Five of this year’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows are headed off to Ph.D. programs — a record not only for Swarthmore but the nearly 50 institutions that comprise the national program.

Graduating seniors Brandon Archer, Aaliyah Bullen, Seth Jeter, Reuben Kadushin, and Andrés Villalba will pursue a Ph.D. in African American studies; linguistics; history; law and history; and Chicana/o and Central American studies, respectively.

The students were recognized earlier this month at an event to celebrate the official recognition of Black Studies as a major and department at Swarthmore. Joseph Nelson, the chair of Black Studies and faculty coordinator of the Mellon Mays program at Swarthmore, lauded each of their accomplishments as well as the historic nature of the cohort pursuing Ph.D. programs.

“That is no small feat,” said Nelson, to spirited applause from the crowd. “Swarthmore is making an impact. We’re making it happen.”

More on the students’ plans for graduate school and experiences at Swarthmore:

Brandon Archer ’25

Archer, a Black Studies and English literature major from Philadelphia, will pursue African American Studies at The University of California, Berkeley.

Archer’s Mellon Mays fellowship research centered on “what is at stake when representing the Black body in 'The Trayvon Generation’ and what is made possible through its refashioning and hybridization. Examining works from select contemporary artists including Tschabalala Self, Nick Cave, and Amy Sherald, [he] explored questions about Black embodiments, the body’s role in constructing Blackness, and Black abstraction’s position in a liberatory world-building project.”

Archer was recently one of only six people accepted to The Black Embodiments Studio [BES]’s Arts Writing Incubator, a prestigious and exclusive program run by Kemi Adeyemi, associate professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Washington.

Archer has been heavily involved in the Swarthmore community and the broader Philadelphia community. On campus, he is part of the Swarthmore African-American Student Society [SASS], the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network, Resident Assistants, Writing Associates, and previously, the McCabe Scholars Board.

Aaliyah Bullen ’25

Bullen, a computer science and cognitive science special major from New York City, will spend the next year as a Watson Fellow, exploring “Language Sovereignty in a Digital Age” in Norway, New Zealand, and Canada. Then she will head to Stony Brook University to study linguistics.

“I am excited to continue my linguistic journey in a Ph.D. program, as it will allow me to continue exploring questions that are important to me,” says Bullen. 

“My peers and professors at Swarthmore have given me a drive for knowledge that I will carry throughout my academic career.”

As a Mellon Mays fellow, Bullen brought her integrated perspective on language to answer major linguistic questions. Areas of interest included psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and English creoles. She spent the summer of 2023 studying and developing theories on Singaporean English, or Singlish. Her research included public perception of the language, influence from Chinese and Malay, and syntactic topicalization. Last summer, she  split her time between working at the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages in Melbourne, Australia and developing an independent study into the vowel production of English speakers with Southeast Asian language backgrounds.  

Seth Jeter ’25

Jeter, an economics major from Yardley, Pa., will study history at The University of Chicago.

“In particular, I'll be studying the 19th century Atlantic world and the linkages between movements of the English working class and revolts and other forms of resistance by enslaved persons in the Americas,” says Jeter. “More generally, I will be studying the history of capitalism in this period.

“What most excites me about my upcoming studies is the opportunity to examine key events that shaped the current economic, political, and ideological environment in which we live, which will enable me to contribute to the work of denaturalizing a lot of things about the world that people take for granted. I'm also excited to just do a bunch of guided reading and writing with really awesome experts in my field.

“Swarthmore provided me with some wonderful, dedicated, and kind professors and mentors who supported me through good and difficult times,” adds Jeter, whose Swarthmore experience included serving as an Aydelotte Foundation research fellow and Writing Associates fellow. “In hindsight, I’m amazed at how much I learned from some of my peers and how we experienced so much personal and intellectual growth together, both inside and outside of the classroom.”

Reuben Kadushin ’25

Kadushin, an Honors political sociology special major from New York City, will pursue a JD/Ph.D. in law and history at New York University.

“I think I’m most excited for the ways that moving between the legal world and academia fosters a unique combination and unity between real-world practicum/advocacy and rigorous research,” he says. “I’m particularly excited about the faculty at both schools, and the mentorship I’m going to receive from people from so many different walks of life.

“Participating in Swarthmore’s Honors program and pursuing an interdisciplinary special major gave me the opportunity to have a personalized academic experience accompanied by personal mentorship between many departments,” adds Kadushin, whose experiences at Swarthmore also included serving as an Aydelotte Foundation fellow. “My thesis advisor, [Associate Professor of Sociology] Salvador Rangel, had a major intellectual influence on me. His classes always stress the need for interdisciplinary approaches and the importance of not seeing a contradiction between a sense of justice and rigorous, objective research. That is, as opposed to common-sense presumptions, the former actually demands the necessity of the latter.”

Andrés Villalba ’25

Villalba, an educational studies and sociology & anthropology major from Stockbridge, Ga., heads to the University of California Los Angeles to study Chicana/o and Central American Studies.

"My path toward graduate school has been unconventional, in part because of my identity as a first-generation, low-income student,” says Villalba, who was an Aydelotte Foundation research fellow at Swarthmore and is now a research intern for the Migration Policy Institute. “What I’m most grateful to Swarthmore, and what I believe set me on the path, is the people who make it up. It was faculty, students, and staff who all helped me to navigate this institution.”

“My appreciation for the community I’ve built at Swarthmore excites me the most about starting my doctoral studies,” adds Villalba. “I’m fortunate to have so many incredible professors in my department doing crucial and impactful research on and with Latiné communities. My research, which centers on the intersections of language, race, and immigration, engages with urgent and often contested issues. I’m most looking forward to learning from my department's brilliant scholars and fellow graduate students whose work continuously inspires and motivates me."