Freshman Scholars Institute

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Ali Aslam is a political theorist.  He is completing a book on 2011 revolutions, parts of which have appeared in Theory & Event.  He received his PhD from Duke University.  He is a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and has taught courses on race, democratic practice, and hierarchy.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Course Co-Coordinator, "Ways of Knowing"         

Kristin Dombek is an essayist and cultural journalist who writes about religion, performance, pop culture, and political rhetoric.   Her essays can be found in n+1, The Daily, TDR: The Drama Review, and The Painted Bride Quarterly. She is co-author, with Scott Herndon, of Critical Passages:  Teaching the Transition to College Composition, and co-creator, with Stephan Wangh, of The Faithful, a documentary play about belief and the culture wars, which premiered in Princeton's Atelier.  She received her Ph.D. from New York University's English Department. Before coming to Princeton, she taught writing and literature at Barnard College, the New School's Eugene Lang College, and New York University.  She is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Khristina Gonzalez, a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Brown University. Her work focuses on 19th-century English literature and culture, and she holds particular interests in the Victorian novel and literary constructions of villainy/monstrosity. She is currently at work on a book project that argues that a new form of villainy, which she calls “malevolent civility,” emerges in the Victorian novel in response to contemporaneous changes in socio-economic policies. Her other research interests include the history of the novel, the British imperial project, Irish modernism, and the current pop culture explosion of vampire texts.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Caley Horan is a historian of the United States interested broadly in the cultural and intellectual transformations of the post-WWII era. Her research explores the cultural life of insurance and the role of risk-based, statistical rationalities in shaping American institutions and daily life during the second half of the twentieth century. She is currently working on her book manuscript, “Actuarial Age: Insurance and the Emergence of Neoliberalism in Postwar America.” She received her BA from Stanford University, completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota, and is a lecturer in the history department at Princeton.

Course Co-Coordinator, "Ways of Knowing"

Rebekah Peeples Massengill is a cultural sociologist whose research centers on culture, politics, and economic sociology.  She is particularly interested in the way that moral arguments and ways of reasoning shape public debates about political and economic issues.  Her first book, Walmart Wars:  Moral Populism in the 21st Century, was published by New York University Press earlier this year.  Massengill also studies contemporary American religion, and has worked as a consultant for the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life.  She returned to the Princeton Writing Program as a lecturer in 2012, having taught most recently in the Sociology and Anthropology department at Swarthmore College.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Patrick Moran is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program. His work focuses on 20th-century literature, material culture, and representations of illness. After receiving his BA from Cornell University and his PhD from Boston College, he taught in the English Department at Wake Forest. He is currently at work on a book entitled, “Playing Modern,” which looks at how childish things, such as toy theaters, butterfly hunts, and kaleidoscopes informed the 20th-century British novel. In addition to this work, he has written scholarly articles on our past and present cultural fascination with hoarding.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Timothy Recuber is a sociologist who focuses on mass media and consumer culture. He has written about the deployment of therapeutic discourse in online archives devoted to disasters and their victims, about the ways in which popular culture has helped inspire fears of terrorism, and about the impact of “immersive” projection technology and theater architecture on contemporary cinema spectatorship. His other scholarly interests include urban studies, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of emotion. He is a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program.

Seminar Leader, "Ways of Knowing"

Neil J. Young,  a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, previously served as a lecturer in the history department at Princeton. Young holds a B.A. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Columbia University. He is interested in the history of religion in modern American politics.  He is particularly concerned with how religious conservatives of different faiths regard each other religiously and how that translates into the political arena. He is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press entitled, We Gather Together: Conservative Ecumenism in the Age of the Religious Right.  His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, the New York Times, Slate, and the Christian Science Monitor.