WHC Fellows

The Whitney Humanities Center Fellows are appointed by Yale’s president at the recommendation of the WHC and its Executive Committee and include members  of Yale’s teaching community from all ranks and disciplines. In addition, each year there are Franke Visiting Fellows and postdoctoral fellows in the humanities. The fellowship gathers for weekly luncheons at the center, where presentations on work-in-progress foster conversations and intellectual collaboration across academic disciplines.

Fellows

Jennifer Allen (History)

Jennifer Allen is Associate Professor of History. She is a specialist in the history of modern Germany with a particular interest in late twentieth-century cultural practices. Her first book, Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard, 2022), charts the history of Germany’s relatively recent efforts to revitalize the concept of utopia after the wholesale collapse of Europe’s violent utopian social engineering projects by the end of the twentieth century. Germans chose to resist an increasing sense of political disenfranchisement, social alienation, and cultural impotence in the 1980s and ’90s and instead pursued new—and new kinds of—utopias by radically democratizing politics and culture in everyday life.

Her current book project, Insurance Against Total Destruction: A Postwar History of German Plans to Save the World, examines the range of possible global catastrophes that captivated East and West German imaginations during and after the Cold War. It follows the efforts of governments, research networks, and NGOs in both the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic to hedge against these disasters. Both states initiated massive projects to archive the raw materials necessary to pull Germany back from the brink of annihilation, should it be required, inadvertently offering answers to a particularly modern question: how could humanity be salvaged after global destruction?

Allen’s research has been supported by the American Academy in Berlin, the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, the German Academic Exchange Service, and other organizations. Her teaching at Yale includes courses on the history of modern Europe and modern Germany, the theories and practices of memory in modern Europe, the history of the Holocaust, and the history of European countercultural politics.

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Carla Baricz (Sterling Library)

Carla Baricz is the Librarian for Literature in English and Comparative Literature at the Yale Library. She holds an MA and PhD in English Literature from Yale University and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Among other fellowships, she has been a US Fulbright research fellow in Bucharest, Romania, a Stanley Wells CBE Fellow at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, a fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a translator in residence at the Romanian National Museum of Literature, and a Mandel Scholion Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her work has appeared in Sixteenth Century Journal, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, and Joyce Studies Annual as well as in publications like the LA Review of Books, the Marginalia Review of Books, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders Literary Magazine, National Translation Month, Asymptote Journal, and international publications like Observator Cultural and Magyar Lettre Internationale. She is also a literary translator from the Romanian, and among other projects, the assistant editor and translator of the anthology Romanian Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2011) and novelist Norman Manea’s forthcoming novel, Exiled Shadow (Yale University Press, 2023).

Her scholarly interests include early modern English literature, genre studies, translation studies, and the public humanities.

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Melissa Barton (Beinecke)

Melissa Barton is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, at Beinecke Library. She received her BA in English from Yale and her PhD, also in English, from the University of Chicago.

At the Beinecke, Melissa has curated exhibits including “Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage,” “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen,” “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and the Beinecke Library,” and, in 2022, “Brava! Women Make American Theater.” Her catalog Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album was copublished by Beinecke and Yale University Press.

Melissa writes and presents frequently about teaching with collections. Her own research focuses on histories of Black theater and performance, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, and on questions surrounding the stewardship, status, and meaning of archives. Her scholarship has appeared in TDR and African American Literature in Transition: 1940–1950, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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Monica Bell (Law/Sociology)

Monica Bell is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of expertise include criminal justice, welfare law, housing, race and the law, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Some of her recent work has been published in The Yale Law Journal, Law & Society Review, Social Service Review, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. She has also published work in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post.

Before joining the Yale Law School faculty, Bell was a Climenko Fellow & Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She previously served as a Liman Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she worked on matters related to cash assistance to families and disabled adults, child support, unemployment insurance, homeless services, healthcare, and other legal and policy issues affecting low-income women and families. Bell clerked for the Honorable Cameron McGowan Currie of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. A first-generation college graduate from South Carolina’s Upcountry, Bell holds degrees from Furman University (Truman Scholar), University College Dublin (Mitchell Scholar), Yale Law School, and Harvard University.

