Contingent is an independent, non-profit online history magazine written by people who work outside the tenure-track professoriate. That includes adjuncts, independent scholars, and workers in museums and libraries. The magazine is built around the ideas that history is for everyone, every way of doing history is worthwhile, and scholars should be paid for their work.
current media partnership fellows
Matías Maldonado Araya
is a Chilean historian. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His doctoral research analyzes the education of the secular clergy in the diocese of Santiago de Chile during the 19th century from an intellectual, global, and institutional perspective.
Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato (she/ella/ya)
is a Xicana MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School, a Graduate Student Associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and an organizer of the Harvard Nahuatl language group. Broadly, Rebecca's scholarship centers Indigenous philosophy, material religion, and ritual survivance pertaining to kinship among humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and land in the Americas. Her interdisciplinary approach is grounded in ancient Mesoamerican and contemporary Indigenous and Chicanx cosmovision and guided by decolonial methodologies.
Dr. Chris Halsted
holds a PhD in medieval history from the University of Virginia. His research looks at identity and belonging in early medieval Europe, focusing especially on witchcraft, gender, and ethnicity. In 2021-2022, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Washington & Lee University.
Cynthia Scheopner, Ph.D./JD
is a philosopher with interests in religion, law, Spanish and Hawaiian philosophies. Her dissertation focused on accommodation of religious identity under the U.S. Constitution. She subsequently obtained an MA in Spanish to translate philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Along the way, she encountered Emilia Pardo Bazán, a kindred spirit one century removed. Her philosophical pursuits follow professional careers as reporter/writer, broadcast news producer, attorney, and administrative staff in higher education.
Zara Surratt
specializes in Religion in the Americas and is a sixth-year Ph. D. Candidate at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include Native American Religious Traditions; history of Catholic missions; race, disability, and religion; and children and culture. She is currently at work on a dissertation that considers how Protestant and Catholic relations in the U.S. affected the residential boarding school agenda and what this meant for the students and staff that lived in these institutions.
Patrick J. Hayes, Ph.D.
is the Archivist for the Redemptorists in the United States. A former professor of religious studies, he is the author or editor of six books, dozens of articles in church history, and over 250 book reviews. In 2018 he curated a museum in conjunction with the National Shrine of St. John Neumann in Philadelphia, and in 2021 was appointed to coordinate a grant from the American Catholic Historical Association on the archival legacy of Native American Boarding Schools. He is based in Philadelphia.