Fellowships - Past

Sophia Charan 

Prior to joining the Academy, Sophia was a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she studied air quality and the formation of particulate matter. During graduate school, she worked at the RAND Corporation and was involved with science policy on campus. Sophia also wrote about science for a few months at the Idaho Statesman, a local paper in Boise. In addition to a Ph.D. from Caltech, she holds a B.S. from Yale University in Chemical Engineering.

Academy projects: Challenges for International Scientific Partnerships; Accelerating Climate Action 

Amanda Vernon

Ph.D. Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT; Sc.B. Neuroscience, Brown University. Prior to joining the Academy, Amanda was a Ph.D. student in Brain & Cognitive sciences at MIT. She has worked broadly on science policy issues as a member of the Science Policy Initiative at MIT, where she served as Communications Director, and as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Science Policy & Governance.

Academy projects: Challenges for International Scientific Partnerships; New Models for U.S. Science and Technology

Erica Palma Kimmerling

Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University; B.E. Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University. As a NIH Pre-Doctoral Fellow, her research focused on designing new approaches for the three-dimensional culture of human kidney cells in order to gain a better understanding of kidney development and disease. As part of the leadership for the national communicating science workshop series, ComSciCon, Erica chaired the organizing team for multiple workshops focused on empowering graduate students to effectively communicate science to a diverse range of audiences. She has also launched a spinoff of ComSciCon, BiteScis, focused on developing lesson plans through partnerships between graduate students and K-12 educators.

Academy projects: The Public Face of Science

Alison E. Leaf

Ph.D., Cell Biology, University of California, San Francisco; B.A., Biochemistry, Cornell University. As a graduate student at UCSF, Alison investigated how signaling receptors are delivered to the primary cilium, an antennae-like extension from the cell that is critical for appropriate cell signaling. Additionally, she worked to increase awareness on science policy issues in the UCSF community; served as a leader for the graduate student-led National Science Policy Group; and promoted science education outreach efforts in San Francisco.

Academy projects: New Models for U.S. Science and Technology Policy; The Alternative Energy Future; and The Public Face of Science

Keerthi Shetty

Ph.D., Immunobiology, Yale University; A.B., Molecular Biology, Princeton University. Keerthi’s thesis research involved studying the recruitment of RAG1 and RAG2—two important proteins of the immune system that help create antibodies—to chromatinized DNA during V(D)J recombination. At Yale, she was the co-president of the Yale Science Diplomats, a science policy group. Leading this organization, Keerthi helped develop a science lecture series for local high schools and the general public; organized policy writing workshops and seminars; and contacted legislators about funding issues concerning biomedical research. She was also named an eIntern for the State Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service program, where she assisted with global science and technology projects.

Academy projects: New Models for U.S. Science and Technology Policy; The Alternative Energy Future; Human Performance Enhancement; and The Public Face of Science

Zackory Burns

D.Phil., Zoology, Somerville College, University of Oxford; A.B., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Certificate in Environmental Studies, Princeton University. At Oxford, he trained as an organismic biologist, investigating the sociality of wild tool-using New Caledonian crows through a novel animal-borne technology. While studying at Oxford, he was also a fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the University of St. Andrews. Prior to attending Oxford, he facilitated clinical drug trials associated with Pennsylvania Hospital. He is published in two fields of science: clinical health care and ethology, and is keen to engage in cross-disciplinary discourse.

Academy projects: The Alternative Energy Future; New Models for U.S. Science and Technology Policy; Public Trust in Science and Medicine

Dorothy Koveal

Ph.D., Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry (MCB), Brown University; B.S., Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University. As a graduate student she investigated the atomic resolution structures of protein kinases, phosphatases, and scaffolds and was dedicated to university outreach, volunteering for recruiting efforts and serving on the MCB graduate program admissions committee.

Academy projects: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE II): The Role of Academia, Industry, and Government in the 21st Century; New Models for Science and Technology Policy; Public Trust in Vaccines

Dorothy Koveal (also 2014-2015)

Ph.D., Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry (MCB), Brown University; B.S., Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University. As a graduate student she investigated the atomic resolution structures of protein kinases, phosphatases, and scaffolds and was dedicated to university outreach, volunteering for recruiting efforts and serving on the MCB graduate program admissions committee.

Academy projects: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE II): The Role of Academia, Industry, and Government in the 21st Century; New Models for Science and Technology Policy; Public Trust in Vaccines

Nathan Yozwiak

Ph.D., Infectious Disease and Immunity, University of California, Berkeley; B.S., Molecular and Cellular Biology, Johns Hopkins University. His graduate studies, under co-mentors Joseph L. DeRisi (University of California, San Francisco) and Eva Harris (University of California, Berkeley), focused on the detection and discovery of known and novel viruses in acute pediatric illness in Nicaragua using viral microarrays and deep sequencing technology. He began his Hellman Fellowship in 2011.

Academy projects: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE II): The Role of Academia, Industry, and Government in the 21st Century; Public Trust in Science: Childhood Vaccines

John C. W. Randell (also 2009-2010)

Ph.D., Virology, Harvard University; B.S. and B.A., University of Iowa. Randell trained as a biochemist and molecular biologist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on the connection between DNA replication and the cell division cycle. He was previously a visiting assistant professor at Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal. As a Hellman Fellow, Randell worked on the Alternative Energy Future project and two Academy studies on the future of the Internet. He began his Hellman Fellowship in 2009 and is now a Program Officer for Science Policy at the Academy.

Academy projects: The Alternative Energy Future; Protecting the Internet as a Public Commons

Kelly M. Stewart

Ph.D., Biochemistry, University of Toronto; B.S., Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University. During her graduate studies, Stewart conducted chemical biology research in the laboratory of Shana O. Kelley, which focused on the design and synthesis of a novel class of organelle-specific drug delivery vectors. She was awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Training Fellowship in Radiation Research while in Toronto and was appointed as the liaison for the transdisciplinary trainees in this program. Prior to that, Stewart was a Post-Baccalaureate Cancer Research Training Fellow at the National Cancer Institute.

