2022 HAL Fellows

Josh Armstrong

Josh Armstrong is a 6th year PhD Candidate in German Studies. His dissertation examines concepts of homemaking and belonging in queer literary writing from both West and East Germany in the 1980s and 90s. He has competed a PhD Minor in History, and has a strong rooting in historical approaches to reading and working with literature. His broader interests include queer theory and history, the German twentieth century, medieval literatures, environmental humanities and contemporary LGBTQ politics. Before coming to Stanford, Josh completed an MA in Germany and French at Cambridge University. He is based in Berlin.

Lorenzo Bartolucci

Lorenzo Bartolucci is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He works on literature in English, Italian, and French, with a particular interest in the intersection of poetry and neuroscience. His dissertation explores the shared imagination of these cultural realms in the twentieth century, documenting relationships between poets and neuroscientists and their influence on modern understandings of the self. Lorenzo received his A.B. with honors in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2015, and after graduating spent two years working for a data virtualization company in California and the UK. At Stanford, he has served as the editor-in-chief of Mantis, the university’s journal of poetry, criticism, and translation, and as the graduate coordinator of the Stanford Workshop in Poetics. He is currently based in Washington, DC.

Annika Butler-Wall

Annika Butler-Wall is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies currently researching how digital media platforms are restructuring the relationship between gender and labor in the U.S. Her dissertation traces the intersections between gendered labor and digital technologies across different economic spheres, examining platforms such as TaskRabbit and Yelp. She holds a BA in American Studies and Economics from Wesleyan University. At Stanford, she has been involved in digital humanities projects as a member of the Literary Lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, served as the Graduate Student Coordinator for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, and is a current Graduate Dissertation Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  

Phoebus Cotsapas

Phoebus Cotsapas is a sixth-year PhD candidate in French, and a 2021-2022 Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, with a research focus on early modern literature. In his dissertation, he studies ways in which death was construed as posing a unique set of problems for atheist thinkers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. He completed his BA in philosophy and French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and his MSt in modern languages at New College, Oxford. Before coming to Stanford for his doctoral studies, he taught English at Université Paris Nanterre.

Brooke Durham

Brooke Durham is a seventh year PhD Candidate in History. Her research focuses on the history of development and the French Empire in Africa. In her dissertation, she studies the efforts of local groups as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations to address longstanding inequalities between European settlers and Algerians in housing options, and the provision of social services, medical care, and primary education. More broadly, Brooke is interested in the interpersonal dynamics of the end of the French Empire as well as the lasting impacts of decolonization in Europe and Africa today. Brooke holds a B.A. in History and a B.A. in International Politics from the Pennsylvania State University.

Chelsea Elzinga

Chelsea Elzinga is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of French where she researches the senses and literature. Her interest in the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies has its origins in her first job out of college working at a wine company. This early curiosity about sensory epistemologies remains stimulus for her doctoral research today. Chelsea’s work grapples with sensorial ways of engaging Francophone literatures, especially where the senses locate legacies of colonialism and relate to pedagogy, memory, and politics. She has taught French literature and language at Florida State University and at Stanford University. She has also taught English language, literature, and theory courses in France and in Luxembourg as a Fulbright grantee. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Chelsea has found a home in Miami where she practices sunrise yoga on the beach and remains mindful of the connection between her research and the experience of la vie quotidienne.

Cynthia García

Cynthia García is a PhD candidate in the Modern Thought and Literature Program with minors in History and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her dissertation documents how Chicanx/Latinx communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago respond to the violence of geographical displacement and the racial homogenization of their communities through storytelling, public art, and activism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, García performs close-readings of literary and historical texts, employs the tools of visual analysis, and interprets trends in demographic data. García’s scholarly and curatorial work appears in Mapping the U.S. Latino Experience, a featured digital media experience for the inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States, located in the Molina Family Latino Gallery at The Smithsonian National Museum of American History. At Stanford, her social justice work has centered around community-based knowledge practices and the recruitment and retention of underrepresented students.

Charlotte Lindemann

Charlotte Lindemann is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford where she expects to receive her degree in June 2022. Her research traces the formation and significance of narrative conventions in American literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, using both traditional and computational methods of reading. Her dissertation project, “Patterns of Speech: Dialogue and the American Novel, 1850-1950,” develops a theory of the novel centered on the changing conventions for representing characters’ speech and their political valences. Lindemann is a member of the Stanford Literary Lab and of CESTA’s 2020-2021 class of Digital Humanities Graduate Fellows. Beyond the dissertation, her research includes a project that uses computational methods to trace the narrative conventions of Hollywood star formation in a corpus of women’s magazines and a project on the influence of film on the birth of narratology as a field.