Skip to content

Fellows

Visiting Fellows

 

Sanjam Ahluwalia is an Associate Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program and Department of History at Northern Arizona University. Her rsearch interests are in the fields of women/gender histories with an emphasis on histories of reproduction and sexualities. Her monograph Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877‑1947 was co‑published by Permanent Black Press and Illinois University Press,2008. She is currently working on her book length project on the history of sexology in India, locating it within a larger global context. She has recently been awarded a residential research fellowship to participate at the Leslie Center Humanities Institute on the Global History of Sexual Science, at Dartmouth College over the summer of 2013. She serves as the book review editor (South Asia) for Journal of Asian Studies. She is also a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Women's History.

 

Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and founding director of BiGS (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality). She has published widely on sexology, translation, nineteenth century literary culture, and the histories of female and male same-sex sexuality including the books English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930 (Palgrave, 2009) and Women and Cross-Dressing 1800-1930, 3 vols (Routledge, 2006). Her most recent publication is Queer 1950s: Reshaping Sexuality in the Postwar Years, an interdisciplinary collection of essays co-edited with the historian Matt Cook (Palgrave in 2012). She is currently completing a book entitled A Violent World of Difference: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Shaping of Queer Modernity. Taking its cues from queer histories of damage and recent scholarship on trauma and violence, the project turns to the lesser-known works of the prolific Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) – including his writings about racism, homophobia and gay suicide – to examine how violence, death, hatred and persecution affected the development of a transnational modern queer identity and culture. In addition, to her work on the histories of sexuality, Heike has research interests in gender and new forms of writing. She recently contributed to a collection of essays on The Lesbian Premodern edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer and Diane Watt (2012). Her chapter, 'Graphic Lesbian Continuum', about Israeli graphic artist Ilana Zeffren and twenty-first century lesbian cultural production, will be published later this year in Graphic Details: The Book, ed. Sarah Lightman (McFarland 2013).

 

Chiara Beccalossi was educated at the University of Bologna. She then did her MSc at Imperial College London and UCL, before obtaining her PhD at Queen Mary University of London. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland and a lectureship in Gender History at Birkbeck University of London. She joined Oxford Brookes University as a Lecturer in History of Medicine in 2012. Her monograph, Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, ca. 1870-1920 has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan (2012). It offers the first comparative study of British and Italian sexological perspectives on women and considers different medical specialties such as psychiatry, psychology, criminal anthropology, forensic medicine and gynaecology. She has also co-edited A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Berg, 2011) and has published a number of articles on the history of medicine, sexology and sexuality. Recent articles include 'Female Same-Sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-Century Europe' (2012); 'Nineteenth-Century European Psychiatry on Same-Sex Desires: Pathology, Abnormality, Normality and the Blurring of Boundaries' (2010)and 'The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion ca. 1870-1900' (2009). Chiara has recently begun to develop two new research areas. The first project explores the phenomenon of European and British sexual tourism in Italy during the nineteenth century. The second project explores how a network of sex researchers defined sexual norms and treated sexual deviances and dysfunctions in the interwar period. In particular she is interested in Latin eugenics.

 

Pablo Ben is the Assistant Professor of Latin American History at San Diego State University. Professor Ben studied anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires and received an MA and Ph.D in Latin American History from the University of Chicago. He has written a number of articles on the history of sexuality in Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1955 focusing on aspects such as female prostitution, male homosexuality, and family formation. Prof. Ben's work explores gender and sexuality from the point of view of social and cultural history with a special emphasis on the daily life of the urban lower classes. As part of his growing interest in transnational and world history, he is currently working on a book manuscript comparing sexuality in Buenos Aires with other urban hubs of the globalizing world in the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This study focuses on the formation of urban areas connecting hinterlands to the world market during this era and it explores how disproportionate male migration and an unstable job market often led to the formation of a large underworld of crime, commercial sex and eroticism between men.

