Meet Our Editorial Board
Maija Brown
Maija Brown, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of Transition and Retention in the Graduate School Diversity Office (GSDO). In that capacity, she has the privilege of leading the Community of Scholars Program (COSP) and the Summer Institute, both signature programs of the GSDO that center the experiences of DOVE Fellows, Native graduate students, and students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). She is proud to work alongside the SPARK Editorial Board, SPARK contributors, and Graduate School staff who are committed to bringing to life the mission of SPARK by amplifying the research, experiences, and voices of COSP scholars.
John Dieck
John Dieck (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation project examines the history of tobacco and cannabis in colonial Morocco (1912-1956), though his research interests broadly encompass the modern western Mediterranean. Funding for his project, which includes a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, has taken him to Morocco, France, and Spain. He is particularly passionate about language study and research abroad, and actively encourages BIPOC and first-generation students to travel during their undergraduate and graduate studies. Before entering the doctoral program, he worked as a language teacher both in the U.S. and abroad. He perpetually misses the food, Spanish, and sun of his hometown, Miami, Florida.
Sean Cameron Golden
Sean Cameron Golden (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction where he studies fugitive literacies and the radical tradition of Black teaching. He is passionate about creating liberatory classroom spaces that focus on humanizing marginalized beings through (re)story and storytelling methods, using various modalities. Sean is a 2023-2024 winner of the university’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a recipient of the COSP Predoctoral Diversity Teaching Fellowship at University of Minnesota, Duluth. Along with Black forms of storywork, Sean is also interested in Children’s and Young Adult literature as an engine to study how we narrativize queerness as a point of future prosperity, rather than monstrous cumbersome identities. Sean’s favorite cartoon at the moment is X-Men 97′ (cause he is a mutant and just waiting for his mutation to kick in).
Hannah Jo King
Hannah Jo King (they/she) is a Ph.D. scholar in the Natural Resources Science and Management program. They are committed to Black and BIPOC liberation and believe that healing our relations to both human and non-human relatives is essential to that liberation. Academically, they conduct social science research within a tribal-university collaborative to protect Manoomin/Psiŋ (Wild Rice), an Indigenous plant relative of the Great Lakes. They also practice and theorize in the space of Black-Native land solidaries through community organizing, education, and research about historic all-Black towns. Hannah Jo is a plant medicine nerd and excited future farmer. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2021-2024).
Antavia Paredes-Beaulieu
Antavia Paredes-Beaulieu (she/her/kwe) descends from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Antavia is a GSDO Summer Institute alum and previous Ph.D. scholar of chemistry. With a research background in aquatic pollution capture by MOFs and phytoremediation by nanomaterials, her academic interests tend towards sustainable and equitable global climate change adaptations. Most recently, her graduate studies have taken her to Kathmandu, Nepal where she installed photovoltaic micro-grid systems in low-resource regions of the Himalayas, as well as to Hawaii to observe how Indigenous Hawaiians retain cultural teachings and language revitalization through land-based intergenerational learning models. She is currently engaged in high school curriculum development and teaching that integrates Indigenous cultural teachings and STEM principles through her work at Migizi.
