently, the only support in terms of coursework for supporting emergent bilingual and multilingual students are ENG 108 and ENG 109. We are a group of interdisciplinary writing faculty from the Departments of English and Linguistics and Communication Disorders working together to support the needs of our faculty, emergent bilingual and multilingual students at the institutional level at Queens College. The aim of this project/study is to understand the needs of emergent bilingual students and multilingual students that ENG 108 and 109 courses are not providing and develop a curriculum for Queens College to support them.

Dr. Natalie Vena
(Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Department of Urban Studies)

Project title: “Environmental Racism and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Southeast Queens, NY”

Project description: The fellowship will provide support to prepare a book proposal and to begin a manuscript on environmental racism in Southeast Queens and grassroots efforts to advance environmental justice there. My research focuses on neighborhoods in Queens Community Boards 12 and 13, including Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans, Springfield Gardens, Rosedale, and Laurelton. This book will increase public awareness of an understudied part of the metropolitan region, one that has been predominantly Black since the 1970s, with families coming to New York City as part of the Great Migration and the post-1965 immigration from the Caribbean. Since the 1990s, Latinx, Indo-Caribbean, and South Asian families have also settled in these neighborhoods in large numbers. The manuscript will deepen definitions of environmental racism in New York City, by systemically examining inland flooding, sewage backups, and an international airport complex through the lens of environmental injustice. Using methods characteristic of anthropology and legal practice, the project will also detail how government bureaucracies often function to worsen environmental inequalities. In tracing government policy through the political action of community advocates, the manuscript will provide further evidence of the everyday indignities attendant to New York City’s economic growth agenda and austere government budgeting in working-class and middle-class communities of color (see also Sanjek 1998, Phillips-Fein 2017).

Dr. Namhee Han
(Assistant Professor, Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures)

Project title: “Afterimages: Colonial Korea, Cold War Archives, and Inclusive Re-Archiving”

Project description: What should inclusive and diverse archives look like? How can we write histories of marginalized people whose racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered lives were documented, encoded, and archived by others in power rather than by themselves? What are the mechanisms ensuring that certain objects are regarded as historical evidence while some traces do not count as such? How can we challenge the mechanisms? Seeking answers to these questions, I develop a book project entitled Afterimages: Colonial Korea, Cold War Archives, and Inclusive Re-Archiving. As an initial step, I will write a peer-reviewed journal article that critically investigates visual documents of colonized Korean women sexually enslaved by the Japanese imperial army and their recurrent appearances in transnational documentary films such as Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women (Miki Dezaki, U.S.A., 2018) and Koko Sunyi (LEE Suk-Jae, South Korea, 2022).

Visual materials of or about colonial Korea leave unique traces that cross national and regional boundaries during the colonial and postcolonial eras. They were produced under the Japanese rule (1910–1945) and disseminated to Japan and its colonies of Northeast China, Taiwan, and South East Asia. After August 1945, the materials were scattered in national archives in China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The United States, which was a leading power during the Cold War era, actively documented the Japanese imperial system that included what were called “comfort stations”; in the process, photographs and film footage of Korean comfort women were created by American military personnel and preserved in the National Archives and Records Administration. These records, unfortunately, contain disinformation and misinformation; the colonial conditions of Korean women’s sexual enslavement were not distinguished from the capitalist sex industry, and lives in comfort stations were testified to only by Japanese owners and mediated through Japanese American military personnel’s interpretations. What archive records of comfort women captured are multilayered racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered gazes of late colonialism and early Cold War, which doubly erased the colonized Korean women’s long suffering. How can we approach their living but not fully told histories and build inclusive and accessible archives for diverse history writings? Intersecting archive theories, area studies, digital technology, and race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality studies, I will argue for the significance and possibility of reflexive, ethical, and multisensorial approaches to archives in envisioning creative and inclusive archival practices that marginalized communities actively participate in and initiate.

Dr. Thomas Hilgers
(Assistant Professor, Philosophy)

Project title: “The Time of Technology: On the Possibility of a Fulfilling Temporality under the Conditions of the Information Age”

Project description: The project’s objective is to arrive at an account of a fulfilling temporality. In particular, the project investigates the nature and possibility of a such a temporality under the conditions introduced by digital technologies. So, it is meant to help us arrive at a better understanding of our current information age.
In general, I claim that our current information age is characterized by temporal conditions that introduce very particular challenges to an individual’s unfolding, or rather manifestation, of a fulfilling temporality. What, however, does it mean to speak of a fulfilling or unfulfilling–or rather of a good or bad–temporality? As human beings, we not only exist in time, but our existence is a temporal unfolding, insofar as we unfold or manifest our existence by intentionally relating to a past, a presence, and a future. Reflecting on the nature and possibility of a fulfilling temporality first of all means reflecting on the different manners in which this temporal unfolding may occur from an ethical point of view. That is, it means to ask which of these unfoldings we may assume to constitute a good or happy life, and which we may assume to contradict such a life. The project, then, relies on the assumption that the goodness, happiness or flourishing of a human life not only depends on what exactly happens in this life, but also depends on how this life temporally unfolds. More precisely, it depends on how exactly a person relates to the past, the presence, and the future.