Ali Aslam is a political theorist who studies the relationships among contemporary architecture, democratic politics, and ethics. His research examines the ways in which architecture conditions political possibility, focusing on how it is possible to share the same spaces on a daily basis yet live in radically different worlds. In particular, he is interested in how conditions of oblivion and obliviousness are produced, sustained, and broken through architectural and democratic practices.
James Byrne is a medievalist and historian of science. His particular areas of interest are the history of astronomy and natural philosophy and the relationship between science and theology in the Middle Ages. He is currently finishing a history of astronomy at medieval universities. He has also begun work on a second project investigating the use of natural philosophy to solve theological problems in the Middle Ages. His work has appeared in Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal for the History of Astronomy, and an upcoming collection, Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700.
Christopher W. Close is a historian who studies the intersection of religion and politics in early modern Europe. His current book project reevaluates traditional models of state formation by analyzing multilateral alliances in the Holy Roman Empire. He is also interested in the history of crime and punishment during the early modern period, especially changing attitudes toward corporal punishment in European society. His articles have appeared in Central European History and Church History, and his monograph The Negotiated Reformation was recently published by Cambridge University Press.
Michelle Coghlan specializes in 19th- and 20th -century American literature and culture, with a particular focus on the ways that novels imagine cities and that cities archive memory. Her current project tracks the curious afterlife of the Paris Commune in American cultural memory, from periodical poetry and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows to radical werewolf fiction and the writings of Henry James. Other research interests include Transnational American Studies, African American literature, Americans in Paris, and the cultural work of Julia Child. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly, the Henry James Review and Must Read: Rethinking the American Bestseller.
Emily Coit studies British and American literature from the late 19th century, examining novels as sites for moral and political expression in the context of consumer society. Her current project investigates the problematic status of art and literature as luxuries by focusing on debates about the role of cultural education in social reform. Other research interests include aestheticism, the representation of decorative and fine arts in fiction, and ghost stories. Recent work has been published in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Francesca Collins is a behavioral scientist with a fascination with the unreal, unusual, and virtual. A clinical psychologist by training, she has investigated dissociative phenomena in nonclinical populations, the personality correlates of paranormal beliefs, and the psychological impact of chronic health conditions. She is currently investigating the experience of self in virtual worlds and its implications for teaching and learning. Her interdisciplinary tendencies are evident in the books Bad Hair Day, Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-cultural Perspective and Humanity in Cybernetic Environments.
Anne DeWitt studies Victorian literature and culture, focusing in particular on the ways that novels of the period take up contemporary debates about science, religion, and morality. She is currently completing a study of how Victorian novels criticized the newly emerging profession of science while asserting their own expertise on moral questions, and she is in the first stages of a new project about the reception of religious novels in the 1880s. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Periodicals Review.
Kristin Dombek writes about performance, rhetoric, and belief in a wide range of contexts, including contemporary American religion, our relationship to other animals, and college writing pedagogy. Her writing tends to explore the secular aspects of religion and the religious aspects of secularism. Her essays can be found in n+1, TDR (The Drama Review), and The Painted Bride Quarterly, among other places, and she is co-author, with Scott Herndon, of Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition.
Mary Harvey Doyno is a historian of the European Middle Ages with an interest in the explosion of lay religion in late medieval Italy. Her look at the beginnings of the cult of Margaret of Cortona was published in History in the Comic Mode (Columbia, 2007), and her study of recent trends in scholarship on medieval urban religious life is forthcoming from History Compass. She is completing a book that explores the veneration of contemporary city-dwellers in the independent communes of northern Italy.
Nika Elder is an art historian who specializes in American Art. She has a particular interest in intersections between visual art and material culture. Her current project analyzes the still-life paintings of the late- 19th -century artist William Harnett in light of contemporaneous discussions and uses of representation in fields ranging from semiotics to anthropology, the decorative arts to museology. A second project on contemporary artist Lorna Simpson examines how and why her early work references the material and visual culture of slavery.
Megan Foreman is a cultural anthropologist primarily interested in the relationships between political systems and identity as well as memory, political rhetoric, and everyday life within transitioning states. Her current work explores identity politics within the post-socialist Hungarian state, and questions assumptions about the necessity of the relationship between ethnic identity and community. In addition, she is also concerned with the methodology and ethics of research and representation, experimental ethnography, exchange, and neoliberalism.
