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Current Fellows

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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Claudia Brittenham (2008-2011),
Art

Claudia BrittenhamClaudia Brittenham received her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale University in 2008. Her dissertation, “The Cacaxtla Painting Tradition: Art and Identity in Epiclassic Mexico,” examined the role of mural painting in the construction of civic identity during the 7th-10th centuries in Central Mexico. Her next project, “Unseen Art: Problems of visibility and the power of memory in ancient Mesoamerica,” investigates a series of interrelated questions: Why carve the bottoms of monumental sculptures? Why bury art in tombs or caches? Why place paintings and sculpture in dark spaces where they cannot be seen? By considering cases diametrically opposed to the modern paradigm of museum display, this project reconstructs a model of how and why art functioned in Mesoamerican contexts, focusing attention on making, dedication, performance, and memory as processes central to the vitality of ancient art.

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Cécile Fromont (2008-2011),
History of Art

Cécile FromontCécile Fromont received her Ph.D. in history of art and architecture from Harvard University in 2008. She is currently working on a book manuscript that brings together African and European historical documents and art objects to examine the correlated role of artistic form and religious thought in the cross-cultural encounter between Catholicism and Kongo worldview in early modern Central Africa.

Her next project is the critical edition of a richly illustrated, unpublished manuscript authored by a Capuchin missionary to the Kingdom of Kongo in the late sixteen hundreds that outlines the nature of the religious, visual, and conceptual encounter between Europeans and the people of the Kongo in the seventeenth century.

Her research interests include the relationship between artistic form and religious thought, the visual syntax of belief systems, cross-cultural translation by visual means, the role of art and architecture in the political history of the kingdom of Kongo and of the Portuguese colony of Angola, the role of Christian art and rituals in the experience of enslavement in colonial Brazil, the history of artistic encounters between Europeans and Africans, art and colonialism, contemporary Caribbean art.

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Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (2008-2011),
Anthropology

Zeynep Devrim GürselMy core intellectual interest is in imagination and mediation – how ideas emerge, circulate and generate other ideas, narratives and forms. Representations – both textual and visual – are central to my work as products that are formed by and reflect particular cultural and historical environments and yet, as fixed entities, can travel and have influence far from their points of origin. In one form or another, all my projects explore cultures of knowledge production: how the circulation of representations, as well as the organization of information and technology shapes the imagination and how, in turn, innovations in narrative form, including communication technologies, come about.

Trained in literature, anthropology and film studies, the question that guided my dissertation fieldwork was highly interdisciplinary by necessity: What ways of seeing are global news audiences offered and how do the structures that shape these ways of seeing, also shape ways of imagining the world and political practices possible within it?

Specifically, international news photographs play a critical role in how the world is imagined today – they mediate and manage diverse imaginations. Against the backdrop of Gulf War II, commonly referred to as “the most photographed war in history,” my fieldwork centered on key nodal points of production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry in its centers of power in New York and Paris. My informants were various “brokers of images,” such as photo editors and agencies, who act as mediators for views of the world, and in so doing also become mediators of our imagination. Currently I am completing the resulting manuscript, Images and their Brokers: The Work of International News Photographs in the Age of Digital Reproduction, an ethnography of a very loose community of people collectively engaged in visual knowledge production at a time when the core technologies of their craft, their status amidst a growing pool of amateurs, and the very relationship between representations and acts of violence was changing rapidly.

My next projects involve: the novelty introduced to visuality with photographic representations of the human body, the use of photography as a tool of governmentality, the expansive photo albums of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II, the confluence of changes in transportation, communication, distribution of capital, industrialization, and perceptions of time and space that coincide with several innovations in the history of media, and Turkish coffee grinds.

Research interests: Visual anthropology, media anthropology, ethnographic and documentary film, cultures of knowledge production, photography, anthropology of news and journalism, anthropology of the imagination, moving image studies, theories of representation, narrative forms. France, Turkey, USA.

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Manja Holland (2008-2011),
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Manja HollandI am a disease ecologist broadly interested in the impacts of disease from the level of individual organisms through ecological communities. I received my Ph.D. in Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. My research has focused on human development of landscapes and patterns of macroparasite infection and disease in amphibian hosts in the northeastern U.S.

While prior studies have focused on patterns of association and infection rates, disease ecologists are increasingly able to explore the influence of parasites within ecological systems. This challenge is made more acute by increasing evidence that human caused changes in the environment can foster the emergence of disease. My goal is to better understand the contexts in which emergence takes place as well as the collateral effects of emergence on the communities within which parasites are embedded.

My next broad research goal is to investigate the broader role of parasites in structuring ecological communities and food webs through a combination of carefully designed mesocosm experiments, field experiments and models. Exciting new research suggests that parasites play a critical role in shaping communities and maintaining biodiversity. I also believe that the study of the role of parasites in communities will improve our broader understanding of the structure and function of ecological communities. I currently teach in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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Miranda Johnson (2008-2011),
History

Miranda JohnsonI study settler colonialism and indigenous histories in North America and Australasia. My dissertation examined the phenomenon of decolonization in Australia, Canada and New Zealand in the past four decades, particularly through legal discussions of these countries’ colonial pasts and the evidentiary value of indigenous histories in these cases. My primary research sites have been courts and commissions of inquiry where indigenous claimants in pursuit of their rights have demanded that judges listen to their histories – often in the form of oral traditions and performances - and thereby open up a political space for their communities in settler societies. Such demands have led to some quite substantive changes in the evidentiary practices of law and of the discipline of history as well. But how democratically inclusive are these disciplines? How far can notions of evidence be stretched? By examining the relationship between democracy and the evidentiary bases of these disciplines in particularly contentious and economically significant legal cases, my research connects local political struggles to broader disciplinary developments and discussions.

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