 

Shrikant Botre completed a MPhil degree in history from the University of Pune on Telugu migrants to the Bombay Presidency between 1850 and 1926. Recently he has been accepted into the PhD. program at the University of Warwick (UK) and has received a Chancellor's International Scholarship from the University to work on the topic of  'Sexual Modernity in Colonial Western India.' During the past year, he has been working on the correspondence written to R.D. Karve in the magazine 'Samaj Swasthya' as a part of a joint project (with Prof. Douglas Haynes)  funded by the Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences, Dartmouth College. Presently he is also working on the editorials of 'Deena- Mitra', a journal that served as the mouthpiece of the Non- Brahmin movement in western India during the first half of twentieth century. He has worked as a visiting assistant professor in the Interdisciplinary School of Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Department of History at University of Pune.

 

Donna J. Drucker is a postdoctoral fellow in the Topology of Technology Research Training Group at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. She holds a master of library science and a PhD in history from Indiana University. She has published journal articles in the histories of science, gender and sexuality, and she has two books forthcoming: The Machines of Sex Research: Technology and the Politics of Identity, 1945-1985 (Springer, 2013) and The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).

 

Kate Fisher is a Professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Exeter. She has written four books: Birth Control, Sex and marriage in Britain 1918-1960 . OUP, 2006; Sex Before the Sexual Revolution (with Simon Szreter), CUP, 2010; Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (co-edited with Sarah Toulalan), Palgrave, 2011; and The Routledge History of Sex and the Body 1500 to the Present (co-edited with Sarah Toulalan), Routledge, 2013. She is co-authoring, with Dr Jana Funke, a book on the uses of the past in the construction of sexual knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth . She is director (with Rebecca Langlands) of an interdisciplinary project Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History (within the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter) which explores the way that both popular and academic ideas about sex and sexuality have been articulated from the 18th century to the present day with reference to erotic material from past cultures, societies and civilisations. As part of this research she is running a project called Sex and History  to bring the fruits of this research to the wider community. They are working with museums, schools, and other groups throughout the South West to develop ways of using museum artefacts to stimulate discussion about contemporary sexual issues among young people.

 

Jana Funke is an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. She has published several chapters and articles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and sexology. She is the co-editor of Sexuality, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave, 2011) and editor of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall (Manchester University Press, 2014). She is currently in the late stages of finishing a monograph entitled Time Travel: Modernism, Sexuality and Female Development. She is also co-authoring, with Professor Kate Fisher, a book on uses of the past in the construction of sexual knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

 

Kit Heintzman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. Heintzman completed an MA at Queen's University studying the creation of nosological categories for sadism and masochism in turn of the century Germany and the concomitant colonization of Southwest and East Africa in 2010. Upon completion Heintzman became a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry-Berlin, shifting focus to contemporary representations of post-identity politics and the creation of political-pomo-porno. Heintzman has lectured in courses addressing the sociology of sport, gender and medicine, and psychology. Heintzman's new research addresses a history of human-animal health/bodily entanglement and nation building in late eighteenth-century France.

 

Rainer Herrn is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Since 19991, he has also worked at the Research Center for the History of Sexual Science of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft, also in Berlin. He studied in Berlin and Leipzig, where he received a doctorate with research into behavior genetics.Currently, he is working on the history of psychiatry and sexual science between 1850 and 1930 in the research project Kulturen des Wahnsinns (Cultures of Madness), financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council). Topics of his research include the establishment, function, and practice of both disciplines as ways of interpreting and negotiating psychological otherness of sexual and gender difference in the urban modernity; key moments of this history include the introduction of new diagnoses (transvestitismus, transsexuality, or schizophrenia) and therapies (psychoanalysis). Two books have been published from this research: Schnittmuster des Geschlechts – Transvestismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (2005) and, with Ulrike Brunotte, the edited volume Männlichkeiten und Moderne – Geschlecht in den Wissenskulturen um 1900 (2008); recent essays include: "Wie die Traumdeutung durch die Türritze einer geschlossenen Anstalt sickerte. Zum Umgang mit der Psychoanalyse an der Psychiatrischen und Nervenklinik der Charité bis 1930" (2013); "Die Einführung der Schizophrenie an der Charité" (2012); "Distanzierte Verhältnisse – Die Berliner Universität und die Sexualwissenschaft" (2011); and „Vom Traum zum Trauma. Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1919-1933" (2004).