Academy projects: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE II): The Role of Academia, Industry, and Government in the 21st Century

Kimberly J. Durniak (also 2008-2009)

Ph.D., Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University; B.A. and B.S., University of Pittsburgh. As a member of the laboratory of Thomas A. Steitz at Yale, Durniak studied the process by which RNA is synthesized during gene expression. She was also a McDougal Fellow in the Yale Graduate Career Services Office and worked as a liaison to the New York Academy of Sciences to provide career workshops for fellow graduate students. She began her Hellman fellowship in 2008.

Academy projects: Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum; Reconsidering the Rules of Space; Scientists’ Understanding of the Public; The Global Nuclear Future; Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE II): The Role of Academia, Industry, and Government in the 21st Century

John C. W. Randell (also 2010-2011)

Ph.D., Virology, Harvard University; B.S. and B.A., University of Iowa. Randell trained as a biochemist and molecular biologist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on the connection between DNA replication and the cell division cycle. He was previously a visiting assistant professor at Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal.

Academy projects: The Alternative Energy Future; Protecting the Internet as a Public Commons

Kimberly J. Durniak (also 2009-2010)

Ph.D., Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University; B.A. and B.S., University of Pittsburgh. As a member of the laboratory of Thomas A. Steitz at Yale, Durniak studied the process by which RNA is synthesized during gene expression. She was also a McDougal Fellow in the Yale Graduate Career Services Office and worked as a liaison to the New York Academy of Sciences to provide career workshops for fellow graduate students.

Academy projects: Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum; Reconsidering the Rules of Space; Scientists’ Understanding of the Public; The Global Nuclear Future

Dorit Zuk

Ph.D., Molecular Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science; B.Sc., Tel-Aviv University

Academy projects: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering (ARISE I); The Global Nuclear Future; Scientists’ Understanding of the Public

Minou Arjomand, Literature; Current Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin; Project Title: “Judging in the Company of Others: The Courtroom and the Stage after WWII”

Kathleen Bachynski, Social Policy; Current Affiliation: Columbia University; Project Title: “‘No Game for Boys to Play’: Debating the Safety of Youth Football, 1945–2015”

Daniel Couch, Literature; Current Affiliation: McNeil Center for Early American Studies; Project Title:“The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early Republic”

Houman Harouni, Social Policy; Current Affiliation: Harvard University; Project Title: “Reckoning Society: The Problem of Purpose in School Mathematics”

Daniel Morales, History; Current Affiliation: Columbia University; Project Title: “The Making of Mexican America: Industrialization, Revolution, and the Rise of Mass Migration 1900–1940”

Jessica Wilkerson, History; Current Affiliation: Arch Dalrymple Department of History, University of Mississippi; Project Title: “Where Movements Meet: From the War on Poverty to Grassroots Feminism in the Appalachian South”

Kristiana Willsey, Literature; Current Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles; Project Title:“Narrative Battlegrounds: A Politics of Veterans’ Storytelling”

Les Beldo, Anthropology (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago; Current affiliation: Part-Time Lecturer, University of Chicago; Project title: “Makah Whaling: An Ethnography of Conflict.”

Merve Gul Emre, Literature (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: English, Yale University; Current affiliation: PhD Candidate, Yale University; Project title: “Paraliterary Institutions.”

Rachel M Guberman, History (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: History, University of Pennsylvania; Current affiliation: PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania; Project title: “The Real Silent Majority: Denver and the Realignment of American Politics after the Sixties.”

Katherine Marie Marino, History (Junior Faculty); Doctoral degree: American History, Stanford University; Current affiliation: Assistant Professor, Departments of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality, Ohio State University; Project title: “La Vanguardia Feminista: Pan-American Feminism and the Rise of International Women’s Rights, 1915-1946.”

Emily Alyssa Owens, History (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: African American Studies, Harvard University; Current affiliation: PhD Candidate, Teaching Fellow, African and African American Studies, Harvard University; Project title: “Fantasies of Consent: Black Women's Sexual Labor in 19th Century New Orleans.”

Joy Marie Lisi Rankin, History of Science (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: History, Yale University; Current affiliation: PhD Candidate, Yale University; Project title: “Becoming Digital: How 1960s Users Created the Computing Age.”

Lukas Rieppel, History of Science (Junior Faculty); Doctoral degree: History of Science, Harvard University; Current affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Brown University; Project title: “Assembling the Dinosaur: Science, Museums, and American Capitalism, 1870-1930.”

Rachel Ann Wise, Literature (Post-Doc); Doctoral degree: American Literature, University of Texas, Austin; Current affiliation: Presidential Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas, Austin; Project title: “Losing Appalachia: Literature, Material Culture, and the Fate of Regional Writing.”

Alex Acs – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Princeton University; M.P.A., Columbia University; B.A., Georgetown University. Implementing Health and Safety Regulation in a Polarized Political Environment. An examination of the implementation of health, safety and environmental regulation over the past thirty years, investigating how the implementation of the regulatory regime developed in the mid-1960s fared in recent decades, particularly given the subsequent mobilization of the business lobby and the increasingly polarized political environment.

Michael Brownstein – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Philosophy, CUNY/John Jay College. Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University; B.A., Columbia University. On the Virtues and Vices of Spontaneity. This book integrates empirical research in social and cognitive psychology with philosophical questions about the mind, action, and ethics in order to consider the positive and negative roles spontaneity plays in our lives. Particular attention is given to research on skill, expertise, and “flow,” on the one hand, and impulsivity, heuristics, and implicit biases, on the other.

Brent Cebul – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Virginia; M.A., University of Virginia; B.A., Hamilton College. Developmental State: The Politics of Business, Poverty, and Economic Empowerment from the New Deal to the New Democrats. Developmental State is a comparative history of the determinative role local businesspeople played in pioneering, shaping, and administering federal economic development and antipoverty programs since the New Deal. By illuminating Sunbelt and Rustbelt businesspeoples’ kindred creation of public-private, local-national partnerships, the manuscript critically revises the dominant narratives of twentieth century U.S. political economy: the fall of liberal Keynesianism and the rise of market conservatism or neoliberalism. Mapping the proliferation of public private growth partnerships reveals instead the persistence of localism, the significance of shifting models of fiscal federalism, and the profound impact of racial and regional competition in determining the winners and losers of public development and antipoverty policies. By illuminating local private sector capture of federal development and antipoverty programs, the book offers a higher degree of empirical and historical specificity than the current literature in revealing when, for whom, and under what conditions truly “free market” policies have been pursued.

Maggie Gram – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; M.A., Harvard University; B.A., Columbia University. Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era. “Matters of State” is the first broad literary history of the American civil rights revolution. Its central claim is that midcentury American writers engaged with that revolution by turning their attention to matters of juridical citizenship: how the state ought to relate to its subjects and what binds together those subjects as members of a political community. Beyond this project, I have interests in media studies and in human-centered design.

Emily Remus – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Chicago. M.A., University of Chicago; B.A., Swarthmore College. Consumers' Metropolis: How Monied Women Purchased Pleasure and Power in the New Downtown examines the incorporation of monied women into commercial public life. The site is Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century—when the city, rising like a phoenix after the great fire, became a center of debate over capitalist urbanism. The project explores the new practices of public consumption that ladies pursued on the streets of the city's expanding retail district and in the restaurants, hotels, department stores, and theaters built by entrepreneurs who invited their patronage. It also brings to light the conflict evoked by ladies’ public presence, as reformers, city officials, and men of business responded to ladies’ conspicuous new habits of consuming in an urban public sphere that had once been the preserve of men. At stake, the project demonstrates, were competing visions of urban commerce, the place of women, and the cultural legitimacy of new forms of consumption. In probing these conflicts, Consumers’ Metropolisilluminates how gender shaped the creation of a moral ethos and built environment that sustained the rise of American consumer capitalism.

Robin Scheffler – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Yale University. M.Phil., Cambridge University; B.A., University of Chicago. Cancer Viruses and the Construction of Biomedicine in the United States. The path of cancer viruses through the twentieth century connects public health and vaccination to molecular biology and biotechnology. Cancer viruses are thus useful objects to follow in order to understand many questions associated with the evolution of biomedicine and American society. Why do particular diseases become public problems while others do not? Who has authority to direct disease research? What relationships have been drawn between biological research and therapies for human disease? How has biomedical research helped shape our understanding of the relative roles of philanthropy, government, and private enterprise in advancing human welfare?

Claire Seiler – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Dickinson College. Ph.D., Stanford University; M.Phil., Trinity College Dublin; B.A., Middlebury College. Midcentury Suspension. The project fuses formal analyses of a range of texts, original research in mid-twentieth-century print and public culture, and the “keywords” tradition of Raymond Williams to create a new account of imaginative literature of the decade after World War II. While literary scholars still tend to describe the middle of the twentieth century as notable primarily for witnessing the dusk of modernism or the dawn of postmodernism, many postwar writers understood their moment as bearing what Wallace Stevens called “the weight of primary noon” (1947). “Midcentury Suspension” credits such literary gestures to the experience of the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly threatened by a nuclear future. The project offers new readings of works by W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Claire is an assistant professor of English at Dickinson College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity, and Twentieth-Century Literature; edited collections on Auden, Shirley Hazzard, and rights and citizenship; and elsewhere.

Sunny Yang – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Louisiana State University. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. B.A., Swarthmore College. Fictions of Territoriality: Legal & Literary Narratives of US Contestation Zones. From 1803 to 1914, the U.S. secured all of the land now associated with the contiguous 48 states, held overseas possessions in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Asia-Pacific, as well as imposed its jurisdiction over sovereign nations such as China and Japan. This unprecedented extension of American authority, particularly over spaces primarily inhabited by peoples deemed to be non-white, raised key questions about the legal status of territories, as well as the relationship between race, rights, and U.S. citizenship. My project investigates these debates through the legal and cultural clashes that emerged when U.S. sovereignty was imposed over territories with at least one other preexisting legal and/or cultural system. I focus on five such “contestation zones”—Louisiana Territory, extraterritorial port cities in China, the Mexican Cession, Indian Territory, and the Panama Canal Zone—where U.S. understandings of race, rights, and just governance collided with at least one other competing system. Drawing on legal and cultural texts ranging from Supreme Court opinions to Boy Scout adventure novels, this project uncovers the narratives (what I term “fictions of territoriality”) deployed to rationalize, as well as resist, U.S. governance during this period.

Kornel Chang – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University, Newark. Ph.D. University of Chicago; B.A., State University of New York, Stony Brook. Occupying Knowledge: The Role of Experts in the U.S. Occupation of Korea. This study re-examines the occupation of Korea as a laboratory for U.S. postwar nation-building strategies, where expert officials experimented and honed methods for managing the aspirations of a former colonized people while arresting the spread of communism in Asia. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, Newark.

Jillian Hess – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Lecturer, Stanford University. Ph.D., Stanford University; B.A., Bryn Mawr College. Commonplace-Book Stylistics: Literary Technologies, 1790-1910. While Romantic writers liberally revised the words (and often the meaning) of texts they transcribed into their commonplace books, Victorians endorsed a growing celebrity culture as they preserved cartoons and photographs of their favorite writers alongside quotations. My project demonstrates how new systems for arranging gathered information in commonplace books facilitated stylistic trends. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Bronx Community College.

Heather Houser – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas, Austin. Ph.D., Stanford University; B.A., Reed College. Is Seeing Knowing?: How Environmental Media Describe. My study addresses how recent artists adapt representational techniques from the empirical sciences in order to manage proliferating information about environmental threats. My cross-media project enriches understanding of environmental aesthetics and establishes that cultural form—in particular, description—is essential to how creative works produce knowledge. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas, Austin.

Ju Yon Kim – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor, Harvard University. PhD., Stanford University; B.A. Yale University. Suspect Audiences and the Spaces of Asian American Theater. This project investigates how theater, as both a mode of social interaction and a distinct cultural form, has rechanneled persistent suspicions of Asian duplicity in the United States into a critique of those assessing Asian American performances. I trace how the pressures of suspicion compel formal innovations in Asian American theater that redefine what it means to be “suspect.” Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.

