2009-10 Fellows and Associates

(View the list of Fellows from previous years)

External Humanities Fellow

Hilary Parsons Dick, PhD, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

CHAT Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor in the College. H.P. Dick is a linguistic anthropologist who investigates Mexico-US migration from the perspectives of discourse analysis; the semiotics of social difference and political economies of language; and gender, class, and ethno-racial relations. She joins CHAT after her tenure as a Fellow and Lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her ethnographic research is situated in Guanajuato, Mexico and Chester County, Pennsylvania. Her forthcoming book, Words of Passage: A Discourse-Centered Approach to Migration, examines how the social imaginaries that encourage migration are produced in everyday talk.

Faculty Fellows

Talissa Ford, Assistant Professor of English

Talissa Ford received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.  Her teaching and research interests include British Romanticism, cultural geography, the revolutionary Atlantic and young adult literature, and she has published essays on William Blake and Lord Byron.  While at CHAT, she will be working on a book-length project entitled Romanticism Off the Map: Prophets and Pirates in the Age of Empire. This project traces the spatial practices of prophets, pirates and other rogue travelers (both real and fictional) in Romantic-era literature, exploring the power of their eccentric movements to expose and disorganize the fiction of national space.

Oliver Gaycken, Assistant Professor of English

Oliver Gaycken is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and Popular Science. This project is an account of the popular science film from its emergence in the last decade of the nineteenth century to its initial flowering and development in the 1910s. It concludes with a consideration of how this nonfictional mode was absorbed into Louis Feuillade’s French crime serials. He is also writing articles about the early educational film, the value of cinema to professional scientists, the avant-garde fascination with positivist aesthetics, and early time-lapse visualizations of plant growth.

Jane Gordon, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Jane Anna Gordon earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. She is currently completing a book entitled Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, co-author with Lewis Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies and Not Only the Master’s Tools. Dr. Gordon teaches modern and contemporary political thought, black political thought, politics and theory of education, modern women political thinkers, and political theory in literature and film.

Jeremy Schipper, Assistant Professor of Religion

Jeremy Schipper received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interests include disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature as well as interpretations of the Former Prophets (Judges – 2 Kings).  He is the author of Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible (T & T Clark, 2006) and the co-editor of This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities In Biblical Studies (Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) During his CHAT fellowship, he will work on a book that examines the role that disability plays in scholarly interpretations of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53.

Graduate Teaching Fellows

Kelly Shannon, Ph.D. Program, History

Kelly Shannon is a Ph.D. Candidate in history.  Her interests include the history of U.S. foreign relations, international history, human rights, and cultural/gender analysis.  Her dissertation, "Veiled Intentions: Islam, Global Feminism, and U.S. Foreign Policy Since the Late 1970s," examines the construction of an American public discourse about the treatment of women in Muslim countries since the 1970’s and how that discourse has influenced U.S. foreign policy.
As a 2009-2010 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Kelly will teach "American Perceptions of Muslims in Historical Perspective" in Spring 2010.  The course will explore how Americans have talked about and imagined the Muslim world from the Barbary Wars through the present.

Graduate School Senior Doctoral Fellows, Fall 2009

Andrew Diemer, Ph.D. Program, History

Andrew Diemer is a doctoral candidate in history, specializing in nineteenth-century America.  His current research focuses on politics and free African Americans.  This work explores both the ways in which free blacks sought to influence a politics which increasingly excluded them from formal participation, as well as the role that the issues of black citizenship played in nineteenth-century American politics.  He recently published an article on the efforts of black Philadelphians to use the Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War as a way to force their own city and state to provide full citizenship to African Americans.  He received his BA from Williams College.

Nick Moudry, Ph.D. Program, English

Nick Moudry's research and teaching interests include translation studies, modern and contemporary poetry, masculinity studies, and film. He is currently completing a dissertation on the effect that poet-translators have on U.S. perceptions of foreign literary canons. He received a B.A. in English from the University of Iowa, an M.F.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Graduate Associates

Matthew Johnson, Ph.D. Program, History

Matthew Johnson's research interests include the history of gender, sexuality, and race relations in post-WWII America. His dissertation analyzes the efforts taken by corporations to racially diversify their workforces after 1964.

 

Byron Lee, Ph.D. Program, Mass Media and Communications

Migrating to Temple University from Vancouver, Canada, Byron Lee examines the relationships between identities, space, and citizenship. He holds a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Women's Studies from Simon Fraser University. His work brings together issues of gender and sexuality, ethnicity, urban theory, memory and nostalgia, and mass media. His current fascination lies in the formation of Philadelphia's "gayborhood," a space that is placed geographically, marked by identity, and promoted through tourism.

Lior Levy, Ph.D. Program, Philosophy

Lior Levy is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Temple University. She is writing her dissertation on the concept of memory in Jean Paul Sartre's early works. She earned her B.A. at Tel Aviv University, where she also pursued graduate study in philosophy. She is interested in the notions of memory and temporality, especially in the ways they are treated in the Continental tradition.

Holger Lowendorf, Ph.D. Program,  History

Holger Loewendorf is a Ph.D. candidate in history specializing in U.S. foreign relations, Europe in the twentieth century, and international relations theory. His dissertation focuses on cultural aspects of American nation-building in postwar Germany. He examines material and ideational factors to explain how Americans and Germans negotiated a new national identity while reconstructing a collapsed state between 1945 and 1949.

Nyama McCarthy-Brown, Ph.D. Program, Dance

Nyama McCarthy-Brown is a Future Faculty Fellow pursuing her doctorate in Dance. Originally from San Francisco, she received her BA Degree in Political Science from Spelman College and completed her MFA in Performance and Choreography at the University of Michigan in 2003. *Nyama is committed to dance education for at-risk youths and has ben teaching dance since 1992. Her research focuses on how students of color experience race in higher education dance departments. In addition to her studies, she recently coached her fifth grade ballroom-dance students to the "Dancing Classrooms Philly Championship" for 2009.

Nicole Noll, Ph.D. Program, Psychology

Nicole Noll’s research interests center on embodied social cognition. She studies the ways in which cognitive processes simultaneously shape and are shaped by embodied action and experience, with a focus on gender and other identities/roles. Nicole earned her M.A. from James Madison University and her B.S. from Wilson College.

Chiaoning Su, Ph.D. Program, Mass Media and Communications

An International student from Taiwan, Chiaoning Su received her B.A. in Sociology from National Taiwan University, her M.A. in Organizational Communication from Emerson College, and began her doctoral program in the fall of 2007. Her research focuses on international communication with an emphasis on East Asia. She is particularly interested in the hybridization of popular culture in East Asia and its effect and practice in the global context.

Amy Woodworth, Ph.D. Program, English

Amy Woodworth specializes in twentieth-century American literature, film, and gender. Her dissertation focuses on the evolution of the male weepie as a film genre from the late 1960s through the present, considering how the genre negotiates male subjectivities in the wake of second-wave feminism and other rights movements. Her previous work includes a published article on Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist aesthetics. She holds a B. A. from New York University and an M. A. from Rutgers University at Newark. 

Previous Fellows