Current Fellows at the FDI

Post-doctoral Fellow 2012-2013

Sarah Seidman's research revolves around race, movements for political change, the radical imagination, and transnationalism in the United States and the world. She has a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University. As a doctoral student in Brown's Department of American Studies, Sarah completed a dissertation, "Venceremos Means We Shall Overcome: The African American Freedom Struggle and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1979," exploring transnational convergences between the African American liberation movement and the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. This project examined African American activists and the intellectuals who participated in the civil rights and black power movements in the United States including Robert F. Williams, Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Alice Walker, and many lesser-known figures that visited Cuba as individuals or with groups, lived there in exile as political refugees, and envisioned the island and its citizens in written and visual texts. The Cuban state, in turn welcomed African Americans to its shores and denounced U.S. racism in its public discourse.

Post-doctoral Fellow 2012-2013

Alison M. Montgomery's dissertation is based on research conducted from 2009-2011 in South Africa's Western Cape Province. Fairtrade is an international economic initiative that aims to empower marginalized producers across the global South through the promotion of equitable production, distribution and consumption practices. Based on a trade-not-aid approach to sustainable development, Fairtrade is now a widespread template for agrarian reform, encompassing over 50 producer states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.