Gretchen Purser – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor, Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., Smith College. Labor On Demand: Dispatching the Urban Poor. Drawing upon extensive interviews, corporate analysis and nearly three years of participant observation working as a day laborer amidst a predominantly homeless, formerly-incarcerated, African-American workforce in the inner-cities of Oakland and Baltimore, this project analyzes the role of the day labor business in the degradation of work, the restructuring of labor markets, and the reproduction of urban poverty. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Sociology, Maxwell School, Syracuse University.

Crystal Sanders – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University. Ph.D., Northwestern University; B.A., Duke University. Preschool Politics: Black Women and a Radical Head Start. Between 1965 and 1968, working-class black Mississippians fashioned Head Start employment into an opportunity to seek bottom-up change in their state. Their challenge antagonized a white power structure at all levels and provoked opposition that diminished the transformative possibilities of Head Start and other War on Poverty programs. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University.

Colin Williamson – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara. Obscured Histories of Modern Magic and Wonder in the Cinema. I explore a history and theory of secular or modern stage magic as a form of popular visual education and consider how marginalized representations of magic with chronophotography, neuroimaging technologies, time-lapse photography, animation, and digital images shed new light on issues concerning knowledge, enchantment, and imponderability in digital media and modern scientific discovery.

Francesca Ammon – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Yale University; M.E.D., Yale University; B.S.E., Princeton University. Culture of Clearance: Waging War on the Landscape in Postwar America. A study of bulldozers, building demolition, and land clearance, examining how the war-inflected ideology, technology, policy, and practice of large-scale destruction dramatically transformed the landscape of post-World War II America. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania.

Melinda Baldwin – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Princeton University; M.Phil., Cambridge University; B.S., Davidson College. Making “Nature,” Making Science: The Scientific Community in Print, 1869-1995. An examination of the development of the scientific journal Nature from its foundation in 1869 through the retirement of influential editor John Maddox in 1995, focusing on Nature’s place in the history of the specialist scientific journal and its role in reflecting and shaping ideas about the scientific community. Current Affiliation: Lecturer in History of Science, Harvard University.

Hillary Chute – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, University of Chicago. Ph.D., Rutgers University; B.A., Oberlin College. “Disaster is My Muse”: Visual Witnessing, Comics, and Documentary Form. An examination of how the comics medium, with its ability to defamiliarize received images of history and yet render them broadly accessible, functions as a documentary form, paying particular attention to genre-establishing figures such as Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Keiji Nakazawa and to historical antecedents. Current Affiliation: Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, University of Chicago.

Matthew Karp – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., Amherst College. The Foreign Policy of Slavery, 1833-1865. An exploration of how Southern slaveholders shaped U.S. foreign relations in the Civil War era, challenging the familiar portrait of Southern elites as states’ rights conservatives, and illuminating the ways that slaveholders confidently enlisted the power of the federal government to achieve their own version of nineteenth-century modernity-through territorial expansion, bold military reforms, and diplomatic ties with fellow bound-labor regimes throughout the hemisphere. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University.

Christopher P. Loss – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University; Ph.D., University of Virginia; M.A., University of Virginia; B.A., Pennsylvania State University. Front and Center: Academic Expertise and its Challengers in the Post-1945 United States. An examination of the emergence and impact of interdisciplinary research centers on American universities, politics, and society since World War II. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Higher Education, Vanderbilt University.

Nikki Skillman – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Brown University. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain. A study exploring how poetic representations of inner life reflect and resist the increasingly physiological conception of the mind promoted by philosophy, psychology, and brain science since the mid-twentieth century, with special attention to poets’ acknowledgment of the embodied mind in the material constructions of lyric form. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Indiana University.

Peter Wirzbicki – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., New York University; B.A., Swarthmore College. Black Intellectuals, White Abolitionists, and Revolutionary Transcendentalists. A history of abolitionist thought that unites the stories and ideas of fugitive slaves and canonical Transcendentalist writers, asserting the importance of black intellectuals to the history of New England ideas and the American anti-slavery movement. Current Affiliation: Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences, Harper Societ y of Fellows, University of Chicago.

Benjamin Coates – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; M.A., Columbia University; B.A., Stanford University. Judging Empire: The United States and International Law in the Early 20th Century. A study of the confluence of law and empire in American foreign relations between 1898 and 1919, exploring international law as an academic discipline, a political ideology, and a diplomatic project, and revealing the roots of America’s contradictory utopian and unilateralist impulses. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Wake Forest College.

Benjamin Fagan – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Virginia; M.A., University of Virginia; B.A., University of Iowa. The Black Newspaper and the American Nation. An inquiry into how early black American newspapers grappled with questions crucial to national definition-including class character, providential design, and international alliances-and reimagined the very notion of an American nation. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies, Univeristy of Arkansas.

Daniel Geary – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Lecturer in United States History, Trinity College Dublin. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., University of Virginia. Tangled Ideologies: The Moynihan Report Controversy. A history of the Moynihan Report controversy, demonstrating that the controversy revolved not only around competing notions of race, but also around emerging ideas about feminism and changing attitudes about the Cold War, the federal government, and middle-class values. Current Affiliation: Mark Pigott Lecturer in U.S. History, Trinity College Dublin.

Chin Jou – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Princeton University; M.A., Princeton University; B.A., Cornell University. Fat and Poor: A History of Obesity, Poverty, and Government Food Programs. A study of the class dimensions of obesity, and the complicated history of the government’s role in the obesity epidemic, including three case studies that indicate the unintended consequences of federal food policy. Current Affiliation: Lecturer in History of Science, Harvard University.

Melissa Milewski – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., New York University; M.A., Brigham Young University; B.A., Stanford University. From Slave to Litigant: African Americans in Court in the Post-War South. An examination of civil cases involving African Americans in state courts from the end of the Civil War through the worst decades of the Jim Crow years, focusing African Americans’ ability to access civil courts providing a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of the American legal system. Current Affiliation: ACLS New Faculty Fellow in History, Columbia University.

