Sebastian Barajas
Sebastian Barajas is a PhD candidate whose dissertation research investigates power dynamics in non-mainstream education settings. Sebastian obtained his B.A. from St. John’s College, Annapolis in 2017, an interdisciplinary program focused on Western classic texts of philosophy, math, science, literature, and history. Post-graduation, Sebastian worked as a content creator for the National Youth Rights Association, a nonprofit organization that challenges ageist laws, attitudes, and beliefs that affect young people. Sebastian’s vision for the field of childhood studies is to see it prioritize its intersectional critique of adultist power structures and to explore alternatives to them.
Dana Barrett
Dana Barrett graduated from Rutgers University- Camden in 2017 with a B.S. in Business Management. Currently, she works as an Academic Advisor for the online BABA degree program affiliated with the Camden Campus. Urban education and girlhood studies will be her focus as she pursues a M.A. in Childhood Studies.
Rachel Comly
Rachel is a doctoral student in Childhood Studies. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Temple University and an M.S.Ed. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2014, Rachel has been working in applied research at Philadelphia non-profits such as The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Research for Action, and the Treatment Research Institute. She has worked on research related to early childhood education programs and policy, mental health and harm reduction programs, literacy education, and out-of-school time programs. She is interested in expanding her interdisciplinary foundation in order to think more critically and ethically as an advocate and researcher.
Courtney Cook
Courtney Cook, MS has a combined background in academia and nonprofit work. Cook has a Bachelors in English Language and Literature and Women’s Studies from University of Maryland, College Park, and Masters in Nonprofit Management and Women’s Studies from The New School and University of Maryland, College Park. Most recently Cook was a Visiting Lecture in the Department of Gender, Women, + Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County teaching Black Girlhood and Gender, Race, and Media. Cook’s research is focused on the intersections of gender, race and media with a focus on Black Girlhood, film, archival methods, and de-adultification.
E Lev Feinman
E Lev Feinman graduated with a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Political Science from The George Washington University in 2017. From GWU, they received the Distinguished Scholars Award and the Undergraduate Prize for Feminist Scholarship for their research on transgender childhoods, memory, and grief. From 2017-2020, E worked at the Center for the Study of Social Policy as a Program & Research Assistant supporting child welfare reform efforts with a special focus on state systems, racial equity, families and youth of color, girls, and LGBTQ+ youth and parents. E volunteers with the Girl Museum and as a counselor with Camp Brave Trails where they mentor LGBTQ+ youth leaders and lead a variety of camp programs. Their areas of interest include queer and trans studies, gender and sexuality studies, girlhood studies, media and pop culture studies, and kinship.
Katie Fredricks
Katie Fredricks is a doctoral candidate and instructor in the department of childhood studies at Rutgers – University Camden. Her dissertation, “Discourses of Girlhood in Reality TV Docusoaps,” is an analysis of Lifetime Network’s popular tween-centric, dance-based docudrama shows, Dance Moms & Bring It! Areas of interest include childhood and adolescence studies; girlhood studies; critical television studies; discourse analysis; mediated notions of reality, authenticity, and individualism; reality television; critical race studies. Teaching undergraduates about childhood studies, online and in-person, is also an important part of Katie’s work.
Liz Gartley
Luke-Elizabeth (Liz) Gartley is a doctoral student in Childhood Studies. Liz holds an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School, M.S. in Library Science in the School Library Teacher Program at Simmons College, and a B.A. in Media Studies from Emerson College. Liz is a certified school librarian and began their career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa. They have since worked in libraries with students of all ages in a wide variety of settings in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, the Dominican Republic, and Mongolia. Liz studies information, media and culture, especially dinosaurs, animals, and cultural studies of science, and their work has appeared in Studies in Comics, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.
Elaysel German
egerman@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Elaysel Germán began her career as a reading, language arts elementary school teacher. After teaching in the classroom, she served as a literacy coach and was responsible for K-5 literacy curricula and professional development for after-school programs. She worked with community educators, teaching artists and young people on best practices in culturally sustaining instruction. She is the 2019 recipient of the International Literacy Association, Literacy Leaders 30 under 30 award, for her advocacy work on book access in NYC communities.
Her teaching and research interests include racial literacy pedagogy, critical race pedagogy, Black children’s care and resistance. She strives to understand and critique systemic racism within the U.S. public school system and advocate for learning spaces that center and love Black and Latinx children.
