Visiting Fellows 2012-13
Dixa Ramirez
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Stanhope Hall, Room 005
(609) 258-4115
Ph.D., University of California - San Diego, 2011
Dixa Ramírez received her PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her work explores the intersections between gender, the construction of national(ist) identity, and geographic displacements in Caribbean literature and culture. At CAAS, she has been working on several projects. One of them, an article entitled "Great Men’s Magic: Charting Hyper-Masculinity and Supernatural Discourses of Power in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," is forthcoming in Atlantic Studies journal. She is currently finishing an article about gender violence in Haitian and Dominican literature called "Forced Intimacies in Hispaniola: The Disentanglement of Eros, Polis, and Reproduction in Émile Ollivier’s Mother Solitude and Marisela Rizik’s Of Forgotten Times." After concluding her fellowship, Dixa will begin her appointment as Assistant Professor of Latina/o Literature in the American Studies Program and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale University.
Aaron Carico
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Stanhope Hall, Room 008
(609) 258-4124
Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University, 2012
During his time at CAAS, Aaron will continue to develop his book project, “The Free Plantation: Slavery’s Institution in America, 1865-1940.” The project excavates the plantation’s lasting structures in American law, culture, and political economy, which withstood slavery’s formal abolition. Through an array of historically situated readings anchored in a diverse archive of legal decisions, economic theories, and ex-slave testimonies, as well as novels, performances, and paintings, “The Free Plantation” reveals the plantation’s endurance not just as a specific territorial formation, but also in the very configurations that have shaped modern America, from systems of credit to the figure of the cowboy. This interdisciplinary work exposes the plantation’s affiliations as promiscuous and far-flung in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, implicating the United States in its entirety rather than any single national region.
Aaron’s work has been supported by grants from the Gilder Lehrman Center, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University, among others. His essay “Freedom as Accumulation” will be included in a forthcoming anthology titled Plantation Modernity, and, along with Dara Orenstein, he is co-editing “The Fictions of Finance,” a special edition of the Radical History Review that examines the rhetorical and the operational dimensions of finance capitalism.
Lynn I. Nottage
Visiting Research Scholar
lnottage@princeton.edu
Stanhope Hall 206
(609) 258-6274
B.A., Brown University, 1986
M.F.A., Yale University School of Drama, 1989
Lynn Nottage’s new play, By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, which enjoyed an extended run Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre, won the Lily Award and was nominated for a Drama Desk. It will soon have a run at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined received an OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play (Manhattan Theatre Club,Goodman Theatre). It had its international premiere in London at the Almeida Theatre in April 2010 and toured several US regional theatres in 2010-2011. The play was also produced internationally in places such as: The Carribean, Germany, Cambodia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad. Other plays include Intimate Apparel (New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play); Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award); Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por’knockers and POOF!.
Nottage is the recipient of the 2010 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play (Ruined), the Lee Reynolds Award, and the Jewish World Watch iWitness Award. Her other honors include the 2007 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” the National Black Theatre Festival’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, the 2005 Guggenheim Grant for Playwriting, the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award for Drama, as well as fellowships from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she is currently a visiting lecturer. She is a co-owner and producer at Market Road Films LLC, a film production company.
Lynn is a board member for Theatre Communications Group, BRIC Arts Media Bklyn, Donor Direct Action, The New Black Fest, Voice and Vision, and the Dramatists Guild.