2013-2014 CHAT Fellows

CHAT is proud to announce the following recipients of fellowships at the Humanities Center for 2013-2014. (View the list of Fellows from previous years, or see news and updates from former CHAT fellows.)

Faculty Fellows

Orfeo Fioretos, Associate Professor, Political Science

Orfeo Fioretos is an Associate Professor of Political Science who specializes in the study of advanced capitalism and global cooperation. He is the author of Creative Reconstructions: Multilateralism and European Varieties of Capitalism (Cornell 2011) and articles in International Organization, Review of International Political Economy, Comparative Political Studies, other journals and volumes.

Mark Leuchter, Associate Professor, Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies

Mark Leuchter is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies with the Department of Religion. His research focuses upon the formation of the Hebrew Bible, prophecy and priesthood in ancient Israel, and mythology in early Judaism. He is the author of several books and scholarly articles, his favorite band is Rush, and he strongly prefers dogs to cats.

Yun Zhu, Associate Professor, Chinese and Asian Studies

Yun Zhu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies in the Department of Critical Languages, where she teaches Chinese language, literature, film, and culture. Her current project, tentatively entitled "Of and Beyond Gender and Nation: The Dynamics of Sisterhood in the Modern Chinese Imaginary, 1890s to Mid-1930s," investigates the unfolding of sisterhood stories in intellectual, literary, and cinematic discourses as embedded in the master narrative of Chinese modernity.

Alicia Imperiale, Associate Professor, Architectural History/Theory and Design

Alicia Imperiale, Architect, is Assistant Professor of Architectural History/Theory and Design at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute, an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College/City University of New York, an MA and PhD (Fall 2013) in Architectural History and Theory from Princeton University with the dissertation, Critical Organicism: Alternate Histories of Italian Architecture 1958-1973.

Graduate School Senior Doctoral Fellows

Brooke Bocast, PhD candidate, Anthropology

Brooke Bocast is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology. Her dissertation, "'If books fail, try beauty': Gender, consumption and higher education in Uganda," examines value production in urban Uganda through the lens of university students' romantic relationships. By considering how female students negotiate competing moral, financial, and affective imperatives through participation in Kampala's university-based sexual economy, this work will illuminate larger tensions regarding social reproduction in cities across East Africa.

Lawrence Kessler, PhD candidate, History

Lawrence Kessler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation, "Islands Hitched to Everything Else: An Environmental History of Hawaii and its Sugarcane Industry," examines the history of sugarcane cultivation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hawaii, the ecological changes that accompanied the rise of cane plantations, and the consequences of those changes for the islands and their human inhabitants. "Islands Hitched to Everything Else" argues that the rise of industrial plantation agriculture in Hawaii connected the islands to a global network of environmental and economic change. This history of a single plant grown on a small archipelago demonstrates how people with capital have attempted to impose artificial order on a dynamic natural world, how ideas and economies can unite remote places, and how environmental conditions and nonhuman actors can exert their own powerful historical agency.

CLA Advanced Graduate Scholars

Timothy Andrews Sayle, PhD candidate, History

Tim Sayle's dissertation, "Pax Atlantica: NATO's Search for a Global Grand Strategy, 1955-1968" is a diplomatic history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His project, drawing on research in fourteen archives, connects the history of NATO with broader questions about decolonization, European integration, and American foreign relations. At heart is the question whether NATO survived crises and change on the strength of transnational connections between allies or a careful balance of international interests. Before taking up his CHAT Fellowship, Tim was the Davis Fellow at Temple's Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, a Doctoral Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and held a SSCHRC Doctoral Award. His research has appeared in Canadian Military History, Cold War History, Intelligence & National Security, and the International Journal.

Brendan Tuttle, PhD candidate, Anthropology

Brendan Tuttle is a Ph.D Candidate in Anthropology. His dissertation, "Life is prickly: History, belonging, and common place in Bor, South Sudan," is an historical ethnography of efforts to build for a peaceful future in a troubled region. By examining how people in Bor creatively put up impediments to violence by creating a sense of the ordinary in their everyday lives, the project considers how concepts developed by people in Bor country to understand the dynamics of their own history can contribute to wider body of ethnographic theory.

Graduate Associate Fellows

Melanie Newport, PhD candidate, History

Melanie Newport is a PhD candidate in United States history. Her dissertation addresses the transformation of American county jails during the latter part of the twentieth century. Contributing to the fields of recent American history, political development, and criminal justice, her dissertation will reveal the impact of the War on Crime on county jails and the role county jails played in developing a system of mass incarceration.

Maite Barragan, PhD candidate, History

Maite Barragan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the Tyler School of Art. Her dissertation explores the interrelationships between the popular and elite classes' visual cultures in Madrid from 1926 through 1936. The study of visual material published in periodicals, popular films, and avant-garde paintings and sculptures permits a more inclusive understanding of how a bourgeoning urbanization impacted the Spanish capital and its people.

Sendy Guerrier, PhD candidate, Geography

Sendy Guerrier is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography and Urban Studies. Her dissertation is titled "A Feminist Geographic Analysis of the Impact of Social Networks on the Labor Market Outcomes of Haitian Immigrants Employed in the Long-term Care Industry". Her research draws on feminist geographic scholarship on the use of social networks in the labor market matching process to examine the process by which individuals and groups are able to effectively navigate the occupational hierarchy of the long-term care industry. Her work examines the labor matching process within the context of significant demographic shifts occurring at multiple scales, most notably the rapidly aging native born population in need of care and the increasing numbers of Black immigrants entering the local labor market. Her work will contribute to substantive areas related to migration, urban labor markets, and gender studies.

Alex Melonas, PhD candidate, Political Science

Alex Melonas is a PhD candidate in Political Science. His dissertation engages themes at the intersection of biology and political theory. "Situated Animals: Recovering a Biologically Informed Political Theory" challenges the excesses of the social constructionist thesis. Without discounting the usefulness of social constructionism to challenge what were other prevailing dogmas, he argues that the thesis itself has now become so hegemonic that it is shutting down critical analysis rather than stimulating it. Through an examination of the relevance of socio-biological findings to political theoretical discussions of identity, human nature, and malleability, his dissertation aims to "recover" a common theme, historically speaking, in political theory: the reality of the human animal.