Cohort 2

Pietro de Mello (he/him/his)

uzt9rb@virginia.edu
Department of Biology

Pietro is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia. At UVa, Pietro's research aims to understand how traits are produced by the interaction of distinct types of cells during an organism's development. A trait, broadly speaking, is a characteristic of an individual. Examples in our species include hair color, height, the presence or absence of wisdom teeth, or even the propensity of developing a heritable disease. Given the shared genetic background of all living organisms (you, for example, share ~ 50% of your genes with corn), we can learn much about how traits are determined in our species by studying other organisms. This is why classic study systems in the field of genetics include fruit flies, mice, or fish.

Pietro received his Ph.D.in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with honors at the University of Kansas, his M.Sc. in Ecology as well as his B.Sc. and Licentiate degrees in Biology at the Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil.

Rashana Lydner

Rashana Vikara Lydner holds a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies with a Designated Emphasis in African and African American Studies (African Diaspora Studies) from the University of California, Davis. She earned her Bacherlor’s degrees in French and Spanish with a minor in Psychology, and her Master’s in French from the University of California, Davis. Her work mainly focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black Popular Culture in the Caribbean basin (Francophone/Anglophone) at the intersections of language, identity and power. At the core of her research is her passion for Creole languages in the Caribbean. Her work highlights how speakers of Creole languages continue to challenge dominant language ideologies and embrace their multilingualism.

Research interests: Creolistics (the study of creole languages); Contact Linguistics, Language and Racialization; Language and Globalization; Language, Gender, and Sexuality; Black France; Caribbean Identity; Black popular culture (Music, social media, etc.), African Diaspora Theory; Black and Third world Feminist thought; Queer Theory.

Sarah Orsak

egv2uj@virginia.edu
Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality

Sarah Orsak is a feminist disability scholar. Her work is broadly concerned with the imbrications of disability, race, gender, and nation in the United States, specifically focalizing the relationship between disability and Blackness through literary and cultural analysis. Trained in Gender Studies, Orsak connects Black feminist thought and critical disability studies.

As a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow, Orsak worked on her first book manuscript, Extractive Inclusion: Blackness and the Rehabilitation of White Disability. The project examines how Blackness structures the contours of disability and able-bodiedness in the US and how institutions mobilize this relationship for oppressive ends.

Sarah Orsak holds a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University—New Brunswick and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Rutgers Center for Research on Women. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UVA.

Leticia Ridley

Dr. Leticia L. Ridley's primary teaching and research areas include African American theatre and performance, Black feminisms, Black performance theory, and popular culture. Leticia earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (where she was a Predoctoral Fellow) and the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities program (AADHum). She has presented her scholarship at numerous conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, American Society for Theatre Research, National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Studies Association. Leticia has published scholarly essays in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, the August Wilson Journal, Routledge Anthology of Sports Plays, Journal of American Theatre and Drama, and Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity (forthcoming). Leticia is also the co-producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons and a recurring co-host on On Tap: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast. She is also a freelance dramaturg.

She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto.

Erica Sterling

mth6uq@virginia.edu
Department of History

Erica Sterling is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department. Her research focuses on the history of education law and policy, and twentieth-century U.S. urban and philanthropic history. Her book project tells an intellectual history of federal education politics from 1954 to 1994; she interrogates how federal bureaucrats and philanthropists, education researchers and practitioners theorized and developed non-judicial alternatives for large segregated school systems of the North and West untouched by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Erica holds her BA in History and Psychology from Emory University, and her PhD in History from Harvard University. Erica is the Curator for Class Action, an exhibit opening at the DC History Center in the summer of 2025. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UVA.