 

Rebecca Hodes is a historian of medicine and a research associate at the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa, where she is researching the medical history of abortion. Rebecca received her M.Sc in the History of Medicine, Science and Technology, and her D.Phil from the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford University. Her research has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Social History of Medicine, South African Medical Journal and Science as Culture. Rebecca has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the representational politics of HIV, on post-apartheid South Africa, and on the Holocaust. In 2013, she will co-convene a seminar series on 'Science and Scandal' at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa. The series will provide a forum for researchers who are working on aspects of the contested politics of health and illness in South Africa and beyond. Rather than focusing on the authority of medicine, the series will aim to shift the frame to the conditions that destabilize and limit that authority, during periods of public and/or professional skepticism and challenge. She may be contacted at rebecca.hodes@gmail.com.

 

Rachel Hui-chi Hsu, associate professor in Department of History in Tunghai University (Taichung, Taiwan). She received her Ph.D. in National Cheng-chi University (Taipei, Taiwan) in 2001. Her field is modern Chinese cultural and gender history, urban study, and transnational history. Now she is pursuing her second doctoral degree of U.S. and transnational history at Johns Hopkins University while retaining her teaching position in Tunghai University; she has become an ABD since April 2012. Her new dissertation topic is about a transnational propaganda project of Mother Earth, an anarchist activist journal published by Emma Goldman. She has published two books and several articles. 'Nora' in China: The Image-Making and Evolution of the New Woman (1900s~1930s) was published by Department of history, National Cheng-chi University (Taipei) in 2003. New Looks of an Ancient Capital: Urban Consumption of Beiping from 1928 to 1937 was published by Student Bookstore (Taipei) in 2008. Her recent articles include "Living New Life, Being New Woman: the Image-making of Modern Ideal Woman by KMT Government during the Nanjing Decade" (2005), "Waitresses in Beiping during the Nanjing Decade (1928-1937): Urban Consumption and Women's Jobs" (2005), "Discourses on Dress Reform and Beyond: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Dress of Women" and its Critical Implication" (2008), "Discoursing Romantic Love and New Sexual Morality Evolved in the 1920s: exemplified by the Three Debates in which Zhang Xichen Took Part" (2008), "Emma Goldman and the "Propaganda by the Deed" of Mother Earth: its Transnational Networks and Gender Activism" (2012). She is especially interested in the transnational encounters/interactions of progressive and radical ideas, theories, and activities with the focus on print radicalism and activism. She has received Fulbright Scholarships in 1999 and 2008, research grants from National Science Council (Taiwan), and TOYOTA Foundation (Japan).

 

Ryan M. Jones is a currently a Faculty Fellow at Colby College in Waterville, ME and will join Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 2013. He received his PhD in Latin American History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2012, with Latin American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies minors and tested fields in World/Global History and Sexuality Studies. His research, which has earned generous support from several national and institutional sources, is a blend of social and cultural history, and it focuses on masculinity, homosexuality, and nation in Mexico during the twentieth century. His current book project, Estamos en Todas Partes: Homosexuality, Nation, and Modernity in Modern Mexico (1880-1960) is the first in-depth history of homosexuality in Mexican urban areas. It examines Mexican male homosexuality in two registers: as a social historical formation of queer male identities and communities and as a cultural historical articulation of national identity. In short, the very category of "queer Mexican (man)" created as a pathology by pundits, social reformers, cultural authorities, medical experts, and criminologists was foundational to the longue durée of political debates on Mexican citizenship and civil rights in modern Mexico. His second project will be a socio-cultural history of the Mexican YMCA. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences, and is currently working on articles on homosexuality at the Islas Marías penal colony, the Mexican Revolution as a world-historical event, and alternative queer archives in Mexico. A multiple award-winning instructor with experience teaching at Colby College and the University of Illinois, he incorporates gender and sexuality in each course because each is critical to revising how history is taught to students, and he situates Latin American histories within wider global frameworks.