Matthew Rubery – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Queen Mary, University of London. Ph.D., Harvard University; M.A., University of Colorado, Boulder; B.A., University of Texas at Austin. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. A history of recorded literature since Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, tracing the tradition of recorded literature from Edison’s conception of phonographic books played on wax cylinders, to talking books for blinded veterans of the First World War, to the advent of commercial audiobooks. Current Affiliation: Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Queen Mary, University of London.

Lisa Siraganian – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Southern Methodist University. Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University; B.A., Oxford University; B.A., Williams College. Technicolor Textuality: Corporate Aesthetics, Literature, and Experiential Color. An examination of the influence of American corporations in both high and mass media art debates during the middle of the twentieth century, exploring the depth and scope of corporate-aesthetic interpenetration in different art forms. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, Southern Methodist University.

Thomas Crocker – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law. Ph.D., Vanderbilt University; J.D., Yale Law School; M.A., University of Wales; B.A., Mississippi State University. By Any Means Necessary? Securing Constitutional Commitments in a State of Emergency. An exploration of the relations between ethical values and constitutional commitments in light of contemporary national security policy examining how necessity arguments challenge established normative orders and how everyday ethical life interacts with constitutional principles. Current Affiliation: Distinguished Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law.

T. Austin Graham – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles; B.A., University of Virginia. The Great American Songbooks: Modernism, Musical Texts, and the Value of Popular Culture. A musicological overview of authorial practice at the turn of the century investigating the sensory dimensions of reading and the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.

Coleman Hutchison – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin. Ph.D., Northwestern University; B.S., Vanderbilt University. Apples of Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. The first literary history of the Confederate States of America, situating Confederate literature in a broader history of nineteenth-century culture and ideas, and telling the story of a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin.

Amy Lippert – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of American History and the College, University of Chicago. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., University of California, Berkeley. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. A project that traces the growth of the commodified image industry in San Francisco during the nineteenth century, incorporating mass-reproduced visual representations of people into a broader history and explaining the cultural roots of modern celebrity. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of American History and the College, University of Chicago.

Jason T. Sharples – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, The Catholic University of America. Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., The College of William & Mary. Mastering Fear: Imagination, Rebellion, and Race in Early America and the Atlantic World, 1640-1800. An examination of fears of insurrection and purported slave conspiracies, exploring the interplay between exaggerated concerns about subversives within slavery, perceived threats external to the institution, and the development of racial thinking. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, The Catholic University of America.

Tracy Steffes – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Education and History, Brown University. Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., Western Michigan University. School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern American, 1890-1940. A study of the expansion and transformation of public education from 1890 to 1940 as a major American response to industrialization and the problem of social welfare, exploring how and why Americans invested so heavily in schooling and how these reforms subtly transformed schooling into a more powerful project of social governance. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Education and History, Brown University.

Heather Treseler – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Worcester State University. Ph.D., University of Notre Dame; B. A., Brown University. Lyric Letters: the American Epistolary Poem, 1945-1985. A study of American poets’ assimilation of epistolary conventions as a coded means of witnessing to war and the ways of empire; as an extension of psychoanalytic narration; and as a vehicle for queer or threatened intimacies in the Cold War. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Worcester State University.

Associate Scholar

Jason Petrulis – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Visiting Assistant Professor, Oberlin College. Ph.D., Columbia University; A.B., Harvard University. Marketing the American Way, 1932-1950. An examination of how the U.S. government policy intersected with corporate marketing to mobilize Americans for World War II and the early Cold War through “idea advertising,” a process that used marketing techniques to sell ideas about companies, people, and even nations. Current Affiliation: Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Oberlin College.

Daniel Amsterdam – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., Yale University. The Roaring Metropolis: Business, Civic Welfare, and State Expansion in 1920s America. A study recasting the 1920s as a moment of aggressive governmental expansion that hinges primarily on the interrogation of urban politics, corporate political activism and the introduction of a new analytic framework, the civic welfare state. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor, School of History, Technology, and Society, Georgia Tech University.

Deborah Becher – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., University of Virginia. Valuing Property: Eminent Domain for Private Redevelopment, Philadelphia 1992-2007. A study of Philadelphia’s recent use of eminent domain, revealing how difficult decisions about economic management are made, challenging existing notions of what citizens expect from government, and exploring the tensions between the public and private dimensions of property. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Sociology, Barnard College.

Angus Burgin – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; A.B., Harvard University. The Return of Laissez-Faire. A transatlantic history of free-market ideas and the institutions that supported them, focusing on the economists in the decades following the onset of the Great Depression who helped to create a theoretical framework for the revival of conservatism in American politics. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University.

Dawn Coleman – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, University of Tennessee. Ph.D., Stanford University; M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School; B.A., University of California, Los Angeles. Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel. A project on the intersection of Protestant preaching and literary culture in the nineteenth century, considering a range of antebellum authors who sought to capture for novels the spiritual authority of the pulpit. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee.

Jason Petrulis – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; A.B., Harvard University. Marketing the American Way, 1932-1950. An examination of how the U.S. government policy intersected with corporate marketing to mobilize Americans for World War II and the early Cold War through “idea advertising,” a process that used marketing techniques to sell ideas about companies, people, and even nations. Current Affiliation: Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Oberlin College.

Jamie Pietruska – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; A.B., Brown University. Propheteering: A Cultural History of Prediction in the Gilded Age. An analysis of changing practices and perceptions of prediction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, including weather prediction, agricultural forecasting, fortune-telling and spiritualism, and utopian literature. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Associate Scholars

Crystal Feimster – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sexual Warfare: Rape and the American Civil War. A study describing how sexual violence during the Civil War and the decades that followed went beyond the immediate effects of the physical attack and had long-lasting political and social consequences. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University.

Andrew Jewett – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies, Harvard University. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., University of California, Berkeley. Against the Technostructure: Critics of Scientism since the New Deal. An exploration of the political meanings attributed to science by mid-twentieth-century critics of American liberalism. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University.

