Degrees prior to starting this degree program:

B.A. in Anthropology (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), Columbia University, 2017 

M.A. in Anthropology, Princeton University, 2022 

Field Research Plans/History:

Ayluonne Txai Tereszkiewicz is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. Her research concerns the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its remediations of historically Black towns along North Carolina’s sea coast. Through investigating localized understandings—and iterations—of harm and repair, Ayluonne will interrogate conceptual, material, and embodied relationships between the EPA’s remediation procedures (i.e. Superfund and Brownfield cleanups) and local practices for historical restoration and heritage-keeping. 

As an IHUM fellow, Ayluonne will critically experiment with the multi-dimensionality of her dissertation field sites. Using creative interdisciplinary training, she aims to re-encounter the contents of her multi-modal fieldwork archive and to craft new ways to sensorially interpret and articulate these materials against the capture of an ethnographic gaze. The final goal is to generate destabilizing visual compositions that converge the enduring legacies of fast (chattel slavery) and ongoing slow (environmental toxicity and climate-induced erosion) violences with the physical and affective poetics of heritage.

Her doctoral research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton.