Affiliates
Sofya Aptekar, Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research
Sofya Aptekar is a sixth year graduate student in the Sociology Department and Office of Population Research. She is interested in sociology of culture, race and ethnicity, stratification and inequality, contemporary immigration and immigrant incorporation in urban settings, and immigration law post-WWII. Her dissertation is a mixed-methods examination of nationalism and national identity through the lens of immigrant naturalization in Canada and the United States. She also writes about immigrants in local New Jersey politics and is working on a study of hipsters in Williamsburg. Sofya earned a BA in Sociology from Yale University and taught elementary school before coming to Princeton.
Matthew Axtell, Department of History
Keisha N. Blain, Department of History
Keisha N. Blain is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century African American History, Black Feminism and African Diaspora Studies. Before coming to Princeton, Keisha received her B.A. in History and Africana Studies from Binghamton University (SUNY).
Adrienne Brown is a fifth-year PhD student in the English Department. Her dissertation, Reading Between the Skylines--The Scyscraper and the Frailty of Space in American Modernism, takes the absence of the skyscraper in modernist prose as its starting point, tracing this peculiar absence to broader anxieties about the instability of space emerging in the early 20th century. Her other research interests include the American underclass, critical race studies, popular culture (particular music), narrative theory, and Modernisms. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Maryland in 2005.
Michelle Coghlan, Department of English
Before joining the graduate program in 2004, Michelle received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, taught English in the suburbs of Paris, and worked as an Americorps volunteer in West Oakland. Her dissertation, "Revolution’s Afterlife: the Paris Commune in American Cultural Memory," traces the Commune’s uncanny persistence in the U.S. literary and cultural imaginary into the Modernist period, unearthing the ways Americans represented and consumed the spectacle—and the specter—of the Commune and its fiery aftermath across a variety of literary forms and mass-cultural mediums. Other research interests include: 19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture, Transnational American Studies, American Women Writers, African American Literature and Postcolonial and Marxist theory. Her research has been supported by awards from the Program in American Studies, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA); in 2008-9, she was the recipient of a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship. In the past, she had the pleasure of teaching AMS 201: Introduction to American Studies.
Kameron Collins, Department of English
Kameron entered the English department in 2009. His current interests are in 19th and 20th century American literature, architecture and visual culture, with an emphasis on representations and performances of pain, mourning and nostalgia. In particular, he is interested in artistic and political monuments to bodies in pain and the ensuing conflicts (and limits) of representation. Genres of interest include AIDS narratives, slave narratives, law and war.
Justene Hill, Department of History
Justene Hill is a first-year graduate student in the Department of History. Her academic interests include African-American History, History of Slavery in the British Atlantic World, and Women’s History. Specifically, Justene is interested in studying the formation of informal and clandestine economies within enslaved communities in the United States and the British West Indies and specifically the ways in which gender shaped participation in informal economic activities. Justene has a B.A. in Spanish from Swarthmore College and an M.A. from Florida International University in African New World Studies. She is originally from Oakland, California.
Chin Jou, Department of History
Chin Jou is a sixth-year graduate student in the history department. She is writing a dissertation on nutrition and medical authorities’ ideas about diet, health, and obesity at the turn of the twentieth century. She graduated from Cornell with a B.A. in the College Scholar Major, Government, and History.
Joy Knoblauch, Department of Architecture
Joy Knoblauch is a student in the Architecture PhD program interested in late 20th century history and theory, particularly domestic environments and environmental psychology in American and English contexts. Previous research topics have included the challenge to the autonomous subject posed by theories of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, the professional and popular media representation of Co-op City in the Bronx between 1965 and 1970 and negotiations of privacy in suburban adolescent bedrooms. Joy has a professional background in architecture and a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale culminating in a thesis on Architecture and Contingent Subjectivity in the theories and designs of Robin Evans between 1963 and 1982.
Jessica Lowe, Department of History
Jessica Lowe is a graduate student in the history department, and specializes in 19th century American legal history, particularly crime and punishment, the American South, American conservatism, and religion and public policy. Jessica is also a graduate of Harvard Law School; before coming to Princeton, she clerked in the District of Connecticut and on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and practiced appellate litigation with Jones Day in Washington, D.C.
Larry D. Lyons II, Department of English
Larry D. Lyons II is a doctoral candidate in Princeton University's department of English where his dissertation research examines the emergence of the Black middle class in Depression-era literature and photography. More broadly, he is interested in articulations of whiteness normativity in 20th century American literature and visual culture. His work is deeply indebted to the fields of masculinity studies, queer theory and black feminist thought. He received his BA in English literature from Rutgers University.