Daniel Foster – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Theater Studies, Duke University. Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., St. Johns College. The Transatlantic Minstrel Show: British Romanticism and American Blackface. A history of blackface minstrels as a movement bringing together scholarship and art, parody and emulation, social misfits and social reformers, black and white, England and America. Current Affiliation: Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of East Anglia.

Louis Hyman – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Columbia University. Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America. An analysis of the political and economic institutions, consumer behaviors, and legal framework that converged, by the 1970s and 1980s, to bring about a major personal debt crisis with deep implications for American society. Current Affiliation: Associate Consultant, McKinsey & Associates.

Rocío Magaña – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., California State University, Fresno. Bodies on the Line: Life, Death, and Authority on the Arizona-Mexican Border. An examination of the complex social, economic, moral, and political space that constitutes the U.S.-Mexico border and the tension among securing the border, procuring the safety of those who try to cross it illegally, and managing the bodies of those who die in the attempt. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

Erez Manela – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, Harvard University. Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The Eradication of Smallpox: An International History. A study of the World Health Organization’s Global Smallpox Eradication Program that provides insight into the history of the Cold War, postcolonial international relations, the role of transnational organizations in globalization, and the development of modern medicine and international public health. (SPRING 2009). Current Affiliation: Professor of American History, Harvard University.

Michael Pasquier – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Florida State University; B.A., Louisiana State University. Catholic Creole Frontier: Religion and Colonialism in the Lower Mississippi Valley. An analysis of religion in the frontier society of the Lower Mississippi Valley, illustrating the impotence of state-sponsored Roman Catholic officials in controlling the religious beliefs and practices of European missionaries and settlers, displaced Native Americans, and free and enslaved persons of African descent. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Louisiana State University.

David Singer – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., University of Michigan.International Finance within Families: Migrant Remittances in the Global Economy. An examination of migrant remittances that will contribute to our understanding of the financial implications of immigration, the influence of global capital flows on government policymaking, and the dilemmas facing U.S. policymakers as they consider immigration policy, foreign aid, and financial deregulation. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Victoria Solan – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Oberlin College.Healthy Design: Modernist Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1920s. An examination of health and the American house within the context of twentieth-century California architecture, focusing on the persistence of seemingly anti-modern, folkloric or homeopathic elements among proponents of some of the most technologically advanced and aesthetically forward-looking design in America. Current Affiliation: Lecturer in Art History, Tufts University.

Thomas Stapleford – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame. Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., University of Delaware. Home and Market: Women, Economics, and the Study of Consumption, 1910-1960. An exploration of the discipline of home economics in universities and government agencies, focusing on the work of female social scientists and their influence on the understanding of modern consumption. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame.

David Ekbladh – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; B.A., American University. The Great American Mission: Development and the Creation of an American World Order. An exploration of how modernization evolved, in theory and practice, as a tool in U.S. foreign relations throughout the twentieth century and continues to resonate in strategies at work today. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Tufts University.

Lisa Fluet – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of 20th Century British and Anglophone Literature, Boston College. Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., College of the Holy Cross.Modernism, Human Rights, and the Novel, 1921-1961. An examination of the historical relations between the modern novel and human rights discourse from the founding of international PEN (1921) to the origins of Amnesty International (1961). Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross.

John Kaag – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Oregon. M.Phil., University of Cambridge (U.K.); B.A./M.A., Pennsylvania State University. Thinking Through the Imagination: The Aesthetic Basis of Human Cognition. An investigation of the central role of aesthetic imagination in the workings of the empirical sciences, employing the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James as a theoretical frame. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Paul K. MacDonald – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; B.A., University of California, Berkeley. Networks of Domination: Social Ties and Imperial Rule in International Politics. A study of how pre-colonial social ties between European political agents and indigenous elites helped facilitate the imposition of imperial rule in India, South Africa, and Nigeria during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College.

Joy Rohde – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., University of Chicago. The Social Scientists’ War: Expertise in a Cold War Nation. A study of how social scientific knowledge about nation-building and revolution extended the power of intellectuals and the Pentagon over American politics and international affairs during the Cold War. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Trinity University.

Galit Sarfaty – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: J.D., Yale Law School; M.A., University of Chicago; A.B., Harvard University. Ethics and Accountability in International Law: An Ethnography of Human Rights at the World Bank. An analysis of the organizational culture of the World Bank with a focus on the bureaucratic obstacles-including the Bank’s incentive system and the power dynamics between professional subcultures-to internalizing human rights. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia.

David Sehat – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; M.A., Rice University; B.A., Dallas Baptist University. The American Moral Establishment: Religion in American Public Life. An argument that the United States had a state-supported or established religion until the 1960s-a period in which law supported a religiously derived morality that functioned as an ersatz or proxy religious establishment. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Georgia State University.

Victoria Cain – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; A.B., Harvard University. Selling Nature: America’s Natural History Museums, 1869-1942. An analysis of how the rise of consumer capitalism and new forms of exhibits deepened the schism between research scientists and those engaged in the popular study of nature and redefined the American approach to the natural world. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Museum Studies, New York University.

M. Taylor Fravel – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D., Stanford University; B.A., Middlebury College. The Long March to Peace-China’s Settlement of Territorial Disputes. An exploration of why and how China has settled its territorial disputes since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, demonstrating that leaders are more likely to compromise when confronted by internal threats to regime security, including rebellions and legitimacy crises, and suggesting that domestic conflicts often create incentives for cooperation. Current Affiliation: Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ajay Mehrotra – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Associate Professor of Law and of History, Indiana University, Bloomington. Ph.D., University of Chicago; J.D., Georgetown University; B.A., University of Michigan. Sharing the Burden: Law, Politics, and the Making of the American Fiscal State: 1880-1930. An investigation of the roots and consequences of a dramatic transformation in American public finance from a system of regressive indirect national taxes to a progressive income tax regime that was guided not only by the need for greater revenue but also by concerns for equity and social justice. Current Affiliation: Professor of Law and History, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History, Co-Director, Center for Law, Society & Culture Indiana University, Bloomington.

