Fall 2026 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees

Allen Baylosis (Research Affiliate, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will present his paper, “Erotic Optic as Method: Performing the Brown Erotics of Excess in Jay Cabalu’s ‘Gooning’” as part of the working session “Eroticizing Performance: Taking Stock of Desire” at the American Society for Theatre Research conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Carolyn Lau (Research Affiliate, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will conduct research on New York City’s racino, the now-defunct Aqueduct Flea Market, and displacement in South Queens.

Aanchal Saraf (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will present a paper at ASAP/17, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, in Madison, Wisconsin, on a panel assembled around the recent publication of Javier Arbona’s Explosivity: Following What Remains. Saraf’s paper, “Mushroom Clouds and Other Explosive Matters,” considers the endurances of “explosivity” by thinking with “mushroom clouds” constructed by artists Lisa McEwan, Adrienne Pao, and Niki Hastings-McFall. These artists make use of discarded objects and synthetic materials, as well as an anti-colonial politics of adornment, to lampoon the nuclear wastelanding of Pacific peoples and places and to offer an account of fallout that definitively sutures militarism, tourism, and nuclear colonialism.

Violet Dong (PhD candidate, NYU Department of English) will attend ASAP/17, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, in Madison, Wisconsin, to present “Transimperial Spatial Imagination: Constellational Fugitivity in Monica Ong and Alán Peláez López’s Visual Poetry.” Dong’s paper traces how artist-poets use cosmological diagrams and immigration documents to move between the extraterrestrial and legal meanings of “alien” while creating other ways of imagining location through the body. The project takes aesthetic form seriously as a way of connecting transpacific and hemispheric histories that are often studied apart.

Juliane Mae Posadas (PhD student, NYU Department of History) will attend the American Studies Conference in Chicago, Illinois to present, “Intermediary of Empire, American Colonial Subject: Maria C. Lanzar and an Intellectual History of Anti-Imperialism in the American Colonial Philippines.” Posada’s paper explores the intellectual labor of Maria C. Lanzar, the first Filipina woman to attend the University of Michigan under the Barbour Scholarship Program, her positionality as a colonial subject during the American colonial period of the Philippines, and her participation in the US knowledge regime. As a part of a larger dissertation project, this paper uses Lanzar’s dissertation and articles published in the US and the Philippines to illuminate how Filipina women intellectuals participated in and perceived US imperial power during and after their colonial training at the University of Michigan.