 

Ralph Leck is a scholar and public intellectual who teaches social justice studies and intellectual history in the University Honors Program at Indiana State University. He completed an MA thesis on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history at The Ohio State University and received a PhD, MA, and Certificate in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who has published in several academic areas. His monograph, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology: The Birth of Modernity, 1880-1920, is considered a canonical text in the area of sociological theory. His second monograph, Vita Sexualis: The History and Theory of Sexual Science in Europe, 1860-1900, is forthcoming from Berghahn Press. This research highlights the radical civic implications of the sexological episteme and parses the long-overlooked relevance of sexual science to contemporary gender studies. Dr. Leck is currently completing a second monograph on the history of sexual science. It focusses on feminist sexology, the birth of sexual anthropology, and the politics of anti-fascist sexual science. A portion of that research was recently published as "Anti-Essentialist Feminism Versus Misogynist Sexology in Fin de Siècle Vienna" (Modern Intellectual History, 2012). His other refereed publications include "An Enemy of the People: Simmel, Ibsen, and the Civic Legacy of Nietzschean Sociology" (The European Legacy), "Conservative Empowerment & the Gender of Nazism" (Journal of Women's History), and "Simmel's Afterlife: Tropic Politics & the Culture of the Great War" (New German Critique).Dr. Leck is the former director of Peace and Justice Studies at Marian University, where he helped establish two peace and justice student living communities. His civic experiences include the organization of university-community events such as Global Peace & Justice Day and Human Rights Day; anti-war activism; participation in the Interfaith movement; work on behalf of labor groups such as Unite Here; and civic activities devoted to the engaged theology of the Solidarity/SOA movement.

 

Kirsten Leng  is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University (SPAN), and is affiliated with the Department of History and Program in Gender Studies. In 2013-2015, she will be an ACLS New Faculty Fellow affilitated with the Department of History and Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. She received her PhD in History and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Leng's research and teaching interests lay in the histories of gender and sexuality, Modern European History, and the history of science and medicine. She is currently working on a book length project, provisionally titled Sexual Knowledge/Sexual Politics: Contesting Truth and Power in the Early Twentieth Century. An intellectual, social, and cultural history, the book argues that the transnational emergence of sexology as a field and sex reform as a movement between the 1890s and 1930s must be viewed as interconnected and mutually constitutive phenomena. Specifically, the book maintains that both were products of collaborations between, and contestation amongst, scientific 'experts,' social reformers, and women intellectuals and activists.

 

Kurt MacMillan studies modern Latin American intellectual history with an emphasis on the history of science and its relationship to themes of race, gender, and nation. He recently completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Irvine with dual interdisciplinary minors in Women's Studies and Critical Theory. His dissertation, Hormonal Bodies: Sex, Race, and Constitutional Medicine in the Iberian-American World, 1900-1950 examines the circulation and adaptation of scientific ideas about sex and race in Chile, Ecuador, and Spain that were produced in relation to constitutional medicine, an early twentieth-century science that correlated physical features of the body with mental characteristics based on their presumed mutual determination by the endocrine system. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, and the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Quito.

 

Mark McLelland is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Wollongong and was the 2007/08 Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. Mark is a sociologist and cultural historian of Japan specializing in the history of sexuality, gender theory and new media. His recent publications have focused on the postwar history of Japanese cultures of sexuality and the development of the Internet in Japan. He has published widely, including the books Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2000), Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) and Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the edited collections Japanese Cybercultures (Routledge, 2003), Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (Routledge, 2005) and Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington, 2007). Mark's latest book project looks at the development of popular sexology in Japan in the early postwar period.

 

Ishita Pande is an Associate Professor of History at Queen's University in Canada. Her research interests include the centrality of the body and sexuality in colonial/modern governmentality. She is the author of Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010) -- a study of the impact of the colonial connection on race science in Britain, the imbrication of race science and imperial liberalism, the role of medical experts in the theory and practice of colonial government, and the use of a medicalized idiom in the fashioning of the Bengali 'modern' and a 'sanitary' citizenship in the long nineteenth century. Her interest in a critical understanding of colonial modernity continues to drive her work on the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada)-funded project, in which she is exploring the connected histories of the moral and political investment in childhood; the definition of an 'all India' nation space; and tensions over jurisdiction from international to 'personal' law; as revealed in the dissemination of a singular piece of legislation prohibiting child-marriage passed in India in 1929. Recent articles based on project include 'Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India' (Gender and History, 2012); 'Sorting Boys and Men: Unlawful Intercourse, Child Protection and the Child-Marriage Restraint Act of 1929'  in Colonial India (Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth, Forthcoming) and 'Phulmoni's Body: The Autopsy, the Inquest and the Humanitarian Narrative on Child-Rape in Colonial India' (South Asian History and Culture, Forthcoming). She holds a PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey, and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

 

Jill S. Smith is an Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College in Maine. Her research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality, Jewish studies, and the city of Berlin from the Wilhelmine era to the present. Her book entitled _Berlin Coquette: Prostitution, New Womanhood, and Desire in the German Capital, 1890-1933, which engages with sexological discourses on prostitution is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2013.