Emily Mace, Department of Religion
Emily Mace entered the program in 2004 with the Religion in America subfield. Before coming to Princeton, she received her MTS from Harvard Divinity School and her BA from Amherst College. Her main area of work looks at religious liberalism in ways that move beyond Protestant theology towards issues of practice, ritual, gender, and pluralism. She enjoys studying the turn of the twentieth century and the myriad ways that era gave birth to the thorny problems and plush pleasures found in American culture today. Her dissertation is titled "Cosmopolitan Communions: Practices of Religious Liberalism in America, 1880-1940."
Sarah Milov, Department of History
Sarah is a third year Ph.D. student in the History department who focuses on twentieth century American history. She is beginning the process of writing a dissertation that will examine how Southern farmers engaged with the "creed" of the New South between the 1890s and WWII. Sarah received her BA from Harvard where she majored in Social Studies. She is also a Resident Graduate Student in Wilson College.
Maribel Morey, Department of History
Maribel Morey is a third year graduate student in the History Department where she focuses on twentieth century U.S. and European intellectual history, and legal history. She is writing her dissertation on the Carnegie Corporation of New York's "race study", which was conducted during the late 1930s and early 1940s; directed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal; and published in 1944 as "An American Dilemma." With a similar focus on European scholars' analyses of race in twentieth century United States, Maribel wrote "Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Little Rock, 1957-59: Echoing Academic Critiques of Brown, and (Somewhat Unwillingly) Legitimizing Segregationist Claims for State Sovereignty," which she presented at the Hannah Arendt and Little Rock Symposium at Princeton University, spring 2007.
In May 2006, she completed a JD degree at the New York University School of Law. In 2003, she graduated from the University of Notre Dame, with a BA in Political Science and Romance Languages and Literatures (French and Spanish).
Dael Norwood, Department of History
Dael Norwood is a graduate student in the History Department, specializing in the history of the early American republic. His dissertation project examines Americans' involvement in global maritime commerce (particularly trade with China) and the impacts this global trade had on the domestic politics, foreign relations, and political economy of the United States before the Civil War. Dael received his B.A. from Wesleyan University, where he majored in History and French.
Anthony Petro, Department of Religion
Anthony Petro is a fourth year graduate student in the Department of Religion. He focuses on American religious history and has strong interests in ethnography, feminist theory, George Whitefield, and early twentieth-century America. His dissertation project "After the Wrath of God: A Religious History of AIDS in America" explores progressive religious responses to the AIDS epidemic since the 1980s. Before coming to Princeton, he earned a BA from Georgia State University and an MA from the University of Chicago. He also worked for the Feminist Legal Theory Project at Emory Law School in Atlanta.
Sonya Posmentier, Department of English
Sonya Posmentier is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English. Before coming to Princeton, she received a BA from Yale University and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Oregon, and spent many years teaching high school. Her research interests include: poetry and poetics, literary modernism, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory. Her dissertation, “’The Unvarying Season’: Cultivation and Catastrophe in Twentieth Century Poetry of the African Diaspora” inquires into the relationships among poetic form, organic form, and cultural identity during the modern period and beyond.
Lindsay Reckson, Department of English
Lindsay Reckson is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English. Before joining the graduate program in 2005, Lindsay received her B.A. in English and American Literature at New York University. Her research interests include American religious history, intellectual history (especially connections between transcendentalism and pragmatism), political and public sphere theory, theories of subjectivity, history of science, and aesthetics. Her dissertation, "The Afterlife of Enthusiasm in American Literature, 1880-1920," explores the intersections of religious, aesthetic, and political experience in American literary realism. Lindsay was awarded a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship and a Center for the Study of Religion Graduate Research Award for 2009-2010.
John Reuland, Department of English
A fourth year PhD student in English, John Reuland is interested in 19th and 20th century American literature, poetry and poetics, popular music, and American intellectual history. His dissertation centers on African American literary culture and pragmatist aesthetics. Before coming to Princeton he received an AB from Harvard in American History and Literature, an MA in English from the University of Illinois, and spent a few years working in business.
Mark Robinson, Department of Anthropology
Mark Robinson is a doctoral student in the anthropology department. His general interests include the social study of science (STS) and of pychopharmaceuticalization, medical anthropology and neuroethics. His specific research questions focus on emerging innovations in neuroscience and biomedicine (especially relating to pharmaceuticals and technologies) in the U.S and the attendant, emerging ethical issues. His additional research interests pertain to theories of human morality generally, the role of the social sciences in ethics, and the problem of language in the biosciences. Under a fellowship from Princeton''s Center for the Study of Religion and Princeton's Institute for International and Regional Studies, Mark conducted research in collaboration with L’Institut Jean Nicod / Département d’Etudes Cognitives in Paris and recently completed a summer program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Neuroscience and Society. A former Galbraith scholar, Mark is a member of the Technology and Ethics Working Group at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center on Ethics.
