Meet our team

Marissa Knaak is a sixth-year PhD candidate at Michigan State University, studying modern European and gender history. Her dissertation studies industrialized labor in department stores and small fashion stores at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically how gender impacted worker lives. Using comparative methods, her study looks at Sheffield, UK and Cologne, Germany. The working title is “In the Shadows of Window Displays: The industrialization of Fashion Retailing in Sheffield & Cologne, 1890-1914.” She holds an MA from the University of York in public history and an MA from Simmons University in Gender and Cultural Studies.

Priyanka Jayakodi is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at Michigan State University, specializing in Medical and Environmental Anthropology. Her doctoral research focuses on environmental health, more-than-human relationalities and politics of industrial agriculture and water in communities where Chronic Kidney Disease of uncertain etiology is prevalent in Sri Lanka. She holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Peradeniya. Before enrolling in the Anthropology Ph.D. program at MSU, she worked as an adjunct instructor at the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at Montclair State University and the Open University of Sri Lanka.

Madison is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University. Her current research interests are in culturally responsive and sustaining computing. She is currently working on culturally sustaining design strategies for educational technology and implementations to help all teachers in creating greater experiences of equity in CS education. This includes drawing on the ways of knowing, being, and doing from BIPOC, rural, and low-income communities and providing pathways for including those ways in the CS classroom. Madison has a background in African American Studies and Social Psychology that inform her current research trajectories.

Ashley Cerku is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on historical photography, cultural heritage, community memory, and digital work. It specifically investigates the semiotic landscape of downtown main street and how digital technologies can provide a more immersive and inclusive approach to heritage preservation. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English and Writing/Rhetoric in 2013 and a Master’s degree in Liberal Studies in 2017 from Oakland University, and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2023.