Anthony Mora – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University. Ph.D., University of Notre Dame; B.A., University of New Mexico. Race Rivals: African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Ideologies of Racial Difference, 1890-1940. An attempt to shift historical studies of race away from the “white” and “other” dichotomy by examining the relationship between these two groups in Chicago, where they lived in close proximity to each other and how they created their own understanding of race in America. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of American Culture and History, University of Michigan.

Bethany Moreton – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Williams College.Wal-Mart World: The Globalization of the Sunbelt Service Economy. An examination of how Wal-Mart and its philanthropic foundations harnessed evangelical Christianity to foster trust in corporate actors and the free market. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies, University of Georgia.

Laura Thiemann Scales – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Yale University. Speaking in Tongues: Mediumship and the American Narrative Voice. A study of the pervasive influence of prophets, spiritual mediums, and psychics in the works of Stowe, Hawthorne, James, Faulkner and other novelists from the Second Great Awakening to the modernist movement. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Stonehill College.

Anne Stiles – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles. A.B., Harvard University. Neurological Fictions: Brain Science, and Literary History, 1865-1905. A consideration of the complex relationship between neurology and literature at the fin de siecle when such scientifically trained novelists as Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Silas Weir Mitchell, and H.G. Wells intervened in controversies spawned by late Victorian neurology and actively shaped public opinion about neurological innovations. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, Saint Louis University.

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Indiana University; B.A., University of Arizona. The Advance of American Archaeology and Resurgence of Native America. A study of the shifting moral landscape of professional archaeology, focusing on the discipline’s complex social and intellectual relationship with native America. Current Affiliation: Curator of Anthropology and NAGPRA Officer, Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Jenny Davidson – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University. Ph.D., Yale University; A.B., Harvard University. Breeding: Nature and Nurture Before Biology. An investigation of modern British debates about human nature before the coinage of modern scientific terms like biology and genetics that traces eighteenth-century writers’ use of the term “breeding” to negotiate questions about education and inheritance in relation to the physical workings of people, plants and animals. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.

Elizabeth Lyman – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University. Ph.D., University of Virginia; A.B., Stanford University.Performing Visual Information: Stage Directions Past, Present, and Future. An interdisciplinary exploration of how elements of visual information combine to communicate complex performance ideas that are fundamentally non-verbal in nature. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance, Southern Illinois University.

Jennifer Marshall – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles.; B.A., University of Arizona, Tucson. The Stuff of Modern Life: Formalism and Pragmatism in Interwar American Aesthetics. An examination of the crucial role that ordinary things played in the formation of American modernism during the interwar decades, focused on the Machine Art Exhibit held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota.

Jason Puskar – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; M.Phil., University of Oxford; B.A. and B.S.J., Ohio University. Underwriting the Accident: Narratives of American Chance, 1871-1936. An analysis of the ways that changes in thinking about chance and accident influenced American literature and culture from Reconstruction to the New Deal, particularly the new opportunities that American ideas about social and economic uncertainty created for narrative and the novel. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, University of Miami. Ph.D., Brandeis University; B.A., University of Rochester. Neither Rock nor Refuge: A History of Nietzsche in America. An account of the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas and image on 20th-century American society, including the American appropriation of Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” (Superman), his claims for the death of God, and his critique of Christianity and democracy. Current Affiliation: Merle Curti Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sarah Song – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D., Yale University; M.Phil., Oxford University; A.B., Harvard University. The Pursuit of Equality: Justice, Gender, and Multicultural Politics. An examination of the theory and practice of group rights, including special accommodations for religious and cultural minorities, with a focus on the tension between group rights and gender equality. Current Affiliation: Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Sharon Weiner – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of International Politics and Foreign Policy, School of International Service, American University. Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; M.A., University of Lancaster; B.A., Truman State University. Our Own Worst Enemy? U.S. Bureaucracies, Nonproliferation Policy, and the Former Soviet Union. A critique of the United States’ recent funding of efforts to reduce the risk that scientists from the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction complex will sell their knowledge to proliferant states or sub-national groups. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of U.S. Foreign Policy, School of International Service, American University.

Christopher Capozzola – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ph.D., Columbia University; A.B., Harvard University. Uncle Sam Wants You: Citizenship and Obligation in World War I America. A study of military conscription; voluntary associations and their dual roles in war mobilization and home front repression; and the rise of legal understandings of civil liberties and citizenship rights, demonstrating how political obligation was tied to coercive practices of citizenship in early 20th-century American political life. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cheryl Finley – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of the History of Art, Cornell University. Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Wellesley College. Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination. An examination of the history, meaning, and use of the leading visual image associated with slavery, the engraving: Description of A Slave Ship, from its emergence in 1780 as a propaganda tool of the abolitionist movement to the present day, when it remains an icon of remembrance and identity in 20th-century black Atlantic literary, political, and artistic spheres. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Cornell University.

Hsuan L. Hsu – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California; Berkeley; A.B., Harvard University. Scales of Identification: Geography, Affect, and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. An analysis of two sets of writings-texts that deal with the colonization of Africa by freed American slaves and Japanese and American writings on the opening of Japan to Western commerce-which exemplify how 19th-century literature reflected changes in the geographical scale by which events are influenced and interpreted. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, University of California, Davis.

Christopher Klemek – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., Ohio State University. Urbanism and Transition: Modernist Planning and the Crisis of Urban Liberalism in Europe and North America, 1945-1975. A survey of the development of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies, focusing on institutions such as the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, public policies including the Federal Model Cities Program, and individuals such as neighborhood activist and author, Jane Jacobs. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History, George Washington University.

Robert MacDougall – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Queens University. The People’s Phone: Rewriting the History of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. A history of the telephone and telephone networks in the United States and Canada from the 1880s to the 1920s, demonstrating how the political struggles of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era were inextricably intertwined with technological changes. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History, Associate Director of the Centre for American Studies, University of Western Ontario.

