President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Leslie Barlow (she/her) received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Barlow’s work has gone on to receive a number of awards including the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, and four MN State Arts Board grants between 2016 and 2021. Her work can be viewed in art collections around Minnesota including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and US Bank Stadium. In addition to her studio research and teaching, Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios, is a part of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective, and is a 7-year volunteer for the organization MidWest Mixed. Leslie Barlow is represented by Bockley Gallery.

Mari Jarris received their dual PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University and in German literature from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Their book project, "Utopia & Revolution: Socialism’s Queer Pasts and Futures," traces queer utopianism within transnational socialist movements from the 1860s to the present as a counternarrative to the dominant forms of scientific socialism. They are also working on a second book project that examines the visual and literary representation of queer identities in the Weimar Republic and early Soviet Union against the backdrop of German and Russian colonialism, arguing that ethnoracial hierarchies were co-constitutive of "modern" queer sexualities. Additional research areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century German- and Russian-language literature, socialist theories and movements, Marxist aesthetics, critical theory, feminist and queer theory, utopian literature, and contemporary intersectional German-language literature. They have received research grants from the German Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Coalition of Women in German, and American Councils Fellowships in Russia.

Deborah (Deb) Yoon identifies best as an interpersonal, family, and health scholar. As a researcher, she is interested in bridging the gap between theory and practice because she believes that the role of research is to make it applicable for individuals who are not only in academia but those who can utilize research findings in practice. Mainly, her research focuses on identity formation and negotiation as it intersects with uncertainty management practices that arise within nontraditional and/or challenging family systems. She works to explicate identity uncertainty as an experience that is applicable to different circumstances while working to contextualize it within other theories of identity, and further explores the communication processes that shape or reflect these specific experiences. Her work seeks to better understand how nontraditional life experiences can be disruptive and raise questions to an individual’s concept of self, the effects if has on an individual’s communication behavior to mitigate the identity uncertainty, and how communication patterns within these nontraditional systems help shape an individual’s identity as well as how an individual’s identity shapes those relationships. Further, she seeks to examine the associations between identity, identity uncertainty, and information management strategies between nontraditional family members and the individual.