Saul Schwartz, Department of Anthropology
Saul has been a graduate student in the anthropology department since 2008. His interests, broadly speaking, center on connections between anthropology and history. He is particularly interested in ethnohistory, archaeology, cultural preservation, language revitalization, and collaborative approaches to research with American Indian communities in the Midwest and Plains. Saul received his BA from Beloit College with majors in anthropology and history.
Jamie Sherman, Department of Anthropology
Jamie Sherman is a graduate student in Anthropology, and recently completed dissertation research at a working class bodybuilding gym in Brooklyn, NY. Broadly, her work concerns the intersection of body politics and everyday life in the United States. Her work engages with literatures of race and multiculturalism, gender and (in particular) masculinity, and post-industrial urban socialities.
James Steichen, Department of Music
James Steichen is a second year graduate student in musicology whose scholarship focuses on cross-disciplinary performance studies and institutional mediation in classical music, opera, and musical theater. He studied comparative literature at the University of Virginia and holds a master’s degree in Humanities from the University of Chicago. His professional background includes extensive experience in arts management and non-profit fundraising, including positions at the National Symphony Orchestra and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Anne Twitty, Department of History
Anne Twitty is a PhD candidate in the department of history. Broadly defined, Anne's research focuses on questions of nineteenth century American social, cultural, legal, and political history, including the history of the American South and Midwest, slavery and emancipation, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and gender and women's history. Her dissertation, "Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Mississippi Valley, from the Northwest Ordinance to Dred Scott," examines a collection of slave freedom suits that reveals the dense, tangled web of slaves, masters, attorneys, judges, and politicians who made and unmade slavery at the margins of the antebellum West. Before coming to Princeton, Anne received her B.A. in Political Science at The George Washington University in 2003.
James R. Young, Department of Religion
James R. Young, Jr. is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion. He is specializing in 19th and 20th century African American religious history. James holds degrees from Dartmouth College (A.B., 2005) and Harvard Divinity School (M.Div., 2008).
Alumni Affiliates
Dan Bouk, Department of History
Dan Bouk is a fifth year graduate student in the history department. His dissertation, "Science and the Culture of Capitalism: Life Insurance in the United States, 1850-1950," explains the development of a distinct economic culture shaped and directed by succeeding generations of scientific and medical experts employed within some of America's most important capitalist institutions—its life insurance companies. He also writes about killing mosquitoes in early-twentieth century suburbs and researching wildlife, while maintaining broader interests in American intellectual and cultural history, environmental history, the history of technology, and the history of capitalism. In the fall 2007 he had the pleasure of teaching for AMS 201. Dan is now an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.
Erin Forbes, Department of English
BA (Reed College). Erin Forbes joined the Princeton graduate program in English in 2003. Her interests include colonial, 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. literature and culture; Enlightenment aesthetic, moral and political philosophy; African-American and women's writing; critical race theory; religion and literature; law and literature; the popular press and reform writing. Erin's dissertation, "Genius of Deep Crime: Literature, Enslavement and the American Criminal" explores the relationship of slavery and penal reform to the literary development of the figure of the "criminal genius" from early national print culture through reflections on Emancipation in the 1890s.
Her research was supported by awards from the Center for the Study of Religion, the Program in American Studies, and the American Antiquarian Society. Erin's dedication to undergraduate education has been recognized by a Cotsen Junior Teaching Fellowship, and in the Fall of 2008 she precepted for both "Introduction to American Studies: American Places" and "Introduction to Afro-American Studies." Erin is now teaching in a tenure-track position at the University of Wyoming, where she teaches both American and African American literature.
Leah M. Wright, Department of History
Leah M. Wright 's research interests include United States History, African American Studies, and American Politics. She was a 2008-2009 MMUF/Woodrow Wilson Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellow. Her dissertation, "The Loneliness of the Black Conservative: Black Republicans and the Grand Old Party, 1964-1992," offered new insight into the relationship between African American politics, the American civil rights movement, and the Republican Party. Leah's past projects include, "Dilemmas in Blackness: Women Gender, and Identity in the Black Power Movement," and "The Madness of Marcus Garvey: Early 20th Century Black Organizational Solidarity as a Reaction to the Garvey Movement." Leah graduated from Dartmouth College in 2003 with a BA in History. Beginning in the fall 2009 semester, Leah is an Assistant Professor of History and African-American Studies at Wesleyan University.