Joseph V. Giunta
Joseph V. Giunta studies the children’s film genre through the lens of the New Sociology of Childhood. After earning his MA from the Cinema Studies program at New York University, his academic interests transformed from postmodern evolutions of the children’s cinematic genre into investigations of the ideologies of childhood and constructions of young people in multimedia narratives. By considering the oscillating representations of children’s moral agencies, unique peer cultures, and interactions with play, Joseph endeavors to highlight fantasy circumscription, childhood subjectivity, and the pedagogical functions present within popular culture characterizations of youth. His other scholarly passions include structural histories of film genres from science fiction and action to animation and cult, employing film as an educational tool for young people, and multimedia adaptations of cultural tales. In his downtime, you can find Joseph worshipping at the altar of Willem Dafoe, crafting remarkably accurate Stranger Things theories, and expanding his already superfluous sneaker collection.
Natalie Gologorsky
natalie.gologorsky@rutgers.edu
Natalie Gologorsky is a first year Ph.D. student in Childhood Studies and a Teaching Assistant. She has her M.A. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York City, and her B.A. in Sociology from Mills College in Oakland, California. She has spent extensive time working with young children under the age of five years old, and has taught seventh graders math support in small groups at a public middle school in Oakland. Her current research interest is in informal learning for children that takes place outside of the formal educational system. Her bachelor’s thesis was on the subject specifically of the informal learning of elementary school-aged children at a museum, the Lawrence Hall of Science, located in Berkeley, California. She is interested in the intersection of choice, self-directed learning, engagement, and the ecosystem of out-of-school programs that support these endeavors for children.
Gaylene Gordon
Gaylene Gordon has a BA in Criminal Justice and a MA in Criminal Justice, both attained from Rutgers University – Camden. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Childhood Studies. Gaylene has taught recitation courses in Methods and Techniques of Social Research as well as a dual semester civically engaged advocacy course geared toward juveniles on probation in the juvenile justice system. She has also been a Graduate Fellow and Faculty Fellow, both concentrated in Civic Engagement.
Gaylene has co-authored “Surviving All the Way to College: Pathways Out of One of America’s Most Crime Ridden Cities” in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. She has presented topics centered on this research at several conferences, including annual meetings for the American Society of Criminology. This article reflects a portion of her interests which also include female delinquency, risk and resilience of vulnerable youth, recidivism and race and ethnicity. She is curious about what, if any, relationship exists between her interests and the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems.
Currently, Gaylene is the Graduate Writing Assistant for Rutgers University – Camden. Gaylene is dedicated to bringing victim awareness, bias awareness and trauma informed care to the juvenile justice system.
Anusha Iyer
Anusha has worked for 5+ years in the development sector in India in different roles within research, project management and communications. Prior to that, she completed two Masters degrees in Journalism and Development Studies from India. She has undertaken research in areas related to adolescents, children, gender and education in rural and urban parts of India. Some of her research projects included understanding the effects of mentoring programs on female adolescents, unpacking the skilling ecosystem within the Indian public education system and evaluating the impact of conditional cash transfers on adolescent girls. In the future, she would like to work with incarcerated youth in India particularly to understand their experiences navigating life, education and work post-conviction/ institutionalization.
Marcus Kissoon
Marcus Kissoon is a dedicated advocate for gender and child justice. He is actively involved in the University of the West Indies (UWI) Break the Silence (BTS) End Child Sexual Abuse action research and national campaign. Since 2008, he has collaborated with individuals and feminists and is a member of the Caribbean women’s movement. His research and activist praxis focuses on Caribbean masculinities, homophoba, Indianness, and their implications for disclosure among male survivors of child sexual abuse. His other areas of expertise include child sexual exploitation, gender-based violence, sex work, HIV, and the development and practice of child safeguarding policies. Marcus contributed to the 2021 independent investigation of child abuse in State and privately run homes. He was a member of the Spotlight Initiative’s Civil Society National Reference Group in Trinidad and Tobago and is currently serving on the Global Reference Group. Marcus Kissoon holds a Master of Science in Gender and Development Studies from the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, and a Master of Arts in Woman and Child Abuse Studies from London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Marcus Kissoon is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Childhood Studies at Rutgers University.
