Fellows 2009-2010

Audrey Calefas-Strébelle is a PhD candidate in the department of French and Italian at Stanford University. She received her BA (1994) and her MA (1997) from Sorbonne University, France.

Prior to joining the PhD program in French, she was a lecturer at the Stanford language center for five years. Besides her PhD dissertation project, Audrey created and manages Michel Serres’ website for his class, and she is working on an essay on motherhood.

Audrey Calefas-Strébelle’ s dissertation, "The Image of the Turk in French Literature and History," focuses on the representation of the Turk in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century French literature and history, and on its relationship with the disappearing figure of the “grand seigneur féodal,” or feudal lord.
In her research, she reveals the existence of strong correlations between these two representations. During the reign of Louis XIV, French society witnessed the disappearance of the feudal lord, but also expressed an increasing curiosity for the figure of the Turk, who was perceived and described with the same admiration and fear that the feudal lord had once elicited.

Mary Campbell is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Stanford. She received her BA from Brown and her JD from Yale. Her dissertation examines the erotic stereographs of an early Mormon photographer. She continues to write on legal issues, and her article on copyright misuse was recently cited by the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

"Holy Lands and Profane Women: Charles Ellis Johnson and the Practice of Mormon Photography" examines the work of the turn-of-the-century Mormon photographer Charles Ellis Johnson. Focusing on two distinct bodies of Johnson's images -- his photographs of the Holy Land and his erotic stereographs -- it reads these pictures for the social, cultural, and ultimately theological crises that they belie.

Mark Feldman is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. His research interests span the late-nineteenth century to the present and focus on representations of nature, animals, and animality. An earlier project explored how evolutionary theory changed the status of the human and led to the articulation of a new, Darwinian self, most clearly presented in literary naturalist texts.

Urban Ecologies: New York City's Visionary Urbanism is an interdisciplinary study of cultural productions in which city and nature intermingle rather than stand in opposition. Feldman investigates how writers, artists, and architects have utilized an ecological perspective to change and reimagine contemporary New York City, in the process outlining a humanistic environmentalism that envisions a green and livable future metropolis. 

Erdağ Göknar is assistant professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University and a literary translator. He has translated and published three novels: My Name is Red by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, and A Mind at Peace by A.H. Tanpınar. His most recent scholarly publications include, “The Novel in Turkish: Narrative Tradition to Nobel Prize” (Cambridge History of Turkey, 2008) and the co-edited volume Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (UNC Press, 2008).

Orhan Pamuk was charged with insulting “Turkishness” in 2005 under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Göknar's project analyses how literature in Turkey has defined and questioned the charged concept of “Turkishness” over the twentieth century. He will be completing a scholarly work of textual analysis that defines the aesthetic and political importance of Pamuk’s novels as it relates to the modern and post-Orientalist Turkish literary tradition.

Rebecca Greene is a PhD candidate in linguistics at Stanford and hails from Kentucky, where she received her BA at the University of Kentucky. She is a sociolinguist whose research currently focuses on the dialect spoken in her hometown of Elliott County, Kentucky. Greene has lived abroad in Japan and France and studied four foreign languages in total: Japanese, French, Spanish, and Mandarin.

Greene's dissertation, "Eastern Kentucky English and Ideology," involves analyzing the speech of women she interviewed in her hometown, looking to see why individuals use given linguistic variables differently. She is relating the patterns she finds to larger societal structures, particularly the relationship of domination and resistance between the North and the South, as well as the urban and the rural. 

Nicholas Guyatt received his BA from Cambridge and his PhD from Princeton, and currently teaches history at the University of York in England. He is the author of several books, including Providence and the Invention of the United States (Cambridge, 2007). Guyatt has written about American history and politics for the Nation magazine and The London Review of Books.

Guyatt's project, Nations, Empires, and the Idea of Colonization, 1730-1900, examines the connections between colonization – the managed transfer of particular groups of people from one part of the world to another – and the emergence of racial categories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Guyatt is particularly interested in the development of ideas about the transformative potential of colonization, and in the application of an early version of separate-but-equal thinking to colonial projects within and beyond the United States.

Blair Hoxby is associate professor of English at Stanford and is author of Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002). His recent articles include “The Doleful Airs of Euripides: The Origins of Opera and the Spirit of Tragedy Reconsidered,” Cambridge Opera Journal (2005) and “All Passion Spent: The Means and Ends of a Tragédie en Musique,” Comparative Literature (2007). Hoxby holds an AB from Harvard University, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from Yale University.

Hoxby's book project, Spectacles of the Gods: Tragedy and Tragic Opera, 1550-1780, seeks to recover a lost, international ideal of tragedy; to restore its sacred and musical forms to their rightful place in the history of the genre; and to prove the merits of an interpretive method that is not text-centric.

Sarah Lochlann Jain received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999 after completing her BA in Philosophy at McGill University. Her professional life has been devoted to understanding the question of how the human body circulates as political material in twentieth and twenty-first century United States, and specifically, how the inevitable injuries of mass productions and consumption are distributed and justified through law, science, and popular culture.

