newsletter: june 2024
meet this month's feature, Dr. Michelle Twali
hi, it’s eliana!
🌴🍉😎☀️ Happy June and Happy Summer! 😎☀️🌴🍉
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Michelle ☕🙂⛰️✈️🍟👪
2024. Attending my first writing retreat in California. As an academic mama, being able to have a dedicated week to myself to write was such a gift.
about me
I am a Provost Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Applied Psychology Department at New York University. I study how groups that have been targeted by mass violence and systemic oppression make sense of their experiences, and how the derived meaning shapes their intergroup relations and engagement in social change. I hope to use my work to develop theory-driven context-relevant interventions to promote equitable societies.
My research interests are really me-search. I was born in Rwanda prior to the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi and was therefore heavily influenced by the genocide. Although I was young and was lucky to not have physically witnessed the genocide (my family was in Kenya visiting family when the genocide started and we got “stuck” there), my understanding of the world has been heavily shaped by the genocide.
In addition to living in Rwanda, I have lived in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana approximating about 5-6 years in each country. I moved to the United States for graduate school in 2010 and again moved around (I started in Salt Lake City, Utah for 3 years, then moved to Dallas, Texas for a year, Worcester, Massachusetts for 5 years, then have lived in NYC and Jersey City since 2017!). I was exhausted from constantly uprooting my life and a lack of belonging to any particular country/place. After I moved to Jersey City/NYC and had my first child, I resolved to never leave. I was therefore lucky when I got my first postdoc fellowship with Innovation for Poverty Action where I worked with Besty Levy Paluck at Princeton University, followed by the Provost postdoc fellowship at NYU working with Rezarta Bilali. I am also exceedingly excited that I will be starting my tenure-track position in the Applied Psychology department at NYU in Fall, 2024!
In my free time, I love hanging out with my family and friends, trying new restaurants in JC & NYC, and reading fantasy novels.
watching:
I am not much of a TV/Movie watcher like I used to be before kids so I focus on non-addictive series that are short and fun(ny). I am planning to catch up on Abbott Elementary this summer. I watched the first season a couple of months ago and I’m looking forward to watching the next two seasons. I LOVE Quinta Brunson!
Severance was probably one of the best shows I watched recently. Still waiting to hear what happened to the Innies if they ever let us know when Season Two will finally come back.
My kids are absolutely obsessed with Bluey and I’ve become an ardent watcher as well!
reading:
A Hundred Years of War against Palestine by Rashidi Khalid. Like many of us, I’ve been horrified to witness the mass violence Palestinians are experiencing at the hands of the Israeli government in the aftermath of October 7th Hamas’s attack on Israel. This book provides a lot of the historical context of the violence experienced by Palestinians and challenges the oftentimes reduction of the violence as a conflict between two parties.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I made the mistake of picking this book from my local public library one weekend and couldn’t put the book down.
The desert magician duology by Nnedi Okorafor. I have read all of Nnedi Okorafor books except the books in this series, and I’m looking forward to finally reading them this summer.
listening:
It came to me in a dream by Jozem. I love all the songs in this album, but I'm partial to Breathe.
Any afrobeats, lingala or zouk music ranging from Tiwa Savage, to Kofi Olomide to Sauti Sol.
some papers that I am ~trying~ to read this month:
Title: The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray.
Authors: Chater, N., & Loewenstein, G.
Journal: Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Year: 2023
Title: How contact can promote societal change amid conflict: An intergroup contact field experiment in Nigeria.
Authors: Grady, C., Wolfe, R., Dawop, D., & Inks, L.
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Year: 2023
THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩
💎 awesome work by marginalia and affiliated scientists 💎
p.s. you can now also find these articles on our website
Michelle Sinayobye Twali, Nicole M. Overstreet, Johanna Ray Vollhardt
Nechumi Malovicki-Yaffe, Sana Adnan Khan, Elizabeth Levy Paluck
👓 OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 🚀
applications are open for the CIFAR neuroscience of consciousness winter school, due july 12: https://cifar.ca/next-generation/cifar-neuroscience-of-consciousness-winter-school/
🌱 JOB-MARKET RESOURCES 🌱
New psych wiki (!!!): https://sites.google.com/view/psychjobwiki2425
and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!
Thanks for reading marginalia’s newsletter!
in support & science,
📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚
eliana hadjiandreou
ivy gilbert
jordan wylie
minjae kim
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