Céline Labrune Badiane, Devenir Ken Bugul. De l’indéterminé. Ken Bugul is the pen name of Mariétou Mbaye Biléoma, one of the first francophone women writers from Senegal. Céline Labrune Badiane is a historian and secondary school teacher based in Dakar. She is writing an intellectual and biographical study retracing Mariétou Mbaye Biléoma’s journey between Senegal, Belgium, and France from 1947 to 1982, before she became a widely recognized writer.

A.J. Boyd, “Black Athenas: The Politics and Power of Black Officers in the 1940s U.S Women’s Army Corps.” A.J. Boyd is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She studies how Black women officers became power brokers between Black women and the state as they navigated competing expectations of enlisted women and military leadership, revealing struggles over how to best act as agents of change ​for Black womanhood.

Chiara Caputi, Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Chiara Caputi is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and faculty member of Italian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Her project examines the protofeminist thought of Arcangela Tarabotti, a seventeenth-century Venetian Benedictine nun and polemicist, situating her work within early modern debates on women’s intellectual authority, forced monachization, and authorship.

Torrey Chin, Unseen Roots: Women Scientists and the Making of U.S. Agriculture. Torrey Chin is an attorney and M.A. candidate in Biography and Memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is researching and writing a group biography of three women scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who helped build the early twentieth-century infrastructure of American plant-disease control and federal quarantine policy.

Bijoyeta Sahoria Das, Phoolan Devi: Villainized, Sexualized, and Unforgotten. Phoolan Devi (1963-2001) is a lower-caste Indian woman who became both a feared bandit and later a member of parliament. Bijoyeta Sahoria Das is an Associate Professor of Journalism at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, who has worked as a journalist reporting from Asia, Africa, and the US. She is writing a critical narrative that examines the life of Phoolan Devi to trace how caste, gender, and violence shaped her public image and erased her agency.

Raven Manygoats, The Birthright of Generations Unborn: Native American Women’s Quests for Sovereignty in the Era of Red Power. Raven Manygoats is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation considers women’s place within the many facets of the Red Power Movement by examining the lives and work of activists such as LaNada War Jack, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Winona LaDuke, and Roberta Blackgoat.

Emma Parker, Apartheid’s Exiles: South African Women Writers in Britain. Emma Parker is Lecturer in Literature and Gender at the University of Bristol, UK and the author of Life Writing and the End of Empire (2024). Her book is the first group biography of a cohort of South African women who fled apartheid during the 1960s only to build lasting literary careers and cultural institutions in Britain.

Carolina Cechella Philippi, Scribbling Walls – Diaries of a Feminist. Carolina Cechella Philippi is a historian of education, a teacher, a researcher, and an extensionist scholar affiliated with the School of Sciences and Letters of Araraquara at São Paulo State University (Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” – UNESP). Her project is a study of the trajectory of Heleieth Saffioti (1934–2010), a Brazilian teacher and sociologist, through an analysis of Saffioti’s personal archive.

Zoë Pollak, Letters for the Freedmen: The Reconstruction-Era Archive of Ellen Garrison, an online exhibit showcasing the career of Ellen Garrison, a freedmen’s educator and early civil rights activist. Zoë Pollak works as an exhibitions designer at The Robbins House, where Garrison was born, and which is open to the public as a Black historic house museum in Concord, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia in 2024.

Meghan Racklin, The Anorexia Museum. Meghan Racklin is a writer, editor, and M.A. candidate in Biography and Memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is writing a hybrid study of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), blending biography, memoir, and cultural criticism to examine eating disorders, repetition and obsession, and historical and personal memory.

Alice Yang, English translation of Adèle Yon’s My Real Name Is Elisabeth (Éditions du sous-sol, 2025), which is an investigation into the story of Yon’s great-grandmother Elisabeth, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, subsequently lobotomized, then forcibly institutionalized. Alice Yang is a literary translator and Ph.D. candidate in the French department at Yale.