Postdoctoral scholars join interdisciplinary community

Five new postdoctoral scholars have joined Princeton's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts for the 2011-12 academic year.

The society, created in 2000 by a gift from Emeritus Trustee Lloyd Cotsen, a 1950 graduate, is an interdisciplinary community that seeks to bring innovative approaches to scholarship and teaching at the University. It offers outstanding young scholars who have recently received their Ph.D. the opportunity to enhance their teaching and research over a period of three years. Its director is Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and a professor of English.

The society includes eight Princeton faculty members who serve as faculty fellows and meet regularly with the Cotsen Fellows in the Joseph Henry House. The full complement of 14 postdoctoral fellows is drawn from disciplines in the humanities, related social sciences and natural sciences.

The Cotsen Fellows for 2011-14 were selected from 890 applicants. They teach half-time in their academic department and pursue their own research. They are:

Hannah Freed-Thall, a Perkins-Cotsen Fellow and lecturer in French and Italian, who holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California-Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the relation between art and the ordinary in 20th-century fiction and philosophy. She is teaching a course in the Department of French and Italian on emotion in modernity, and will serve as a member of the faculty team for "Humanistic Studies 217-218," which explores interdisciplinary approaches to Western culture since the Renaissance. She will revise her dissertation for publication and conduct research on a second book project tentatively titled "'C'est vraiment dégueulasse': The Rhetoric of Revulsion in 20th-century France." 

Douglas Jones Jr., a Race/Ethnicity Studies-Cotsen Fellow and lecturer in English, who holds a joint Ph.D. in drama and humanities from Stanford University, where his dissertation, "The 'Common Sense' of Slavery: Race, Performance and a 'Peculiar' America, 1817-1861," won the Wendell Cole Memorial Prize for Distinguished Dissertation. He is teaching a seminar called "The Drama of Making America: Staging Race from the Revolution to the Civil War," and a freshman seminar on slavery and American culture. He is preparing a book manuscript on the ways in which proslavery ideology conditioned the social, political and cultural landscapes of the post-slavery North in the decades before the Civil War.

Joel Lande, a Cone-Haarlow-Cotsen Fellow and lecturer in humanistic studies, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago's Department of Germanic Studies. He is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled "Nomadic Stages: On the Emergency of Literary Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment," which traces the influence of itinerant performers on comedy from the early modern period to the 18th century. Lande is coordinating and lecturing in the two-semester course "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture: Antiquity to the Modern Period," as well as working on a project that examines folk-theatrical forms in the postwar Viennese avant-garde.

Ellen Lockhart, a Cotsen Fellow and lecturer in music, who recently finished a Ph.D. in musicology at Cornell University. Her dissertation, "Moving Statues: The Rise and Fall of Pygmalion, 1770-1815," charts the development of an aesthetic of animation within opera, dance and music theory on the Italian peninsula. She will pursue research on theories of operatic media and performance in the first half of the 19th century and teach two seminars, one on editing opera (with Professor of Music Wendy Heller) and one on the French and Italian opera industries of the 18th century. 

Tey Meadow, an LGBT Studies-Cotsen Fellow and lecturer in sociology, who received a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and a J.D. degree from Fordham University School of Law. Her work examines the ways that legal entities, political institutions and the family respond to challenges to gender and sexual classifications. Meadow is preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, "Bringing Up the Transgender Child: Parents, Activism and the New Gender Stories." She is teaching an undergraduate course in sociology on sex, gender and sexuality, and a freshman seminar titled "From Mars and Venus: Cultural Ideas of Male/Female Difference."