Princeton University

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.

April C. Armstrong, Department of Religion

April C. Armstrong entered the Ph.D. program in the Department of Religion in Religion in America in 2007. Currently she is working on a dissertation focusing on interfaith dialogue between the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Baptist Convention, entitled, "'That's What Makes Me a Jew and Him a Baptist': Jews, Southern Baptists, and the American Public Square from the Reagan Revolution to the Dawn of the New Millennium." She is interested in the challenges and costs of American pluralism, especially as related to church-state issues. Prior to enrolling at Princeton, she earned her B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Oklahoma and her M.A.Th. in Theological Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Matthew Axtell, Department of History

Keisha N. Blain, Department of History

Keisha N. Blain entered the history department in 2009. Her research interests include 20^th century U.S. History, African American History, Women’s History and African Diaspora. She is specifically interested in Black Nationalism and Black women’s international activities during the early twentieth century. Before coming to Princeton, Keisha received her B.A. in History and Africana Studies from Binghamton University (SUNY).

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. He works at the intersection of 19th and 20th century American literature and law, with related interests in legal and literary theory/philosophy, theories of affect (including but not limited to psychoanalysis), theories of performance, and American legal history. His dissertation project will likely examine the imbricated roles of affect, the body and aesthetics in American literature and law at the turn of the century. He is also at work on a secondary project concerning the persistence of falling bodies in post-9/11 artistic production. He was the recipient of an AMS summer research prize in 2010, and will be co-organizing the AMS graduate conference in fall 2012.

Henry M. Cowles, Department of History

Brittney Edmonds, Department of English

Brittney joined the English department in 2010. Her current interests include 20th Century American Literature, African-American Literature, and Science Fiction. Of particular interest is the work of author Octavia Butler.

Nika Elder, Department of Art & Archaeology

Rachel Gross, Department of Religion

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.

Jennifer Huynh, Department of Sociology

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. 

George Laufenberg, Department of Anthropology

George Laufenberg (post-generals) works at the intersection of medical anthropology, political anthropology, and the anthropology of religion; he is interested in relationships between embodied practices of spirituality, healing, and community formation in contemporary North American life. His fieldwork explores modes of knowledge production and representations of experience in the teaching and learning of metaphysically-oriented practices of ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine’, as well as the connections practitioners make to healing traditions in native North America and European esoteric traditions.

Rachel Lindsey, Department of Religion

Rachel McBride Lindsey is a fifth year doctoral student in the Department of Religion. Her dissertation focuses on vernacular photography and the visual archives of nineteenth-century American religion by employing deep material and visual culture studies approaches. The analytic paradigms of gender, sexuality, regionality, race, and the body help to locate some of the ways religious Americans incorporated various photographies into their devotional practices, domestic activities, and religious instruction. Rachel received her B.A. in Religious Studies at Missouri State University in 2006.

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.

Sarah Milov, Department of History

Sarah Milov is a historian of American politics. She is particularly interested in twentieth century agriculture policy and the imagery of farming that sustained it. Motivating questions of her research include, “why are you eating that,” “who grew this,” and “what is the American Meat Institute?”  Her dissertation, entitled “Little Tobacco: how tobacco farmers became lobbyists, 1920-1980,” examines the shifting relationship between government, tobacco growers and the tobacco industry.  Sarah received a BA in Social Studies from Harvard in 2007.   

Maribel Morey, Department of History 

Maribel Morey is a Phd candidate in the History Department where she is writing a dissertation on a landmark study that the United States Supreme Court, the Truman Administration, Congress, and the public-at-large in the 1940s and 1950s cited when discussing the urgency for white-black integration in the United States: Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944). The dissertation is titled, "The Politics of Race and Knowlege: Why Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) Came to Exist." This academic year, Maribel is writing the last chapters of the project in Stockholm, Sweden under Fulbright and American-Scandinavian Foundation grants. She plans to defend the dissertation in the fall of 2012. 

Dael Norwood,  Department of History

Dael Norwood is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Princeton University interested in the global dimensions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics and economics. His dissertation project explores the thriving commerce between the United States and Asia in the century after the American Revolution, arguing that this trade became both a motive and a medium for U.S. politics, increasingly entangling the capital, goods, and people in the trade with the struggles over states’ rights, slavery, and expansion that defined the early American state. A New Englander by birth and Brooklynite by inclination, his other research interests include Sino-American relations, the history of capitalism, and digital humanities. 

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.

Leslie Ribovich, Department of Religion

Leslie Ribovich is a first-year student in the Department of Religion. Her interests include the relationship of church and state in America, character education programs, the history of teaching morality in schools, and religion in the public sphere. She received a BA in Religion and English from Barnard College, where she wrote her senior thesis on the universalizing of moral values in the public sphere among thinkers in the character education and New Atheist movements.

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.

Rebecca Rosen, Department of English

Rebecca Rosen joined the English Department in 2010. She studies early American literature, with particular interests in women's manuscript writing, autobiography, captivity narratives and slave narratives, Native American literature and history, and elegiac forms.

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.

Roy Scranton, Department of English

Sarah, Seo, Department of History

Sarah Seo is a graduate student in the history department and studies U.S. legal history.  She is currently examining criminal procedure in the twentieth century.  Sarah received an A.B. in history from Princeton and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.  Before coming to Princeton, she clerked in the Southern District of New York and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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 PhD candidate in musicology at Princeton University whose scholarship focuses on cross-disciplinary performance studies and institutional mediation in classical music, opera, and musical theater. He holds a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of Virginia (1999) and an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago (2007). After his undergraduate studies he worked for two years in Germany as a teaching assistant for English through the Fulbright Scholars Program. Prior to his graduate studies, Steichen worked for five years in the Development Office of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, for the last two years as Manager of Development for the National Symphony Orchestra, where he oversaw a $10 million annual fundraising campaign. Steichen’s dissertation, “George Balanchine in America: Institutions, Economics, and Aesthetics of the Nonprofit Performing Arts, 1933–54,” examines the early decades of this seminal choreographer’s American career, which moved freely between non-profit and for-profit organizations, from ballet and opera to film and musical theater.

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.

Sarah Wasserman, Department of English

Sarah Wasserman is a sixth-year PhD student in the English Department.  Her dissertation, Material Losses: Urban Ephemera in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, is an interdisciplinary study that examines the prevalence of the vanishing object in American literature and culture since the beginning of the 20th Century.  Situated at the intersection of literary analysis, psychoanalytic theory and material culture studies, this project considers how ephemera encode the grief and anxiety inspired by particular moments in the nation's history.  Her other research interests include critical race studies, urbanism, popular culture, and visual studies. She received her M.A. in Humanities from The University of Chicago in 2005 and her B.A. in English and Biology from Kenyon College in 2003.

James R. Young, Department of Religion

James R. Young, Jr. is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion.  He studies the history of religions in America and 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).

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.

Anthony Petro, Department of Religion

Anthony Petro was a graduate student in the Department of Religion. He focused on American religious history and had 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" explored 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.

Lindsay Reckson, Department of English 

Lindsay Reckson received her Ph.D. from the Department of English in 2011, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture, African American literature, American religious history, visual and popular culture, critical race and gender studies, experience and affect studies, and the history of science. Her first book project, Realist Ecstasy, explores the trajectories of ecstatic experience and performance in American literary realism. While at Princeton, Lindsay helped organize the first annual graduate conference in American Studies (“The Complex”) and the first annual Americanist Research Symposium (“Public Matters”), both in 2009. She was awarded a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship for 2009-2010. Her research has been supported by grants from the Program in American Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for African American Studies, and the Huntington Library.

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.