Rashmi Kumari
Rashmi received her M.A in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, Universty of Delhi, and an MPhil from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has worked with young adults especially girls in a variety of conflict zones including the Maoist conflict zone of Bastar, India. Taking her research forward, her current research interests are in exploring gendered childhoods in a conflict zone.
Eunhye Grace Lee
Eunhye Grace is a doctoral student in Childhood Studies. Before joining Rutgers, she studied at University College London in the UK for her M.A. in Sociology of Education, where she documented voices of young activists in the School MeToo movement in South Korea.
For the past nine years, she has worked with young people in diverse educational settings such as public schools and private academies. She has also worked as a researcher at the Korea Development Institute and the Korea Institute of Childcare and Education, where she researched the needs of parents of children with disabilities.
Her areas of interest include theories and practices of feminist pedagogy and children’s geographies at private tutoring academies in Korea. She plans to use ethnographic methods to document students’, parents’, and teachers’ stories of tensions and struggles as well as hope and inspiration.
Deborah Lynam
Deborah Lynam is a first year master’s student in Childhood Studies and a Graduate Research & Grant Assistant. She currently serves on the Family Engagement Advisory Board for the National Center on Improving Literacy as well as the Board of Directors of the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council. Deborah consults on the NJ Department of Education’s State Implementation and Scaling Up Evidence-based Practices (SISEP) project, previously chaired the State Special Education Advisory Council, and served on the Dyslexia Handbook Committee. She is the former Director of Partnerships & Engagement at AIM Institute for Learning & Research and previously worked as a Family Resource Specialist for New Jersey’s Statewide Parent Advocacy Network (SPAN). Her areas of interest include children’s rights, early literacy instruction, education policy, implementation science, and learning disabilities.
Ella Makaïa
Ella Makaïa received her Bachelor’s degree in History and her Master’s degree in Historical Research from the University of Angers in France. Her areas of interest for this PhD include racialized youth in the French urban space, particularly childhood in the cités, as well as youth in the French West Indies, the AOF and the AEF.
Pranau Manohar
Pranau, a dedicated first-year Master’s student in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Rowan University.
With an innate empathy and a lifelong sense of humor, Pranau is driven by his passion for working with children of all ages. His experience includes serving as a camp counselor and volunteering for the Sunrise Association of Philadelphia, where he engaged with pediatric cancer patients and their families. He’s a certified TEFL teacher and has taught English as a second language to students in South America. Currently, Pranau works as a paraprofessional in the Washington Township School District, providing one-on-one support to students with intellectual disabilities.
In his pursuit of a Master’s degree in Childhood Studies, Pranau is excited to delve into the multifaceted perspectives and issues of childhood within diverse societies. This academic journey lays the groundwork for his future career as a Child Life Specialist. His research interests predominantly focus on children’s rights and how children develop the agency to challenge and combat rights discrimination within their communities.
Nick Markellos
Nick Markellos is a PhD candidate whose focus is to revamp the approach to teaching English Literature to children, especially at the high school level. By focusing on character analysis in various works of literature, Nick hopes to provide students with a way to understand what it means to be a creative, thoughtful, and caring individual in this world. That is, if they can better understand what characters are feeling, then perhaps they can also better comprehend themselves as well as others.
Nick received his B.A. from the University of Delaware in 2002, and an M.A. from Villanova in 2005 both in European Intellectual History. For the last 20 years, he has taught high-school English Literature and European History at Paul VI High School in Haddonfield, NJ. More recently, in May 2024, Nick obtained another M.A. from Rutgers Camden in English Literature.
Beth McIntyre
Beth got her Masters of Library Science from Simmons College in Boston, MA in 2007. She has worked as a special education teacher, and her work as a librarian was focused on teen programming and collection development. Her research interests include children, emotion, and affect– especially children’s experience with disgust and fear– in history, literature, and material culture.
Elizabeth Nelson
Elizabeth is a PhD student in Childhood Studies. Her research interests include philosophy, specifically ontology and morality, and disability studies. By centering infants and young children, she intends her research and writing to challenge adultist ideologies and inform new understandings of what it means to be human.
Elizabeth received her BA in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and an MA in Theological Studies from Saint Louis University.
Anna Perry
Anna Perry graduated from Rutgers University- Camden in 2017 with a B.A. in Childhood Studies. There, she enrolled in the Teacher Preparation Program and received a certificate in Early Elementary Education as well as Special Education. Post-graduation, she worked as a Special Education Case Manager and Reading Interventionist for students with disabilities in elementary school.