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Edyta Bojanowska (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Edyta Bojanowska is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures with a secondary appointment in the Department of History.  She works on nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, focusing on the questions of empire and nationalism and on interdisciplinary connections between literature and history. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard, 2007), won the Modern Languages Association’s Scaglione Prize for the best book in Slavic Studies and was translated into Ukrainian in 2013.  The book challenges the Russocentric myth of Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russophone writer.  Her most recent prizewinning book, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Belknap, 2018), uses a Russian travelogue about Africa and Asia - Ivan Goncharov’s The Frigate Pallada (1858) - as a lens onto global imperial history and Russian colonial imagination.

An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism bridges this most recent publication with Prof. Bojanowska’s current book project, Empire and the Russian Classics (under contract with Harvard UP), which explores imperial themes in the work of major nineteenth-century writers.  She has also published articles on Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Tolstoi, Babel, and on topics in Polish and Ukrainian literature.  Among her other interests are postcolonial studies, history of globalization, ideology, travel writing, journalism, intertextuality, and the spatial turn in the humanities and the social sciences.

Prof. Bojanowska was a Guggenheim Fellow (2020-21), a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2003-2006), spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Historical Studies) in Princeton on a Burghardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015), and most recently was a Foreign Visitor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, Japan.  She currently serves as Chair of the MacMillan Center’s European Studies Council.  She is member of the Editorial Board of the journal Ab Imperio and of “Russian Shorts,” a Bloomsbury Press series, and a former member of the PMLA Advisory Committee.

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Craig Buckley (History of Art)

Craig Buckley is a historian of modern architecture and its intersections with the visual arts and media.

His first book Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) provided a new understanding of montage and collage as cultural techniques central to architectural culture. Such techniques, it argued, fostered experimental approaches to industrial assembly during the 1960s by means of new media such as offset-lithographic printing, portable film cameras, slide projectors, and video recorders.

A second book project, Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Media (University of Amsterdam Press, 2019), co-edited with Yale colleagues Francesco Casetti and Rüdiger Campe, examined the contemporary proliferation of screens from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together new genealogical approaches to the environmental and infrastructural roles played by screens over the last five centuries.  

His current book project explores cinema architectures in Paris, Casablanca, Berlin, São Paulo, and New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining the pivotal role buildings played in the mass circulation of audio-visual media, the book also theorizes the conflicting functions such architecture assumed; as platforms for new kinds of sociability and milieus of technical innovation, but also as instruments used to categorize and segregate spectators on the basis of race, class, and gender.

Professor Buckley is interested in supervising dissertations from a wide variety of perspectives on topics concerning architecture in the twentieth century, including, but not limited to, modern architecture’s relationship with avant-gardes and socio-political movements, as well as its manifold relations with print culture, the visual arts, and optical media.

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Ardis Butterfield (English)

Ardis Butterfield is the Marie Borroff Professor of English with secondary appointments as professor of French and Music, and specializes in the literatures and music of France and England from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge for her BA and PhD degrees, she taught in Cambridge and UCL before coming to Yale in 2012. Her teaching and scholarship are grounded on continental and insular vernacular manuscripts and the social, material, and theoretical ways in which they record how writers and musical composers worked and thought. She has particular interests in the medieval lyric and lyric theory; word and music relationships; Chaucer and nationhood; bilingualism, translation, and medieval linguistic identities; and theories and histories of language, form, and genre.  

Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002) and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and the Nation in the Hundred Years War (2009). She has edited two collections of essays: Chaucer and the City (2006) and, with Henry Hope and Pauline Souleau, Performing Medieval Text  (2017), and published some sixty articles and essays. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Virginia, the Huntington Library, San Marino, and All Souls College, Oxford. Most recently, she spent 2018–2019 as a visiting fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and senior research fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She was elected President of the New Chaucer Society in 2016–2018 and is cofounder and coeditor (from 2017) of the monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture.

She is currently completing a new Norton edition of medieval English lyrics, and writing a book on medieval song, tentatively called Medieval Songlines: Theory of Medieval Song. The edition has provoked her to rethink approaches to medieval lyric, taking into account notions of rhythm, repetition, sound, memory, silence and writing, and the pressures of history on voice formation in multilingual song genres.

