Postdoctoral Fellows
Anne Löhnert received her Ph.D. in Assyriology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany, where she holds a position as Lecturer. Her scientific interests include the handling of fear of divine loss as reflected by so-called lamentations – literary cultic texts that were in use in ancient Mesopotamia since c. 2000 BC. She has published a book (Wie die Sonne tritt heraus, 2009), and several articles on this topic. Her current project focuses on the mechanics of administration of royal power as exemplified by the palace organization of the ancient administrative capital Nuzi that flourished in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC in the region of modern Kirkuk (Northern Iraq).
Ayten Gündoğdu is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2008. Her research centers on critical approaches to human rights, contemporary problems of citizenship, and political and ethical dilemmas of international migration. Her current book project, Aporias of Human Rights, draws on the work of twentieth-century political theorist Hannah Arendt and analyzes the paradoxes of human rights for the purposes of understanding the contemporary struggles of asylum-seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants. She has work forthcoming in European Journal of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, and Political Theory.
Berit Hildebrandt is Research Associate for Ancient History at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History in 2005 from the Georg August Universität Göttingen, Germany. Her research interests include social and economic history, gender history, and ancient medicine. Her current project explores Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity, with a Focus on Silk. Roman written sources mention silk (sericum /serica) as a much sought-after good, but at the same time a moral discourse arose which condemned it for a number of reasons. Her work argues that the moralizing literature conceals the important role silk played in the formation of the monarchy, for example, as mark of status. Based on written and archaeological sources, the project will investigate the different forms of exchange and the meaning of silk as commodity, gift, tribute, and status symbol in a diachronic and transcultural perspective. The goal is to enhance our understanding of the economic and socio-political dimensions of trade in antiquity.
David Russell received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011. His book project, A Literary History of Tact identifies the development of an ethic and aesthetic of tact in nineteenth-century Britain. The meaning of tact travelled in this period from the realm of politesse, and the prerogative of an elite, to the realm of politics and an everyday urban sociability. The project credits this development to the experiments in style of the under-studied essay form, and demonstrates how tact emerged in the response of romantic essayists to urban modernization. The project challenges current readings of nineteenth-century sociability as an assertion of power relations, proposing instead that tact provided the basis of an “aesthetic liberalism.” In the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater this liberalism demanded the freedom of a more just distribution of aesthetic experience, in critique of and complement to John Stuart Mill’s freedom of procedural conflict and rational consensus. David’s second project is called Learning from Experience: Aesthetic Education and the Foundation of Literary Criticism. It examines how the “sage” writing of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and George Eliot sought to change their audiences through the experience of reading, and the ways in which this tradition of writing provided a basis for the development of the discipline of literary study. David has work forthcoming in ELH and Raritan.
Haydon Cherry studied Southeast Asian history at the National University of Singapore and Yale University. His Ph.D. dissertation examined the social history of the poor in colonial Saigon, based on archival work in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Hà Nội, and Hồ Chí Minh City. Haydon’s received support from Yale University, the Social Science Research Council, and from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. His current interests include modern Vietnamese social history, the history of Vietnamese political economy, intellectual change in twentieth-century Vietnam, and the social history of modern Burma. He has published on colonialism, nationalism, and archaeology in Vietnam, as well as a number of reviews.
Kyung-Ho Cha is Junior Professor of German Literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in German literature from the Technical University Berlin in 2008. His primary work is in the field of literature and science, focusing on evolutionary biology and the writings of Walter Benjamin. His book "Human Mimicry: Poetics of Evolution" (2010) explores the emergence and proliferation of the scientific myth of human mimicry in literature and the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The biological term mimicry originally describes the deceptive resemblance of an insect to another species or its environment. Around 1900 men of letters as well as biologists, physicians, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and sociologists probed the question of human mimicry and its function for societal coexistence: human beings are attributed the biological ability of perfectly adapting to their social environment to the point that they are physically and psychologically indiscernible from their peers. His current project, “Walter Benjamin and the History of Science,” analyzes the historical context of Benjamin's epistemology and pursues the question of whether his reflections on material culture and changing modes of perception can be methodically harnessed for a 'Benjaminian' history of science.
Interdisciplinary Dissertation Completion Fellows
Katherine In-Young Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard University. Her dissertation explores the ways in which the popular samulnori percussion genre from South Korea has accrued a range of cultural and political meanings over time and place. Employing historical and ethnographic methodologies, she interrogates how and why contested meanings are ascribed to music, especially in cases where there is no text to accompany it. Other interests include transnational circulations, historiography, and ethnographies of musical touring. Her research on music and protest was awarded the Charles Seeger Prize by the Society of Ethnomusicology in 2010. She trained as a classical pianist under Anton Nel at the University of Michigan (B.M. Piano Performance; B.M. Musicology), and holds an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Washington.
Matthew Sussman is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University. His dissertation examines the way that Aristotelian virtue ethics influenced philosophy and aesthetics during the Victorian period. He argues that whereas other ethical approaches focus on content or theme, virtue ethics highlights the value of literary style within an author’s work, prompting reappraisals of famously overlooked or difficult styles in authors such as Thackeray, Trollope, or Meredith. Matthew holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in Contemporary European Studies and a B.A. from Harvard in History and Literature. He has also served as a Cabinet Officer in the Department of Canadian Heritage in Ottawa where he worked on issues related to multiculturalism and human rights.