Her areas of interest include disability studies, girlhood and gender studies, youth identity development, urban education, and sexual health education. She is interested in understanding how children’s voices can be used to determine specialized services and inform positive identity development for individuals with disabilities.
Lisa Puga
Lisa’s experience as a Teach for America corps member and involvement with various nonprofit groups exposed her to educational inequities that motivated her passion for reform. Lisa’s interests in the fast-growing alternative education movements across the country – particularly democratic schooling, homeschooling, and unschooling – shed insight into various spaces of learning as they intersect with.
LaTiana Ridgell
LaTiana Ridgell has a Bachelor of Nursing degree from Chico State and a Master of Public Health degree from Drexel University. Previously, she worked with Nurse Family Partnership as a Nurse Home Visitor supporting first-time parents until their child turned two years old. She has testified with the Lead-Free Philly Coalition advocating for the universal lead law that passed in 2019.
Her areas of interest include Black childhoods, Black children’s joy, girlhood, and public policy. She has a particular interest in understanding the ways Black children exercise their agency in resisting adultification.
Janene Ryan
A native of Camden, NJ, Janene holds a B.A. from Rutgers-Camden in English with a focus on Creative Writing and Pre-Modern Day Era Literature and a M.S. from Cairn University in Christian Counseling with a concentration in trauma therapy.
Janene is currently employed with the Division of Children and Families (DCF) as an investigator for child abuse and neglect. She holds certifications in Disaster Response Crisis Counseling and Hoarding. Janene is also a self-published author and facilitator for monthly seminars in Camden.
Janene’s research interests include secondary trauma and death in urban communities related to homicide, suicide and terminal illness; childhood trauma related to systemic poverty; childhood trauma within child welfare/foster care structures and cognitive conditioning of the Rap/Hip Hop culture in teens.
Moloud Soleimani
Moloud Soleimani graduated with an M.A. in clinical psychology from Alzahra University in Iran in 2019. Since then, she has pursued a career as a play therapist with a psychoanalytic approach and as a creative writing teacher in various settings such as clinics and schools. Apart from that, she is a poet and short story writer. She is interested in finding ways to write without reinforcing the adult/child binary and censoring information for children.
She joined the childhood studies department to pursue her interdisciplinary interests and explore various aspects of child activists’ lives, especially children’s rights in social movements.
Deszeree E. Thomas
Deszeree E. Thomas is the Deputy Commissioner for the Division of Community Based Prevention Services of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services. She manages over 225 city-wide programs delivering services in the areas of family community supports, youth development, violence and deliqnuency prevention, truancy, child and family violence, housing support services, educational support services and out-of-school time. With a special interest in gender specific programming, Deszeree is interested in examining ways to mitigate the public health consequences associated with African American girls’ involvement in intimate relationships by exploring how societal representations of femininity, sexuality and love impact their attitudes and behaviors.
Cecelela Tomi
Cecelela Tomi’s interest is in the lived experience of children of Black African immigrants in Western societies since the mid-1900s. She is currently investigating the childhood experiences of individuals raised in live-in home care settings, balancing an African approach to care versus professional caregiving and parenting. Her dissertation proposes a multi-sited ethnography to document language and theoretical concepts of dis/ability in Tanzania and the U.S. She previously earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from The University of Pennsylvania. In 2020, she completed her Master’s in Social Work at The University of Michigan, where she learned about how bibliotherapy and cinematherapy can help people process. Cecelela aims to create similar resources. Her research also explores documentary filmmaking, embodied liberation, graphic memoir, representations of Black girlhood, and sacred spaces. Cecelela is the first in her family to pursue a Ph.D. Additionally, she designs greeting cards and hopes to illustrate children’s stories.
Palak Vashist
Palak Vashist graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in History. She then received her Master’s degree in Modern Indian History from the University of Delhi and her M.Phil. from the same. She is a historian by training and specializes in labor history. Her doctoral dissertation plans to examine the processes of identification authorized by the colonial state to establish the certification routine for children employed in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is interested in exploring how the ‘industrial child’ was produced as an age-based category through the interaction between these regulatory processes, a corrupt bureaucracy, and a superficial colonial concern for child protection. She wants to look into child labor from the child’s perspective and childhood itself.