Asif Siddiqi – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University; M.B.A., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.S., Texas A&M University. Science and Repression in the 20th Century: Revisiting Soviet Science. A historical study of the oppositional relationship between the state and the scientific community focusing on four themes: the organization of science under repressive regimes, the possibility of non-state supported science in totalitarian states, the “success” of science under the threat of terror, and the use of science in support of terror. Current Affiliation: Professor of History, Fordham University.

Lisa Szefel – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of Rochester; M.A., University of Virginia; A.B., Mount Holyoke College. The American Poetic Community, 1890-1920. An analysis of the transformation of American poetry in the early 20th century brought about by the interaction of organizations and publications that linked poets, readers, and editors in new ways, resulting in fresh creative possibilities for poets and new expectations in readers. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History, Pacific University.

Associate Scholar

Matthew Lindsay – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: J.D., Yale Law School, Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago; B.A., University of California, Irvine. Market Competition as Equal Citizenship: The “Colorblindness” Ideal and the Meaning of Race Since the Second Reconstruction. An investigation into the ascendance of the “colorblindness” ideal in American political and constitutional discourse, focusing on the increasing equation over the past three decades of racial justice with social and economic competition among individuals. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Law, University of Baltimore.

Eileen Babbitt – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School, Tufts University. Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.A., University of California, Berkeley. Shotgun Marriage: Can Coercion Create Reconciliation?. An examination of whether coercive laws and structure are the only way to keep “enemies” together when refugees return and try to reintegrate into communities where they are not welcome, and whether this coercive strategy leads to voluntary coexistence or undermines peace-building efforts. Current Affiliation: Professor of International Conflict Management Practice, The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

Robert Chodat – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Stanford University; B.A., McGill University. The Pattern of Persons: Ideas of Agency in American Literature and Philosophy. A study of meaning and action in twentieth-century American literature and philosophy, focusing on how certain narrative texts from Gertrude Stein, Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow and others articulate competing pictures of mind, intention, and personhood. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, Boston University.

Crystal Feimster – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of African-American History, Boston College. Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A.; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching in the American South. An analysis of the varied roles played by black and white women in the history of lynching in the southern regions of the United States. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University.

Jonathan Hansen – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Boston University; B.A., Haverford College. Apostate’s Return: American Expatriates and the Dilemmas of National and Ethnic Identity. An exploration of the cultural criticism of twentieth-century American expatriates whose return home reveals the ineluctable grip of national allegiance on twentieth-century selfhood while providing a fresh perspective on American national identity. Current Affiliation: Senior Lecturer on Social Studies, Harvard University.

Matthew Lindsay – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: J.D., Yale Law School; Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago; B.A., University of California, Irvine. Market Competition as Equal Citizenship: The “Colorblindness” Ideal and the Meaning of Race Since the Second Reconstruction. An investigation into the ascendance of the “colorblindness” ideal in American political and constitutional discourse, focusing on the increasing equation over the past three decades of racial justice with social and economic competition among individuals. Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Law, University of Baltimore.

Adam Webb – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Princeton University; A.B., Harvard University. A World, Not a Globe: Towards an Alternative Vision of Intercivilizational Dialogue and Political Cosmopolitanism. An exploration of encounters among the major pre-modern civilizations, and the lessons they provide for an ethically richer view of cross-cultural collaboration and a future world order. Current Affiliation: Resident Professor of International Politics, Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Centre.

Associate Scholar

Ann Mikkelsen – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California, Irvine; A.B., Harvard University. Voices from the Field: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A project on twentieth-century poets who called attention to social, economic, and political inequities and attempted to reconcile these with their own relatively privileged, but simultaneously marginal, status as representative voices of a democratic society. Current Affiliation: Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.

Eric Bettinger – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University. Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.A., Brigham Young University.The Effectiveness of School Vouchers in Colombia. An investigation of the influence of school vouchers on the education of poor high-school students in Colombia, as a case study in a project on the feasibility of universal basic and secondary education. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of Economics and Education, Stanford University.

Joseph Entin – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Wesleyan University.Sensational Modernism: Disfigured Bodies and Aesthetic Astonishment in American Culture.A reinterpretation of American modernism that focuses on how writers, artists, photographers, journalists, social scientists, and doctors interpreted the lives and histories of immigrants, African Americans, working-class communities, and the underclass. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, Brooklyn College.

Virginia Page Fortna – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University. Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Wesleyan University. The Effectiveness of International Peacekeeping in Civil Wars. An examination of whether, how, and to what extent international personnel sent to war-torn states actually contribute to a stable peace. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.

David Greenberg – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., Columbia University; B.A., Yale University. The New Politics of Appointments: Congress, Ideology, and the Supreme Court. A study of the history of nominations to the Supreme Court and the unacknowledged role that ideology has played in the confirmation process. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History, Journalism and Media Studies, Rutgers University.

Jay Grossman – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., Yale University. F. O. Mathiessen: A Cultural Biography. An analysis of the life and work of this Harvard scholar of American literature, his influence on the practice of American literary studies, and his involvement in a range of activities and institutions central to the political and cultural history of America. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of English, Director of American Studies, Northwestern University.

Andrew Jewett – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., University of California, Berkeley. To Make America Scientific: Science and Democracy in American Public Culture, 1900-1950. A study of a group of scientists and social scientists, philosophers and writers who thought that the development of scientific knowledge would revitalize self-government in the United States. Current Affiliation: Associate Professor of History and Social Studies, Harvard University.

Ann Mikkelsen – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: Ph.D., University of California, Irvine; A.B., Harvard University. Voices from the Field: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A project on twentieth-century poets who called attention to social, economic, and political inequities and attempted to reconcile these with their own relatively privileged, but simultaneously marginal, status as representative voices of a democratic society. Current Affiliation: Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.

Associate Scholar

Andy Zelleke – Affiliation during Fellowship Year: J.D., Harvard Law School; Ph.D., Harvard University; A.B., Harvard University. Freedom and Constraint: The Design of Governance and Leadership Structures in Britain and the United States. An analysis of the influence of cultural, historical, market, and political forces on the structural leadership of prominent American and British corporations. Current Affiliation: MBA Class of 1962 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, Harvard Business School