 

Michiko Suzuki is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2010). Her articles have appeared in journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Japanese Studies, and Japan Review. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern Japanese literature and history, and examines issues relating to gender, sexuality, women's writing, popular literature and print media. Her work on sexology has focused on the ways in which the works and ideas of Western sexologists have been translated and used in Japanese literature and culture. She is currently working on two projects: the first explores material culture, such as the kimono, and gender representation in postwar Japanese literature and film. The second looks at early twentieth-century views of sexual difference in Japan, from specific topics such as chastity to broad notions of male-female distinctions, expressed in sexology and other discourses.

 

Robert Deam Tobin holds the Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages, Literaures and Cultures at Clark University in Worcester, where he teaches on German literature, sexuality studies and human rights. He is the author of Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and Doctor's Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Science (Bucknell University Press, 2001). With Ivan Raykoff, he is the co-editor of A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (Ashgate, 2007); in 2011, he edited "Global Freud," a special issue of the journal Psychoanalysis and History. Recent articles include: "Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany," in Masculinity, Senses, Spirit (2011); "Early Nineteenth-Century Sexual Radicalism: Heinrich Hössli and the Liberals of His Day," in After the History of Sexuality: German Narratives of Lust and Longing (2012); and "Queering Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig," in Thomas Mann: Neue kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren (2012). He is completing a book-length project on the emergence of modern discourses of sexuality in German-speaking central Europe, tenatively called "Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex." In the summer semester 2013, he was the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freund Museum and the University of Vienna, where he was working on a new project focusing on sexuality and human rights.

 

Angela Willey, Assistant Professor of Feminist Science Studies received her MSc in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and her PhD in Women's Studies from Emory University in Atlanta, GA.  Before joining the faculty of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College as a Five College appointee in 2011, she completed her dissertation as a fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and a postdoctoral fellowship in LGBT Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, MN.  She is currently working on her first book, From Pair Bonding to Polyamory: On the Political Nature of Monogamy, which examines the racialized and gendered sexual politics of narratives about whether monogamy is natural or unnatural.  The book problematizes sexuality as a frame for the interpretation and reproduction of "human nature."  She is interested more broadly in queer feminist critiques of coupled forms of social belonging and naturecultural feminist theories of what we are and might be.  She is author of "'Science Says She's Gotta Have It': Reading for Racial Resonances in Woman-Centered Poly Literature" (2009) and "'Christian Nations', 'Polygamic Races', and Women's Rights: Toward a Genealogy of Monogamy and Whiteness" (2006) and co-author of "The Mating Life of Geeks: Love, Science, and the New Autistic Subject" (forthcoming) and "Why do Voles Fall in Love: Sexual Dimorphism in Monogamy Gene Research" (2011).  She is chair of the Five College Feminist Science and Technology Studies Initiative based in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and co-chair of Feminists in Science and Technology Studies, a mobile taskforce of the National Women's Studies Association and the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Dartmouth Fellows

 

Aimee Bahng is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College with affiliations in Women's and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. Her research has primarily focused on speculation and futurity with a particular attention to transnational Asian/American studies and queer theory. Her article on Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ("Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies") appeared in the "Alien/Asian" special issue of MELUS in 2008. She has two more articles forthcoming on the speculative fiction of Larissa Lai and Sonny Liew's graphic story collection Malinky Robot, and she is currently finishing up her first monograph DisOrienting Futures: Asian/American Speculative Fiction and Finance Capitalism

 

