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Current Fellows

Dean Bavington (2005-2008),
Natural Resources and the Environment

Dean BavingtonDean Bavington hails from Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. His doctoral research was focused on a critical examination of the history of managerial interventions into the Northern cod fishery in his home province. He is currently exploring how, why and when natural and human resources become constituted as objects amenable to managerial intervention and alternative ways of conceptualizing society-nature relations. He continues to research developments within fisheries and coastal zone management policy with a focus on the eco-social consequences of industrial aquaculture expansion. He is located within the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

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Michael Benard (2005-2008),
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Michael BenardIn my research, I investigate the ecological and evolutionary consequences of environmental variation in space and time. I focus on three main questions:

  1. What traits are adaptive in different environments?
  2. How does immigration between different environments affect adaptation to each environment?
  3. How is the probability of extinction influenced by environmental variation, adaptation and immigration?

To answer these questions, I use approaches ranging from laboratory experiments to large-scale field studies. Amphibians are my primary study group because their two-stage life cycle, in which they spend time as an aquatic tadpole and then metamorphose into a terrestrial adult, provides an excellent model system to investigate the consequences of environmental variation. During the tadpole stage, populations in different ponds experience natural selection on their behavior, body shape and physiology that is specific to the conditions in each pond. After metamorphosis, the adult frogs can move between ponds, and may ultimately breed in a very different type of pond than it was born in. My research gives us insight into how these amphibian populations adapt to and persist in different environments. Ultimately, these results will not only help answer several pressing questions in ecology and evolutionary biology but will also provide information on how to best protect habitat to maintain amphibian populations.

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Akiko Takenaka (2005-2008),
History of Art

Akiko TakenakaAkiko Takenaka teaches architectural history and theory in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is trained both as an architect and architectural historian with a professional degree in architecture (Tokyo Institute of Technology), masters degrees in architectural history and theory (MIT) and the history of art (Yale), and a Ph.D. in the history of art (Yale). She has taught and published on the use of architecture and visual cultures for wartime propaganda, memory works associated with war and other human and natural catastrophes, and the destruction and reconstruction of cities. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the collection, preservation and politicization of Asia-Pacific War memories in Japan.

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Heather Wiebe (2005-2008),
Music

Heather WiebeHeather Wiebe's current project is on the uses of early music in 1940s and 50s Britain, focusing on music's place in a national project of postwar reconstruction. Research interests include: the early music revival; modernism; musical monuments and memorials; twentieth-century opera; early history of radio; television arts programming in the 1950s; British film in the 1930s and 1940s, especially documentary. She completed a Ph.D. in music history at UC Berkeley in 2005.

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Sera Cremonini (2006-2009),
Physics

Sera CremoniniMy general area of research is theoretical particle physics, with special emphasis on string theory and its relation to cosmology. One of the greatest open challenges in theoretical physics is understanding why gravity seems to behave so differently from all other forces. In particular, while electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces - i.e. the nuclear forces - have been found to fit into a unified mathematical framework, gravity has so far resisted such unification.

String theory is currently the most promising candidate for a unified theory describing all interactions. One of its main postulates is that the fundamental building block of nature is a string-like object. The point-like particles we observe correspond to different modes of vibrations of the string, much in the same way in which notes are produced by a string vibrating at different frequencies.

Although promising, string theory has proven very difficult to test experimentally, primarily because it requires energies that are too high for any particle physics experiment. Such high energies were achieved, however, in the very early stages of formation of the universe, when it was extremely hot and dense. Thus, any signatures left behind by cosmological processes which occurred in the very early universe may provide a window into the validity of string theory. This is a compelling motivation for trying to embed the study of cosmology into the framework of string theory.

The main focus of my work is to better understand the connection between gravity and the interactions describing the behavior of elementary particles. I am also working towards bringing string theory closer to cosmology, so that it will be equipped to describe intrinsically cosmological processes such as the formation and evolution of the universe.

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Deirdre de la Cruz (2006-2009),
Asian Languages and Cultures

Deirdre de la CruzDeirdre de la Cruz received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2006. Entitled "All His Instruments: Mary, Miracles, and the Media in the Catholic Philippines," her dissertation examines several apparitions of the Virgin Mary and the devotional communities that attend to them, paying particular attention to their conjunction with the rise of mass mediated practices and cultures in modernity. Her next project will examine the category of the "miraculous" more broadly, and address the persistence of the miracle in both ostensibly secular and religious domains. Other research interests include: history and anthropology, U.S. cultural imperialism, visual culture and the anthropology of the senses, theories of temporality, language and translation, and the "power" of prayer.

