Former dissertation fellows graduate and find success

Lisa Fink, a white woman with long dark blond hairLisa Fink, a 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow, received her PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy in June 2023. Her dissertation, “Unsettled Ecologies: Alienated Species, Indigenous Restoration, and U.S. Empire in a Time of Climate Chaos,” was selected as the University of Oregon’s nominee for the 2023 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts category. 

She has accepted a National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship with the National Parks Service’s Alaska Regional Interpretation Team’s “Identifying Connections Between Indigenous Knowledge and Scientific Results” fellowship. As a postdoctoral fellow Lisa will transform interpretation through researching Indigenous knowledge, cultural practices, and meaning correlated with peer-reviewed science of natural resource topics in Alaska’s National Parks. And she will develop trainings for interpreters as well as new comprehensive interpretive products that ensure deeper and expanded storytelling. 

Sheela Bora Hadjivassiliou, a woman with brown skin and dark shoulder-length hairSheela Bora Hadjivassiliou, a 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow, successfully defended her dissertation “Reorienting the Utopian Island: Tropes, Toponymy and Transgression in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Caribbean and Indian Ocean Fictions” and received her PhD in Romance Languages in June 2023. She teaches in the French Immersion Program at the 4J District’s Eugene International High School.

 

 

Katrina Maggiulli, a white woman with long light brown hairKatrina Maggiulli, a 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow, successfully defended her dissertation “Managing Life’s Future: Species Essentialism and Evolutionary Normativity in Conservation Policy, Practice, and Imaginaries” and received her PhD in Environmental Studies and English in June 2023. 

She has accepted a position as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Comparative Cultural Studies (Environmental Humanities) at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff beginning in August 2023. Katrina will be teaching “Introduction to Humanities” and “Environmental Humanities” during the fall semester.