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Robin Dembroff (Philosophy)

Robin Dembroff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy. They work on feminist and LGBTQ philosophy, and focus on questions related to what gender is and how it shapes social outcomes, experience, and ways of knowing. In addition to scholarly venues, their writing has been featured in popular venues including Scientific AmericanThe Boston ReviewTIMEThe Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. Dembroff’s current book project, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Weaponizes Gender (OUP, 2023) offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of patriarchy. Against the received view that patriarchy privileges men over women, Dembroff argues that patriarchy is an institutionalized system of gendering that primarily privileges “real men”.

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Yarrow Dunham (Psychology)

Yarrow Dunham is an Associate Professor of Psychology as well as faculty in the Cognitive Science Program and an affiliate of the [Wu Tsai Institute](wti.yale.edu). His research explores how people make sense of the complex social worlds they inhabit. Particular areas of focus have been how children divide social space into human kinds, what underlies the tendency to prefer similar or “ingroup” others, how perceptions of social status shape our sense of our own position in the world, and how these phenomena play out across different cultural settings. A more recent goal is characterizing  people’s acquisition and understanding of “institutional kinds” like money, borders, and presidents, in which he draws heavily on philosophical work in social ontology. He directs the [Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale](socialcogdev.com).

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Anastasia Eccles (English)

I work on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, with particular interests in theories of reading, the novel, and the long history of formalism. My book project examines modes of reading cultivated by a group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels and tales, asking what aesthetic experiences like being held in suspense, feeling complicit, or longing for a different plot have to do with living in a political collective.

I have also written on the reception of Laurence Sterne in Russia and am working on a coauthored manuscript on suspense and the digital humanities with members of the Stanford Literary Lab. This year I am teaching courses in the history of poetry, narrative suspense, and Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

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Joanna Fiduccia (History of Art)

Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and a specialist of European and North American modern art. Her scholarship focuses on the shared ground of visual and political representation. Her current book project Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism explores the relationship between artistic crisis, nationalist rhetoric, and theories of modern belonging. Her other research and teaching interests include scale, the history of attention, ornament and abstraction, sculptural representations of the human, and experimental research practices.

Alongside her scholarship, Joanna frequently writes essays, reviews, and catalogue essays about contemporary art. She is also a member of the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the Friends of Attention, a group of artists, scholars, and activists concerned with forms of attention that resist financialization. Her curatorial projects include “Coquilles Mécaniques” (CRAC Alsace, 2012) and “The Third, Meaning” (Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 2022).

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Alexander Gil Fuentes (Spanish and Portuguese)

Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly,  co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela).  His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke Press.

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Bruce Gordon (Divinity)

Bruce Gordon is Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School with a secondary appointment in the Department of History. He is also actively involved in the Early Modern Studies Program at Yale. Educated in Canada and the UK, before coming to Yale he was Professor of Early Modern History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His research and writing focus on European religious cultures from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment with a particular focus on the Reformation. His books and articles deal with the formation of religious identities, cultures of dying and death, book history, self-writing, biography, and textual studies of the Bible and other forms of religious works. He has a particular interest in questions of historical memory and ways in which contemporary society in the public sphere interprets pre-modern religious events, such as anniversaries of the Reformation. In 2006 he received a major project grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for The Early Modern Protestant Latin Bible, which examined the relationships between translation, material culture, interpretation, and reading practices of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Bibles. In 2015 he received the Horace W. Goldsmith Award to produce a Coursera MOOC entitled “A Journey Through Western Christianity: From Persecuted Faith to Global Church.”

His books include The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002, Choice Magazine Outstanding Book), Calvin (Yale, 2009), John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton, 2016) and God’s Armed Prophet: Zwingli (Yale, 2021). In addition, he has edited several volumes, most recently The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford, 2021). He is currently completing a book entitled The Bible: A Global History for Basic Books in New York. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of King’s College (Canada), and frequently writes for online magazines and is active in podcasts.

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Sheila Heti (Franke Visiting Fellow)

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She recently published her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esmé Shapiro. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by the New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Motherhood was chosen by New York magazine and the critics of the New York Times as the Best Book of the year, and How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. Her nonfiction collaboration Women in Clothes, which includes the words of 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has interviewed many writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey, and John Currin. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives and works in Toronto.