Cancer science and technology is haunted by its manifest unsteadiness as a scientific program, despite the highly lucrative treatments and continued industrial and commercial use of carcinogens. In this terrain of uncertainty, cancer as a cultural formation, and one currently undergoing many transformations, remains under-researched and under-theorized. Jain's project, Cancer Culture in the United States, aims to redress this.

Hanna Janiszewska is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford. She received her BA in English from Yale and her MPhil in British Literature 1700-1830 from Cambridge University. Besides her primary focus on British Romanticism, she is also interested in the history of ideas, philosophical approaches to literature, and theories of poetry.

"Romantic Life of the Mind: Literary Forms as Forms of Life" considers the nature of the commitment to a “life of the mind” in the Romantic Period. Janiszweska looks at how writers such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Keats used the forms of poetry, criticism, and autobiography not only to grapple with the problems of life, but to test the possibility of actually inhabiting intellectual propositions. By attending to the shape of these literary engagements, she hopes to show how central their success was to the Romantics’ conception and pursuit of a full life.

Florian is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford. He received his MA in Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Latin American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and also holds an Artist’s Diploma in Violin from Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. His research interests include poetry and poetics, classical rhetoric and philosophical aesthetics, with a special emphasis on late eighteenth and early twentieth century German.

Klinger's project, "Judgment and Kairocentric World," identifies the question of judgment as the question of human self-determination in its most recent form, in which the latter is brought down to the level of singular cases and situations that have to be decided in the absence of given criteria as provided by metaphysical and ideological frameworks. In Klinger's consideration of texts by authors such as Fichte and Kleist, Nietzsche and Kafka, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, the modern discourse of judgment evolves as deeply torn between an emphasis on the thetical (or positional) moment on the one hand, and the moment of measure (or appropriateness) on the other; two moments that are discovered to be just as irreconcilable as they are inseparable, and that in such juncture articulate the structure of every decision – be it determining the rhythm of a poem, a course of action, a specific interpretive view on history, or a sentence in court.

Gwyneth Lewis was appointed Wale's first National Poet from 2005-06. She has published six books of poetry in Welsh and English. Her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995) won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was short listed for the Forward, as was her second book, Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998). Chaotic Angels collects her first three books of poetry in English.

Lewis' first non-fiction book, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Flamingo 2002), was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year and was recently broadcast as a play on BBC Radio 4. She is also a librettist and an award-winning playwright. In 2008-09 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard.

Lewis was a scholar at Girton College, Cambridge and was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. She received a DPhil in English from Oxford, having written a thesis on eighteenth-century literary forgery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Welsh Academi and a NESTA Fellow. NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation. In 2005 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. In 2008-09 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard.

In the past, she spent three years in the U.S. as a Harkness Fellow and was a documentary producer and director at BBC Wales, where she won a BAFTA. She left the BBC to become a freelance writer.

Poetry and the Body will be a scholarly survey of prosody, drawing on Celtic, English, and American poetry from earliest times to the present day, exploring the effect of meter and rhyme on poets’ and readers’ bodies. The whole project argues that prosody is far more than literary ornament - it’s fundamental to how we learn and develop language and an essential part of our ongoing health as creators of poetic discourse.
The Arts Practitioner/Writer Fellowship is sponsored jointly with the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts.

Gregory Mann is an historian of francophone West Africa. He is currently working on a history of nongovernmentality in the West African Sahel from 1946 to the late 1970s. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Mali, as well as in Senegal and Niger, the project attempts to analyze novel forms of political rationality among governments and non- governmental organizations in the post-colonial Sahel. It takes the Sahel as an object of governance, investigation, and intervention, focusing on mobility, humanitarianism, and human rights, and using social science as both sources for and objects of its analysis. Mann’s articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of African History and Politique Africaine. His book Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the 20th Century was published by Duke University Press in 2006. Mann teaches in the history department of Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Mann's project analyzes novel forms of political rationality among governments and non-governmental organizations in the post-colonial Sahel. He studies the Sahel as an object of governance, investigation, and intervention, focusing on mobility, humanitarianism, and human rights, and using social science as both sources for and objects of my analysis. The project grapples with central concerns of the historical discipline: the predilection towards state biography; the centrality of narratives and theories emerging from Europe; and the hazard of historicity, which insists on the analytical pre-eminence of the past and views contemporary phenomena solely as the expression of unique and particular histories.

David Marriott teaches in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and Haunted Life (Rutgers, 2007).

Marriott will be researching Black Poetry and Knowledge: a study of the philosophical aesthetics of several key twentieth-century poets. In particular, he will be addressing the following questions: What kind of knowledge is poetry, and how have leading black poets and critics answered this question? And how did their differing approaches to language, ideology, and/or form manifest themselves poetically, critically, aesthetically?

Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University. She holds a joint appointment in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Music, and served as Chair of the Department of Music from 2005-2008. Her publications include Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and several edited volumes. She began her career as a trumpet player and has recently been studying contemporary Senufo balafon.

Monson is writing a book about Neba Solo, Neba, a Malian musician widely known as the 'genius of the balafon,' whose music illuminates creativity, musical perception, modernity, and globalization in contemporary West Africa. Employing a biographical lens, her book addresses an interlocking set of social and economic contexts that shed light on the significance and complexity of a prominent artist’s social and musical positioning, while simultaneously addressing several broader themes – such as the musical perception of polyphony, economic disparity, and the crises of modernity.

Prior to his graduate work at Stanford University’s Department of History, Daniel Perez received a BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and then a Fulbright-IIE research scholarship to Albania. Perez’s research focuses on the history of federalism in southeast Europe as a mechanism for managing ethnic conflict.

Perez's project, "Between Yugoslav Federation and Albanian Nation-State: Albanian Communists and the Assertion of National Sovereignty, 1944-1948," examines Albanian communism and nation-building within the context of Yugoslavia’s initiative to unite Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece into a pan-Balkan federation between the Second World War and the Cold War. He analyzes the ways in which the Albanian pursuit of the planned merger facilitated Yugoslav expansionism, precipitated the Soviet-Yugoslav diplomatic break, and resulted in the unlikely preservation of the Albanian nation-state.

Maria Ponomarenko is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford. She received her BA in history and economics, and her MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago. Ponomarenko's research interests include the political, social, and institutional history of twentieth-century United States.

Ponomarenko's dissertation, "The Department of Justice and the Limits of New Deal State Building, 1933-1945," examines the history of the Department of Justice during a pivotal moment of state expansion, from the New Deal through World War II. It addresses how institutional structures and political culture shaped the form and effectiveness of government action, and contributes to ongoing debates over American political development and the legacies of the Roosevelt years.

Cabeiri Robinson is assistant professor of International Studies and South Asia Studies at University of Washington (Seattle). She received her PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Cornell University in 2005. Her scholarly interests include political movements in contemporary Muslim societies, armed conflict and refugee studies, and human rights and humanitarian interventions. Robinson's research focuses on political violence and the transformation of political cultures in contemporary South Asia.

Robinson will complete a book manuscript entitled Body of the Victim, Body of the Warrior: Refugees and the Kashmir Jihad. This book presents a historical ethnography of the social production of jihad in transnational Kashmiri society 1947-2001. Robinson argues that politicized Islam in the Kashmir region was produced through the integration of Muslim political subjects into global political regimes-- including systems of representation, value, administration, and violence-- rather than by a clash of ideology or a resurgence of timeless or universal religious forms.

Vincent Tomasso is a PhD candidate in the department of Classics at Stanford University. He received his BA in Classics from the University of Washington in 2004. His professional interests include archaic Greek poetry, the legend of the Trojan War, Greek mythology and folklore, and the practice(s) of reception.

The third century AD poet Quintus of Smyrna wrote a fourteen-book epic entitled Posthomerica, which tells the story of the Trojan War from the death of Hector to the departure of the Greeks homeward. In his dissertation, "'Cast in Later Grecian Mould': Studies in Quintus of Smyrna's Reception and Refiguration of Homeric Monumentality in the Posthomerica," Tomasso argues that Quintus, rather than simply telling the stories that are not narrated in the Iliad or Odyssey, was actively engaging with and negotiating Homeric tradition and poetics.

Amir Weiner is an Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for European Studies at Stanford University. He completed his Bachelor's work at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem before receiving his Ph.D at Columbia University. Weiner is the author of three books, and his research concerns totalitarian polities with a focus on the Soviet Union from the late 1930s to its disintegration in the early 1990s.

Weiner's project, Wild West, Window to the West: Sovereignty, Governance and Revolutionary Violence Between the Baltic and Black Seas, 1935 to Present, explores the evolution of the Soviet system along its geographical, ethnic, economic, and cultural frontiers. The project examines the limits and horizons of the Soviet Revolution from the zenith of its geographical expansion and state terror through the cataclysm of the war, renunciation of mass terror and debates over the fate of the Communist Party after Stalin’s death, opening to the outside world, routinization and disintegration.

Lael Weis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and a JD candidate in the Law School, specializing in political philosophy and the philosophy of law. She received Bachelor’s degrees in political science and philosophy at the University of Washington. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of democratic political theory, constitutional legal theory, and property law.

Weis' dissertation, "Public Purpose, Common Good: Constitutional Protection of Private Property in the Democratic State," focuses on the constitutional protection of private property rights in a democracy, asking both: (1) what are the roles and value of private property in a democracy?, and (2) how are constitutionally guaranteed rights best understood within a system of popular self-governance, when those rights are conventionally or politically defined? She argues that attempts to reconcile the conventional nature of private property with its higher law standing fall short because they assume that the primary function of a constitutional right lies in acting as a “check” on the majoritarian political process, and thereby fail to appreciate the roles and value of private property in a democracy.