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Jeremy Mumford (2006-2009),
History

Jeremy MumfordI am a historian. I specialize in the early colonial Andes, and I have broad research and teaching interests in the shared history of the Americas, especially in Native American histories and the cultural politics of colonialism. Historians working on the United States and those working on Latin America don’t talk very much to each other. This is too bad, considering how much history the Americas have in common, especially before the twentieth century: indigenous societies, European invasion, various regimes of forced labor and slavery, transatlantic export economies based on extraction and monoculture, creole revolutions, waves of immigration, turbulent republics.

My current research project is a comparative study within the Spanish, British, French and Portuguese colonies of a single narrow but interesting phenomenon: civil lawsuits in colonial courts by Native Americans. I became interested in this topic because these lawsuits were so common in colonial Mexico and Peru, but uncommon elsewhere, and I’d like to know why. That a member of a conquered society, subject to brutal discrimination, chooses to bring a dispute to a judge from the nation of the conquerors is an interesting, somewhat odd decision. What did it mean in practice?

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Hussein Anwar Fancy (2006-2009),
History

Hussein Anwar FancyHussein Anwar Fancy received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and B.A. in English Literature from Yale University. He has conducted research in both Europe and the Middle East, including two years in Spain, where he was affiliated with the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and two years in Egypt. His dissertation, Mercenary Logic: Muslim Soldiers in the Service of the Crown of Aragon, 1265-1309, which was based on Latin and Arabic archival sources, attempted to rethink interconfessional interaction in medieval Spain by mapping the alliance of Muslim holy warriors and bandits with Catalan kings during a period of sovereign crisis. In addition to an adaptation of his dissertation, he is currently working on a second project, tentatively entitled The Criminal Mediterranean, which imagines the Mediterranean not as an multiconfessional utopia between Europe and the Islamic world but rather as a zone of competing laws and legitimacies that shaped as well as maintained religious and political boundaries. Broadly, his research interests include all aspects of medieval social and cultural history, in particular violence, smuggling, slavery, and piracy as well as Latin, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Aljamiado paleography. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Medieval Academy of America, and Spains Ministry of Culture. He currently teaches in the Department of History.

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John Finarelli (2007-2010),
Geological Sciences

John FinarelliI am a paleontologist interested in large-scale evolutionary patterns that are recorded in the fossil record of mammals. I received my Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chicago, where my dissertation research focused on the Caniformia (the sub-group of Carnivora that includes bears, dogs, and weasels, skunks other similar species). I have worked on reconstructing the evolutionary relationships within this group, using both DNA sequences and morphological data. Using these hypotheses of relatedness, I reconstruct patterns, and the evolutionary mechanisms behind the observed patterns, with respect to key organism-level variables such as body size and brain volume. My current projects include extensions of my work on the evolution of brain and body size to encompass the entire Carnivora, and eventually expanding these themes beyond the Carnivora to other mammalian groups. I am also beginning several projects on the morphometrics of the mammalian braincase and skull. I currently teach in the Department of Geosciences.

Go Cubs!

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Yiching Wu (2007-2010),
Anthropology/Anthropology and History

Yiching WuYiching Wu is an anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture. Among his interests are popular social movement, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and counterhegemony. His dissertation is a historical and anthropological investigation of the development and political significance of various forms of social protest during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Based on archival and field research, it studies the dynamics of radicalizing the Cultural Revolution from below, through documenting and analyzing several key instances of popular socioeconomic grievances and their political expressions. Exploring how resistance or ruptural moments may develop, political boundaries may be reinterpreted, and transgressive forces reworked or partially appropriated, Yiching's work seeks to develop a new interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, by opening up a space in which an alternative history of the movement-one which attends more to internal differentiations and critical possibilities-can be written.

Yiching is currently at work on two book-length projects. The first, titled The Other Cultural Revolution: Social Protest and the Politics of Class in China, 1966-1969, is based on his dissertation. The second one, tentatively titled China at Crossroads: Popular Opposition and Ideological Transformation in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution, investigates China's underground political and literary cultures in the mid- and late 1970s-a crucial transition moment before the full inauguration of the post-Mao reforms that have since thoroughly transformed China's social landscape.

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