WHC Fellows

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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 History, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Ethics, Research in African Literatures, The 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.

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.

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.

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 18^th- and 19^th-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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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 & Event, Journal 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.

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).