News
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities wishes to acknowledge the sudden and tragic passing of Nicole Gervasio. Nicole was a Public Humanities Fellow (2016-2017) at the SOF/Heyamn, during which she founded the Kaleidoscope Project. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation discussed the ethics and politics of representing state-sponsored political violence in contemporary literature from the Global South.
Our colleagues at ISSG shared the following tribute:
It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden death from cardiac arrest of our student, friend, and colleague Nicole Gervasio. Nicole left a profound imprint on so many parts of Columbia and the world. Everyone who knew her learned something from her unique way of being in the world. Nicole was a brilliant and inquiring graduate student, a beloved prize-winning teacher and mentor, a talented intern and administrator, and a creative participant in the activities of ENCL, ISSG, CSSD, the Writing Program, SOF/Heyman, Barnard, Public Humanities, and more. She was a beloved and loyal friend. And she was crazy about her dogs.
A first-generation college student, Nicole graduated from Bryn Mawr in 2010 with High Honors and defended her dissertation “Arts of the Impossible: Violence, Trauma & Erasure in the Global South” in 2018. While at Columbia, she completed a Graduate Certification in Gender and Sexuality Studies and developed a course on the Literature of Human Rights in the Writing Program. She co-founded the “Diaspora, Race, & Empire Colloquium” in ENCL; was a Public Humanities Fellow at Humanities, New York; an Editorial Assistant at Public Books; she taught Literature Humanities at the Taconic Correctional Facility; and she volunteered and built curricula with Girls Write Now. Nicole was an active and creative participant in the transnational Women Mobilizing Memory project at the Center for the Study of Social Difference for which, with other graduate students, she developed a Gender, Race and Memory Walk through Harlem. Nicole won two prestigious teaching awards: the Columbia Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a graduate student, and the Core Preceptor Meyerson Award for Teaching Excellence in Literature Humanities, which she was awarded twice.
After graduation, Nicole was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, where she examined paradigms of Human Rights and their current usefulness. She then served as an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow at PEN America, where she was one of the organizers of the PEN World Voices Festival. Nicole returned to Columbia for three years to teach Literature Humanities and, two years ago, she assumed a position teaching High School literature classes at Grace Church School. All the while, she continued to write, publish and give papers at conferences.
Nicole’s many talents and accomplishments, her dedication and advocacy, her enthusiasm and skepticism, her colorful outfits and genuine laughter, her fierce commitments to justice and equality –all these are truly difficult to summarize. She is deeply mourned by her partner Celia Turner, her family, her extensive and vibrant community of close friends, and the beloved canine companions who accompanied her everywhere.
If you would like to donate something in Nicole’s name, please consider Res-Q-Pets, where she and her beloved Penny found each other; Girls Write Now; or Word Up Bookstore.
About The Kaleidoscope Project
The Kaleidoscope Project, supported by the Public Humanities Fellowship at the New York Council for the Humanities and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, began with a very simple premise: when kids have access to stories that validate their lives, they feel more empowered to learn. Not only that, but they feel emboldened to become creators themselves—creators of art and knowledge. I know because I was a working-class, queer teen in an urban setting: scholarship-bound to a college-preparatory high school, yet alienated by the endless injunction to ponder lives of privilege and power that bore no relation to my own. Read more here.