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Cajetan Iheka (English)

Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English, specializing in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest single-authored book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). The monograph, which positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure, won several awards. It won the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in the Humanities. African Ecomedia was also a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize, and for the Media Ecology Association Book Awards. Professor Iheka is editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022). He also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space(University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.

His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in refereed venues such as New Literary HistoryCambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary InquiryInterdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentEnvironmental EthicsResearch in African LiteraturesThe Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, and the Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics. Professor Iheka is currently working on a comparative study of the cultural and formal intimacies of African and Caribbean literatures. In Fall 2022, he becomes the Editor-in-Chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.

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Willie Jennings (Divinity School)

Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Theology and Africana Studies. He is a leading authority on race and Christianity.

His publications include The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010), winner of the American Academy of Religion Award for best book and the Grawemeyer Award, the largest prize for a text on religion given in North America; A Commentary on the Book of Acts (2017), winner of the Reference Book of the Year Award; and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (2020), winner of the Publishers Weekly Book of the Year Award.

He is currently working on a book on race, Christian doctrines of creation, and animist thought. He also writes poetry.

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Noreen Khawaja (Religious Studies)

Noreen Khawaja specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European intellectual history, and particularly on the shifting status of religious ideas and norms in late modernity. Her research examines the fate of metaphysics, the relation between critique and reform, the nature of realism, as well as the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic features of the secular. Her first book, on existentialism, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre, was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2016. She is currently working on two major projects. The first is a monograph on the relation between theory and philosophy in the humanities, with particular focus on the study of religion. The other, longer work looks at the emergence of authenticity as a cultural ideal from the early Surrealists to the present day.

At Yale recent and upcoming courses include Existentialism, Critical Theories of Science and Religion, Authenticity, Problems of Secularization, Possession, Religion and Society, Martin Heidegger, Romance and Romanticism, The Surreal.

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Naomi Levine (English)

Naomi Levine is Assistant Professor of English. Her research explores the relationship between formal and historical conceptions of poetry in the nineteenth century and after. She is completing a book manuscript called “The Burden of Rhyme,” which examines nineteenth-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for the theory and practice of Victorian poetry and for the development of close reading. She is also at work on a related project, “The Badness of Victorian Poetry,” about twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems. Her essays have appeared in Victorian StudiesVictorian Poetry, Victoriographies, Victorian Literature and Culture, MLQ, and Literature Compass. Before coming to Yale, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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Katja Lindskog (Directed Studies)

Katja Lindskog holds a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Humanities Program, and since 2019, I serve as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Directed Studies program. Before joining the English Department at Yale, I was a Core Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Since arriving at Yale in 2015, I have taught courses on literature, climate change, cultural and intellectual history, and often I have designed and taught courses on all these together. My current research focuses on the ways in which we can contextualize British nineteenth-century literature within the onset of the Anthropocene era and the present-day climate crisis, particularly through our past and present relationship to fossil capital in its many forms. Broadly speaking, I am hoping to expand the parameters for what constitutes useful ecocriticism in the study of Victorian literature and culture.

My essays have appeared in Victorian Poetry and Scandinavian Studies. I am currently working on an essay about Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, as well as drafting a book manuscript about ecocriticism provisionally titled That Future Is Now: Ecocriticism in the Age of Climate Change.

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Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive)

Brian Meacham is Managing Archivist at the Yale Film Archive, where he has overseen the film collection since 2013. He is responsible for acquisition, inspection, cataloging, and preservation of the Archive’s collection, which includes thousands of print and pre-print film elements acquired by the university over the last fifty years. He has overseen the preservation of more than twenty-five films in the collection and helped launch and program the ongoing 35mm screening series Treasures from the Yale Film Archive. He led the Yale Film Archive’s application for membership in the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and is a member of the FIAF Executive Committee. 

He received his master’s in library and information science with a concentration in archives management from Simmons College and began work as Archive Coordinator at the Harvard Film Archive in 2002. He received a certificate in film preservation from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 2006. As Public Access Coordinator and subsequently Short Film Preservationist at the Academy Film Archive from 2006 to 2013, he oversaw public, scholarly, and commercial access to the holdings of the Academy Film Archive and curated and preserved a collection of live-action and animated short films spanning more than one hundred years of cinema history. He also helped spearhead a collaborative effort between the National Film Preservation Foundation and five film archives in the United States to repatriate and preserve hundreds of American silent films found in the New Zealand Film Archive, including Upstream, a lost feature film directed by John Ford.

