2011-2012 CHAT Fellows

CHAT is proud to announce the following recipients of fellowships at the Humanities Center for 2011-2012. (View the list of Fellows from previous years, or see news and updates from former CHAT fellows.)

Faculty Fellows

Alex Gottesman, Asst. Professor, Greek and Roman Classics

Alex Gottesman received his PhD from the University of Chicago, and is assistant professor of classics.  He studies Greek literature, political thought and rhetoric.  His book-in-progress, entitled The Athenian Street: Performance and Politics in Democratic Athens, examines the interplay between classical Athens' formal institutions—namely the assembly, council and courts—and informal performances of the street, such as festivals, processions and other kinds of public displays.  It explores the tensions that existed between these two kinds of public spheres (the theatrical and the deliberative), and the intellectual and institutional responses that they provoked.  The book argues that more attention to the role of theatrical public displays (aka "publicity stunts") in Athens can enrich not only our knowledge of Athenian politics, but also give us a resource for thinking about the ever-fraught relationship between democracy and spectacle more generally.

Nichole Miller, Asst. Professor, English

Nichole E. Miller's research focuses on the intersections between 16th-17th C. British literature, particularly Shakespeare; political theologies and political philosophies; critical theory, and gender studies.  Her book project, Violence and Grace:  Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity, explores the interaction between Renaissance drama and twentieth-century political thinkers.  Each chapter stages a dialogue between an early modern play (by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton) and a modern work of political philosophy (by Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Max Weber) that draws on early modern drama to ground its own critique of modern statecraft.  Violence and Grace's primary goal is not only to demonstrate the ways the playwrights negotiate the febrile political tensions of the period, but also to show how their works illuminate modern political phenomena.

Inmaculada M. García Sánchez, Asst. Professor, Anthropology

Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her book project, Language and Transnational Childhoods: Muslim Immigrant Children in a Time of Surveillance documents the socio-cultural lifeworlds of Moroccan immigrant children as they navigate family, educational settings (both public and religious), and neighborhood peer groups. Moroccan immigrant children walk a tight rope between sameness and difference as they simultaneously participate in their own immigrant community and a "host" society that is deeply ambivalent toward the multicultural politics of "belonging" provoked by recent migratory trends. This book examines Moroccan immigrant childrens' everyday social interactions in a dialectic relationship with broader cultural logics and socio-political discourses implicated in conceptualizations of inclusion and identity.

Shannon Walters, Asst. Professor, English

Shannon Walters received her PhD in English and Women's Studies from Penn State in 2008. She teaches and researches in the areas on rhetoric and composition and disability studies at Temple University. Her other research interests include areas of technical communication, assistive technology, haptics and animal/nonhuman studies. Work in these areas has appeared journals such as in JAC, Technical Communication Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is currently at work on a book exploring the sense of touch as a rhetorical art for people with and without disabilities.

2012 NTT Faculty Fellow

Caroline Stark, Asst. Professor, Greek

and Roman Classics

Caroline Stark received her Ph.D. in Classics and Renaissance Studies from Yale University. Her research interests include ancient cosmology, anthropology, ethnography, and the reception of classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  She has published several articles on the reception of classical antiquity in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Her current book project, “The Role of Knowledge in Ancient and Renaissance Conceptions of Man,” examines ancient stories about the birth and development of mankind and their reception in the writings of fifteenth-century Italian humanists as they rediscovered Lucretius and other ancient authors.

Graduate Teaching Fellow

Nicole Cesare, Ph.D. Program, English

Nicole Cesare is a Ph. D. candidate in English.  She is currently working on her dissertation, "Spaces in Motion: The Dynamic Cartography of the Contemporary African Novel," which focuses on how the African novel engages questions of space and geography.  The project suggests that while earlier African novels wrote against a colonial cartography imposed on the region during the scramble for Africa, the chosen contemporary novels look forward and move from a static notion of cartography based on traditional understandings of the space/time dyad to a dynamic cartography that accounts for such phenomena as diaspora, the transnational, and cyberspace. 

Graduate School Senior Doctoral Fellows

Corinne Castro, Ph.D. Program, Sociology (Fall)

In addition to her doctorate, Corinne Castro is also earning a graduate certificate in Women's Studies. Her research areas focus on the intersections of race, gender, class, and inequality in the workplace and higher education. Her dissertation, titled "Women of Color Navigating the Academy: The Discursive Power of Professionalism," examines the professional experiences of women of color faculty at research universities. A mixed-methodology study with both quantitative and qualitative components, this project reveals how even despite the relative successes of women of color in academia, they continue to struggle daily with professional legitimacy and authority.

Avram Gurland-Blaker, Ph.D. Program, Philosophy (Spring)

Avram (Oz) Gurland-Blaker has done work on issues in contemporary philosophy of art, 20th-century continental philosophy and phenomenology, social and political philosophy, and German Idealism.  He is currently completing a dissertation on Hegel that examines an alternate theoretical description of the relationship between the individual self and the surrounding world (one which views self and world as fundamentally integrated rather than as separable) developed by Hegel in the “Ethical Order” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. He is interested in nonmaterialist ontology, the interconnectedness of thought, action, and actuality, questions of methodology, and institutionalization.

Erum Naqvi, Ph.D. Program, Philosophy (Spring)

Erum Naqvi came to Philadelphia from London, where she studied Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics. She has written on Philosophy of Music and the History of Modern Philosophy (especially Hume and Kant). Leveraging an interdisciplinary approach, her dissertation research analyses the relation between specific music concepts and diverse musical, social, and political practices, with a focus on the role of values in these contexts. It draws on analytic contemporary philosophy of music; 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy; contemporary theory on globalization and culture in social and political philosophy, critical theory, and Iranian studies; ethnomusicology; and Persian aesthetics, music history, and music theory.

Daniel Royles, Ph.D. Program, History (Fall)

Dan Royles received a B.A. with honors in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, where he completed a senior thesis on ideas about destructive mothering in postwar American culture.  His dissertation project, "Owning AIDS," explores the political culture of HIV/AIDS activism and advocacy in African American communities, investigating the intersection of histories of race, gender, sexuality, and public health.  Dan is generally interested in ways that political meanings of nationhood and belonging are mapped onto and naturalized through the human body.

Graduate Associate Fellows

Alex Elkins, Ph.D. Program, History

Alex Elkins is a fourth-year PhD history student. His dissertation examines the African American uprisings of the 1960s. This project takes events, “riots,” that are usually the domain of political science and sociology and analyzes their import for mid to late Sixties historiography. Research will explore questions of governance and state power, black liberation, urban crisis, and national destiny as they are played out on city streets in dramas of sovereignty between the state and the crowd. Outside this, his academic focus is on post-emancipation United States, in particular histories of ideas, race, colonialism, nationalism, and the state.

Jessica Lewis-Turner, Ph.D. Program, English

Jessica Lewis-Turner is completing a dissertation entitled "Hermaphrodite: An American Metaphor."  Her research focuses on the metaphor of the hermaphrodite as natural and as a national body, especially as depicted in nineteenth-century American fiction, memoir, and medical narratives.

 

Laura Porterfield, Ph.D. Program, Urban Education

Laura Krystal Porterfield's work centers on looking at the city as an educative text. Her dissertation examines the race and gender norms embedded within the hidden curricula of visual culture, both in and out of the school environment. She situates young black women as key knowledge producers and engages them in an ethnographic, photography-based project that aims to  investigate their everyday landscapes. This inquiry is geared toward better understanding how and in what ways visual culture shapes their relationship with education and learning in the image-saturated 21st century.