Profiles of 2026-2027 CRS/NMHR Fellows

Grace Leishman is a PhD candidate in the History department at the University of New Mexico, studying the transnational United States during the long twentieth century with a focus on Black radicalism and other social justice movements. She earned an MA of U.S. History and a BA of International Studies with a minor in History, both from UNM. Her dissertation project studies Caribbean American activist Margaret Prescod, a tireless grassroots organizer and coalition builder who cofounded Black Women for Wages for Housework and the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. Prescod’s work helped conceive a feminist, antiracist community of women organizers from around the world, including the U.S. Southwest and East Coast, the Caribbean, the African continent, the United Kingdom, Canada, and China. Grace has been training under Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil since 2017, and she has lived in New Mexico for over thirty years.

Sierra R. Ramírez (Mashgalé-Ndé/Mescalero Apache, enrolled) is a doctoral candidate in the department of history. She received both her BA and MA in history with a secondary education certificate from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her dissertation examines the intersections of gender, Indigeneity, and citizenship by examining the lives of early 20th-century girl students at federal American Indian boarding schools across the U.S. West. She employs Critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous feminisms, girlhood studies, and intersectionality to consider kinship, caretaking, and sociability as modes of resistance.

Abigail Swanson is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department and the associate editor at the New Mexico Historical Review. Her studies focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century reproduction and gender in the American Southwest. Her master's thesis, "Womanhood on the Veranda: Maternalism and the Expansion of American Women's Public Life," examines how some U.S. women levied domestic issues to create an informal public sphere, between private and public spheres, to gain social and civic power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This informal public sphere, which she likens to a veranda, functioned as complex, multifaceted conceptual borderland where gender roles, ideas of civility, respectability, and race intersected. Abigail was a GA for one year in the History department. She is currently working on research for her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Shannon Withycombe. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, Abigail wrote encyclopedic entries for BlackPast.org. After graduating with a BA in History from the University of Washington in 2013, Abigail took over a decade off of school and participated in community activism, community event planning, and artistic endeavors including performance art, music, and writing poetry. She also started a small vintage clothing company focused on circular fashion and sustainability.