Michael R. Dietrich is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.  He earned his doctorate in Philosophy  at the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to Dartmouth in 1998, he was an Associate Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of California, Davis.  As a historian and philosopher of biology, his primary interests are in the nature of scientific controversy. In numerous scholarly articles and chapters, he has explored controversies in evolutionary genetics and molecular evolution, as well as controversial figures, such as the émigré geneticist Richard Goldschmidt. He is currently engaged in research that documents the diversity and distribution of developmental biology on a global scale during the post-war period. He has edited three books; Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology with Oren Harman (Yale 2007), The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences with Nancy Anderson (UPNE 2012), and Outsider Scientists: Routes to Innovation in the Life Sciences with Oren Harman (Chicago 2013, forthcoming). He is currently writing a book on genetic drift with Roberta Millstein and Robert Skipper entitled Survival of the Luckiest: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Random Drift in Evolutionary Biology, as well as a biography of Richard Goldschmidt. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Sloan Foundation. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the History of Biology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

 

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the Wissenschaft des Judentums.  Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christians, Nazis and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2008).  She is the author of over seventy articles and has edited or co-edited several books, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (1998). Currently she is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam from the 1830s to the 1930s. For that project, she received a Scholar's Grant in Islamic Studies from the Carnegie Foundation, and was given a fellowship in 2011-12 to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, an institute for advanced study. Many of her other publications have dealt with issues related to gender and sexuality, including "Jesus as Theological Transvestite," "From Jesus to Shylock: Configurations of Christians, Jews, and Gender in The Merchant of Venice," "Homoeroticism and the Origins of Christianity," "Theological Bulimia: Christianity and Its Dejudaization," "Gender and Agency in the Feminist Historiography of Jewish Identity," and "Does Atrocity Have a Gender? Women in the SS." She has received four honorary doctorates and numerous awards and fellowships, including the Carnegie Grant in Islamic Studies, grants from the Ford Foundation, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She serves at Dartmouth on the faculty in the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Religion, and the Women and Gender Studies Program.

 

Elizabeth Pérez, Assistant Professor of Religion, studied cultural studies and religion at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she received her bachelor's degree. She holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She comes to Dartmouth after teaching at the University of Chicago and Carleton College, offering such courses as "Religion and American Culture," "Envisioning Vodoun: Haitian Popular Religion in Historical Perspective," and "Goddesses." Her recent articles and first book project both draw on several years of ethnographic "observant participation" in a predominantly African-American community dedicated to the Afro-Cuban traditions of Lucumí (popularly called Santería), Palo Monte, and Espiritismo. Her peer-reviewed publications include "Portable Portals: Transnational Rituals for the Head across Globalizing Orisha Traditions" (forthcoming, 2013); "Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh: Historicizing the Initiation Narrative in Afro-Cuban Religions" (forthcoming, 2013); "Staging Transformation: Spiritist Liturgies as Theatres of Conversion in Afro-Cuban Religious Practice" (2012); "Cooking for the Gods: Sensuous Ethnography, Sensory Knowledge, and the Kitchen in Lucumí Tradition" (2011); "Spiritist Mediumship as Historical Mediation: African-American Pasts, Black Ancestral Presence, and Afro-Cuban Religions" (2011); and "The Virgin in the Mirror: Reading Images of a Black Madonna Through the Lens of Afro-Cuban Women's Experiences" (2010). Her chapters are soon to appear in the forthcoming anthologies Yemoja: Water Goddess, Fluidity and Tradition (SUNY Press); The Way of Food: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press); and "There is a Mystery": Esotericism, Gnosticism, and Mysticism in African American Religious Experience. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation; University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; University of Chicago Center for Gender Studies; and the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Her second major research project examines the challenges and triumphs of transgender and transsexual religious actors in the contemporary United States.

 

Dennis Washburn is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in Japanese Language and Literature from Yale University, and his research has covered a range of topics in both modern and classical Japanese literature, in cinema studies, and in comparative literature. He has published two monographs, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (Yale University Press, 1995) and Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity (Columbia, 2006), as well as numerous articles. He has also co-edited several volumes, including Word and Image in Japanese Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity (Brill, 2007). In addition to his scholarly work, he has translated several works of modern Japanese fiction, including Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai, Tsushima Yuko's Laughing Wolf, and Mizukami Tsutomu's The Temple of the Wild Geese, for which he received the 2008 US-Japan Friendship Commission Prize. He recently finished a new translation and annotation of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, which is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in the Critical Editions Series. He is currently working on two new scholarly projects:  a volume of essays, titled The Affect of Difference, that deals with representations of race under Japanese empire; and a monograph on the global circulation of the concept of the gothic and the aesthetics of the sublime in horror cinema.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *