skip to main content

Current Fellows

Hussein Anwar Fancy (2007-2010),
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.

Return to Top of Page

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!

Return to Top of Page

Benjamin Paloff (2007-2010),
Slavic Languages and Literatures

Benjamin PaloffBenjamin Paloff is completing a book on how new concepts of space-time influenced the representation of subjectivity in Eastern European literature between the World Wars. A second project examines the idea of freedom in literature about gulags, concentration camps, and besieged cities. A poetry editor at Boston Review, his poems have appeared in The New Republic, A Public Space, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and he writes frequently for such publications as The Nation and the Times Literary Supplement. He received an MFA from the University of Michigan, his doctorate from Harvard, was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Russia and Poland, and has translated several works from Eastern and Central European literatures, most recently Dorota Masłowska’s Snow White and Russian Red (Grove Press, 2005) and Marek Bieńczyk’s Tworki (Northwestern University Press, 2008). He is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Frankel Center for Jewish Studies, and a 2009 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Return to Top of Page

Claudia Brittenham (2008-2011),
History of 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.

Return to Top of Page

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.

Return to Top of Page

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.

Return to Top of Page

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.

Return to Top of Page

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.

Return to Top of Page

Carrie Booth Walling (2008-2011),
Public Policy

Carrie Booth Walling is a postdoctoral fellow with the Michigan Society of Fellows (2008-2011) and an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Her general research interests are in the areas of international politics, human rights, norms, and international institutions. Her current work focuses on changing beliefs about the purposes of military force in the United Nations Security Council, how new democracies address past human rights violations, and the construction of human rights narratives by international human rights organizations. Walling received her undergraduate degree from James Madison College, Michigan State University and masters degrees from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and the University of Minnesota. Her Ph.D. is in Political Science from the University of Minnesota.

Return to Top of Page

Tung-Hui Hu (2009-2012),
English Language and Literature

Tung-Hui HuTung-Hui Hu is the author of two books of poetry, The Book of Motion (2003) and Mine (2007); his third collection is Greenhouses, Lighthouses. Described by the San Francisco Foundation as a "provocative gesture towards cinematography," the book is composed of a series of palinodes, a form that sings back or recants a previous error. Complementing his creative work, his nonfiction manuscript, A History of Clouds in the Desert, examines the legacy of atomic blasts and electronic warfare in the empty spaces of the Nevada desert. Analogue records from that period—classified film footage, abandoned railroad tracks—have begun to decay, and now constitute a ghostly presence inside modern-day digital networks.

Hu holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film from UC Berkeley. He teaches in the Department of English, where he focuses on post-1960 visual art, poetics, and new media.

Return to Top of Page

Robert Jansen (2009-2012),
Sociology

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2009. My interests include political sociology, the sociology of culture, comparative and historical research methods, and sociological theory.

My dissertation explored the cultural bases and practical organization of contentious politics by examining the historical emergence of a new mode of politics in early twentieth century Latin America: populist mobilization. Through the in-depth study of a strategically selected case (Peru's 1931 presidential contest), situated in historical and comparative perspective, it addressed the questions of when, why, how, and with what consequences politicians pursue populist mobilization.

I am currently working on two projects. The first is a book on the historical emergence populism in Peru in the early twentieth century. The second is a multi-country comparative study of the consequences of populist mobilization and the patterning of cycles of recurring populism in Latin America. This project covers the seventy-five year period from the initial emergence of populism through the recent rise of "neo-populism."

Return to Top of Page

Christopher Skeaff (2009-2012),
Political Science

Christopher SkeaffChristopher Skeaff received his Ph.D in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2009. His main areas of study are the history of modern political thought and contemporary political theory, with a general thematic focus on rival conceptions of freedom and power. Other research interests include: Enlightenment thought, the role of affect in politics, political ontology, political theology, and biopolitics. His current research project aims to rethink political expression through an original interpretation of the work of Benedictus Spinoza and its situation within modern genealogies of public reason and free speech.

Return to Top of Page