He teaches a course on the film archive for the Yale Film & Media Studies graduate program and has published articles in Film Quarterly, the Journal of Film Preservation, and The Moving Image. His current projects include ongoing research into the cultural and technological history of the analog photobooth, as well as the ways in which filmmakers and cinephiles document their movie-going histories.

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Liliana Milkova (YUAG)

Liliana Milkova, the Nolen Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery, leads the Gallery’s Education Department, overseeing Public Education, Public Programs, and Academic Affairs, as well as outreach and programming at the Wurtele Study Center, a hybrid open-storage, educational, and research facility at Yale West Campus. At present, her research and practice focus on art’s capacity to enhance knowledge acquisition and cultivate skills and thinking dispositions in the science curriculum.

Before joining the Gallery in 2019, Liliana directed the Office of Academic Programs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College. At Oberlin, she significantly expanded the museum’s curricular integration and developed innovative strategies for teaching with collections across disciplines.

Liliana holds an A.B. in Art History and Old World Archaeology from Brown University and a PH.D. in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published on pedagogy, 20th-century art, photography, and political propaganda. Liliana has curated many exhibitions, including Illuminating Faith in the Russian Old Believer Tradition, which offered a rare glimpse of 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts from this long-persecuted faction of the Russian Orthodox church. She has also held several prestigious fellowships, most recently in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Feisal Mohamed (English)

Feisal G. Mohamed is professor of English and Early Modern Studies. He is the author or editor of six books, including Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford University Press, 2020); and A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education (Rutgers University Press, 2016), co-edited with Gordon Hutner. In addition to academic venues, his writing has appeared in Dissent MagazineThe New York TimesThe American ScholarThe Yale ReviewThe Chronicle Review, and the website of The New Republic.

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Matthew Morrison (Medicine)

Matthew Morrison, M.D. is an Emergency Physician in New York, and has been a lecturer at Yale in the Medical Humanities since 2019. He is a graduate of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (2012), and the Mt. Sinai-Morningside Emergency Medicine Residency (2015). He has contributed writing to Film Comment, Singh’s Case-Based Neurology, and Mattu’s Avoiding Common Errors in the Emergency Department. His interests include the “two cultures” of Rationalism and Romanticism; physician-writers – including Bulgakov, Chekhov, Henry Marsh, Lisa Sanders, and Oliver Sacks; philosophy of science – particularly Feyerabend and Karl Popper; phronesis; medical ethics; and ‘prosaic Romantic’ thinkers – including Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, William James and Mikhail Bakhtin.

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Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (English)

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English. She works on the literature of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial world, particularly on reading practices and print cultures in South Asia. Her current book project explores how readers in colonial South Asia derived their understanding of what it meant to inhabit empire through sporadic, if intimate, relationships with everyday forms of print, ranging from bureaucratic documents to astrological almanacs. She has written several articles on the Theosophical Society and is the co-editor of a volume of essays, The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices(Palgrave, 2017). Mukhopadhyay received her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and completed her doctoral research at the University of Oxford. Prior to moving to Yale, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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Lucy Mulroney (Beinecke)

Lucy Mulroney is Associate Director of Collections, Research, and Education for the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

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Fatima Naqvi (German/FMS)

Fatima Naqvi, Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies

Fatima Naqvi is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000. From 2000–2019, she taught at Rutgers University. She is on the board of the ICI Berlin as well as the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies.

Her research interests include the intersection of architecture and literature/film; ecological films; Austrian authors and filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries; affect studies; and landscape in the post-1945 period. One current book project focuses on the topic of fremdschämen—the sense of shame for another—in contemporary media culture, with special attention to the works of Ulrich Seidl, Erwin Wurm, and Elfriede Jelinek. A second project delves into hospitals; it looks at the way in which we experience them in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Fatima Naqvi’s books include The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005 (2007), Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke/ Deceptive Familiarity: Films by Michael Haneke (2010), and How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung (2016). A German Film Classics-volume on Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon appeared in 2020, as well as her co-edited volume Michael Haneke: Interviews (with Roy Grundmann and Colin Root). In 2021, she published The Insulted Landscape: Postwar German Culture 1960–1995 with Königshausen and Neumann.

