2022-2023 Graduate Research Fellowships Awarded | Penn Program in Environmental Humanities

October 3, 2022

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities is pleased to announce a wonderful new cohort of graduate research fellows for the 2022-2023 academic year. Congratulations to the three fellows, and welcome to PPEH!

three photos of Pablo, Cecilia, and Elisheva

Pablo looks into the camera smiling with his hand on his chin. He has dark curly hair, a beard, and a white shirt.

Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo is a Mexico City native and a Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Pablo’s research is situated at the interface of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Environmental Anthropology, and Latin American studies. With a background in environmental studies, development studies, and anthropology, Pablo’s work has focused on different forms of environmentalism and environmental programs across Latin America bringing him to his current work in Mexico.

His doctoral research analyzes the importance of the Yucatec Karst Aquifer System in southeastern Mexico for the articulation of new forms of environmentalism around subterranean spaces such as cenotes, caves, wells, groundwater, etc. As part of this project, he considers nascent forms of collaboration between experts and communities, reconfigured claims of territorial sovereignty, and emergent forms of legal, scientific, and environmental expertise. In his work, Pablo has frequently experimented with photography, participatory mapping, and audio ethnography as multimodal tools to study how people articulate claims of environmental justice and materialize political changes. His graduate research has been supported by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Penn Museum, the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), and the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE). He is currently a graduate fellow at the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities (PPEH) and a founding member of Penn’s EnviroLab.

Cecilia looks smiling into the camera, her head slightly tilted to the left. She has shoulder length brown hair and glasses, and is wearing a dark red shirt with short sleeves.

Cecilia González Godino is a third-year PhD student whose research is focused on the analysis of Caribbean contemporary visual art from archipelagic, non-hegemonical frameworks. Her work engages epidermic and geological aesthetics as strategies of disorientation and resistance against colonial attempts to the figuration of Caribbean identities. Cecilia holds an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University and has several years of experience translating, copyediting, and assisting artists, librarians, and curators. She co-founded the Spanish publishing firm Circo de Extravíos in 2018, awarded with the Young Innovators Award by the Frankfurt Fair, and her first exhibition as curator will be held at Kelly Writers House in 2023.

Elisheva is standing on the street, looking slightly up to the camera. She has long hair pulled back and wire rimmed glasses.

Elisheva Levy is an architecture historian and researcher. After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art (Sculpture department), Elisheva studied civil engineering. She has extensive experience as a teacher, teaching Fine Art and Architecture Design Studio for over a decade at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.

At Weitzman School of design’s architecture department at UPenn, Elisheva is working on her PhD research into homes which present a radical break from the single-family, isolated, would-be-independent, finance and crises-based household so prominent in Western cultures under capitalism. Investigating a variety of historical and contemporary sources, spanning from the indigenous to utopian, Elisheva's research aims to offer analysis from which to imagine communal and egalitarian alternatives to the unsustainable living typologies normalized through the global advancement of free-market capitalism.

The research Elisheva has conducted so far at Penn was presented in Architecture & Collective Life, the 16th Annual International Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (2020); at the Theory Collective for Social Research at the New School, New York (both in 2020 and in 2022); at Penn’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Colloquium (2021); in Make Way for Winged Eros a podcast by anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee; and in From the Margins - Perspectives on Architecture a podcast by architectural historian German Pallares. In 2022, Elisheva’s work was presented in The First Annual Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute at Duke University, and at Weitzman School of Design architecture PhD forum. Lately, Elisheva was selected as a Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Graduate Fellow for 2022-23.