Currently she and co-editor Andrea Grill are putting out a Literatur+Kritik dossier on the fear of hospitals (with works by Friederike Mayröcker, Marlene Streeruwitz, Michael Stavaric, Margret Kreidl, etc.). Essays on film criticism in Austria (“Kakanian Flyspecks”) and the documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (“Ephemeral Spaces and Pneumatic Architecture”) appeared in New German Critique. An article on Ulrich Seidl and “fremdschämen” came out in Film-Konzepte.

Professor Naqvi teaches on 20th and 21st century German culture. Her courses include Literature and Architecture; Vienna 1900–1930; From Haunted Screen to Hyperreality: Classics of German Cinema; Our Threatened Planet: Green Thought from the German-Speaking World; Weimar Cinema; Landscape, Architecture, Film; German Film after 1945.

She has held guest professorships at Harvard University (2017) and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (2013).

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Stephanie Almeida Nevin (Humanities)

Stephanie Almeida Nevin is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Humanities Program at Yale. Her research focuses on the history of political thought on education.

In her book manuscript, Beyond Becoming: Politics, Education, and the Search for Truth, Almeida Nevin argues that a true civic education is only found in lifelong association with others. Revealing how social, political, and economic justifications for education often rely on a limited vision of education as subject formation, she challenges the assumption that persons are entities to be made in the classroom. Her project explores how education has long been romanticized by political thinkers for its supposed power to shape ideal selves and societies.
 
In 2016, Almeida Nevin co-founded the Citizens Thinkers Writers program for students in the New Haven public schools. Prior to her graduate study at Yale, she earned a B.A. in politics and English from Pomona College and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

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L. A. Paul (Philosophy)

L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University and leads the Self and Society Initiative for Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self, decision-making, time and temporal experience, philosophical methodology, causation and causal experience, perception, and essence.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. She is also the author of three books, including Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Causation: A User’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2013), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. In 2020 she received the Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her work on transformative experience has been covered in major media venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, NPR, and the BBC, and explored artistically, in “The Missing Shade of You”, a dance and spoken word performance by the Logos Dance Collective, performed in New York City in 2017, in the documentary film “Comfort Zone”, about  off-piste/extreme skiing in Scotland, and as the theme of the 2022 contemporary art fair Artissima, in Turin, Italy. She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.

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Jessica Peritz (Music)

Jessica Gabriel Peritz is Assistant Professor of Music and Affiliated Faculty in Italian Studies and Early Modern Studies. A cultural historian of music, literature, and philosophy in the long eighteenth century, she studies representations of bodies and voices in Italian opera. Her first book, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy (University of California, forthcoming October 2022), argues that certain Western ideologies of liberal subjectivity emerged out of a network of eighteenth-century Italian musical and literary practices. Her new work-in-progress reads opera seria as a mode of historiography by drawing on, among other frameworks, performance studies, pre-modern critical race studies, and queer theory.

She joined the Yale faculty in 2019, the same year she completed her PhD in Music History at the University of Chicago, and also holds a Masters of Music in Opera from The New School and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard. Her work has received fellowships and prizes from the American Musicological Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Franke Humanities Center at the University of Chicago, and the Council for European Studies at Columbia, as well as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. At Yale she teaches courses on such topics as “Lyric & the Posthuman,” “In Search of Historical Voice,” and “Music & Jane Austen.”

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Maya Prabhu (Medicine/Psychiatry)

Maya Prabhu is a medical doctor practicing in psychiatry and an international jurist in international health law and sustainable development. She is Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Law and Psychiatry Division. In addition, Prabhu works with victims of international conflicts seeking political asylum through the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine and the Yale Institute for Global Health, and is the lead counsel for Health at the Centre for International Sustainable Development. As of 2016, Prabhu coleads the Yale Adult Refugee Clinic.

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Nana Osei Quarshie (History)

Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Medicine. He received his PhD from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2020. His research illuminates the impact of African political imaginaries, which are often relegated to the margins, on the production of knowledge about science, medicine, and technology globally. 

Quarshie’s first book project, An African Pharmakon, is a historical ethnography of the place of psychiatric care in political processes of social stratification and in the production of national, regional, and ethnic diversity in West Africa. This research has been supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Race, Law, and History Fellowship at the Michigan Law School, and the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), among others.

At Yale, Quarshie teaches courses on the global history of psychiatry and confinement, African systems of thought, and historical methods beyond the archive.

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Claire Roosien (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Claire Roosien is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and a cultural historian of modern Eurasia, with a focus on mass culture and empire in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her joint PhD in History (Russia) and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Her book-in-progress, Socialism Mediated: Culture, Propaganda, and the Public in Early Soviet Uzbekistan, examines how Central Asian cultural producers imagined and mobilized mass participation through state-run institutions and Socialist Realist cultural production: poetry, novels, film, newspapers, and material and visual culture, among other mediums.

Drawing on published and archival sources in several Eurasian languages, she posits the category of the “state public” to describe the contested imaginaries of state control and public participation in the context of Soviet ideologies of popular sovereignty. She is also making initial forays into projects on race and ethnicity in Soviet popular performance culture and the cultural history of the Aral Sea disaster.

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Evren Savcı (Womens,Gender and Sexuality Studies)

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of it distributive logic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & EventJournal of Feminist Studies in Religion and GLQ, and in several edited collections. She has contributed op-eds, blog entries and interviews to Jadaliyya, The Feminist Wire, make/shift and MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project).

Christophe Schuwey, I specialize in the literature and culture of seventeenth-century France. My scholarship focuses on marketing and literature, the development and control of an information culture, and the making of cultural hierarchies.

My latest book, Un entrepreneur des lettres au XVIIe siècle (Classiques Garnier, 2020), explores how a close collaborator to Molière turned classical literature and early modern books into fashionable entertainment devices and social networks. In the field of digital humanities, my essay Interfaces (Alphil, 2019) reflects on what digital humanities can really do for literature.

I have also developed multiple critical editions and databases on early modern theater and literature.

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Gerald Torres (Yale School of the Environment/Law School)

Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment and Professor at the Yale Law School. He is a former president of the Association of American Law Schools and has taught at Stanford Law School and at Harvard Law School, where he served as the Oneida Nation Visiting Professor of Law.

Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the US Department of Justice and has served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and the National Petroleum Council. He is Board Chair of EarthDay Network and Founding Chairman of the Advancement Project, the leading civil rights advocacy organization in the country. He is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Torres has just been appointed to the Advisory Council of the Connecticut Sea Grant. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters and is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. 

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Jesús Velasco (Spanish and Portuguese)

Jesús R. Velasco is Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature. His most recent book is Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages (Penn, 2020); his new book, Microliteraturas, is forthcoming (Cátedra, 2022).

He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation in law, titled “Science de l’âme et corps du droit: généalogies d’une affinité,” at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

At Yale, he founded and convenes Iberian Connections (iberian-connections.yale.edu).

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Jonathan Wyrtzen (History/Sociology)

Jonathan Wyrtzen His work focuses on society and politics in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly with regards to interactions catalyzed by the expansion of European empires into this region. His first book, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2015; 2016 Social Science History Association President’s Book Award winner), examines how European colonial intervention in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. His second book project, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia, 2022), reexamines how the First World War unmade the greater Ottoman political order that had shaped the Middle East for centuries and opened up the possibility for local and European actors to reimagine political identities and political futures within the region. Running against the standard narrative of European colonial powers imposing artificial boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference, it demonstrates that, instead of an imperial drawing room, it was in and through violent clashes on the ground among competing local and colonial projects during the latter phases of the Long Great War in the 1920s–30s that the Middle East’s states, boundaries, and identities were remade.

He is currently starting up a third book project, tentatively titled “Nation in Empire,” that explores how spatial and symbolic boundaries of political and social inclusion/exclusion are recurrently drawn and contested. The project focuses on two central cases—the United States and France—tracing out how their entwined histories of overland and overseas imperial expansion (including the Caribbean/Americas, Africa/Middle East, East and Southeast Asia) and contraction have patterned long-running struggles over “national” identities and the apportionment of rights.

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