Rachel Galvin is a comparatist specializing in 20th -century poetry written in English, Spanish, and French. Her current book project explores how journalism provided an unexpected model for poetry during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Essays are forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has published a book of poems, and her translation from the French of Raymond Queneau, Hitting the Streets, will be published by Carcanet Press in 2013.
www.rachel-galvin.com
James L. Gould is an ethologist interested in the mechanisms and evolution of human and animal behavior. His particular interests are animal communication, building behavior, orientation and navigation, sexual selection, learning, and cognition. Current projects focus on the evolution of mate choice, learning and concept formation, and the ecology of tropical marine forests. His tenth book, Nature’s Compass: The Mystery of Animal Navigation, will appear in Spring 2012. He also teaches EEB 211 (Biology of Organisms), EEB 311 (Animal Behavior), and EEB 312 (Marine Biology).
Dov Grohsgal is a historian of United States history, with a focus on 20th -century American political history. His current project explores American civil rights policy in the 1960s and early 1970s, with specific interest in the relationship between civil rights policy and political strategy. His other academic concentrations include United States intellectual history and the history of the American city.
David Hollander is an attorney and law librarian who is interested in the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of legal scholarship and education, and the response to this change by law librarians in the legal academy. His recent work explores the history of interdisciplinary legal scholarship at Princeton University and legal reference at the Princeton University Library. He is currently working on a bibliographic analysis of Jewish law scholarship in secular law schools.
Amanda Irwin Wilkins studies literature from between the wars, particularly narratives that imagine war from the relatively safe space of home. She explores the ways in which writers navigate the aftermath of collective or individual trauma and use historical analogies to make sense of the present and future. Her work in literary studies complements her work on establishing interdisciplinary communities of writers in the classroom and other spaces across the university.
Richard Joseph Martin is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and the re-emergence of ritual forms in modern, secular contexts. In his writing, he reflects on the epistemology of encounter, and how ethnographic research can complicate the terms through which we understand the world. His current project examines how participants in sadomasochistic subcultures in Berlin use ritual, play, and exchange in ways that both depend on and subvert ideologies of the individual. His scholarly publications include: “‘Matter out of Place’?: Fieldwork with the Arbeitskreis SM und Christsein” (Berliner Blätter 54, 2010) and “The Anthropologist’s New Clothes: On Ethnographic Exposure” (Sex: Anthropological Encounters, Haller and Martin, eds., forthcoming).
Andrea Mazzariello is a composer, performer, and writer. His creative output is diverse, from concert music to rock songs, sound design, prose, and collage. Currently his work focuses on the electronic manipulation of autobiographical text. His scholarly pursuits include the study of popular music, multimedia, and vinyl culture. He is especially interested in the ways that composers and performers negotiate issues of physicality, pushing their bodies to develop novel approaches to music-making.
Emily Anne McDonald is an anthropologist who has researched medical travel between the United States and Argentina, with a focus on embodiment, race, and the politics of transnational health. More broadly, she is interested in theoretical approaches to movement and intersubjectivity, and has recently published on this topic as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. At Princeton, she teaches courses on embodiment and the relationship between the human and nonhuman.
Anne Hirsch Moffitt specializes in 20th -century literary modernism, with a particular interest in the ways formulations of modernism travel between and beyond metropoles. Her current project looks at novels from the United States, North Africa, and Ireland as case studies for how modernist forms were used to represent local traditional cultures being transformed by the large-scale, interpersonal devastation of social upheaval wrought by slavery, colonialism, war, and nation-building. Broader research interests include transatlantic studies, postcolonial and diasporic literature, and theories of space and place. Recent work is forthcoming in The Faulkner Journal.
Noelle J. Molé is an anthropologist who is interested in the dynamic interplay between economic and political structures and medicine and affect. Her book Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy investigates a newly codified form of work harassment in Italy, called mobbing, and its relation to state policy and occupational illness. She is currently working on a project exploring Italian psychiatry in relation to political conspiracy, with an eye toward how widespread social vigilance becomes unevenly pathologized. At Princeton, she teaches courses on medicine and belief, and the anthropology of mental illness.
Andrew R. Mossin is a poet interested in the relationship between different forms of life-writing and the subjective experiences they engage. His scholarship explores how constructs of masculinity in particular influence the development of avant-garde poetics and poetries, notably the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain School. His books include Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), and two collections of poetry, The Veil (Singing Horse Press, 2008), and The Epochal Body (Singing Horse Press, 2004).
Ken Nielsen is a theatre scholar whose primary research focuses on the cultural construction and representation of the U.S. in intercultural performances. Most recently he has studied how gendered and sexualized American identities are produced through scenic representation in Western Europe. Both his research and his teaching are invested in furthering an understanding of the interplay of popular culture, identity, and lived experience. In addition to his scholarship, he writes plays and theater criticism.
Maika Pollack is a writer whose biweekly column on museum exhibitions appears in the New York Observer. Her current research investigates the idea of vision with the eyes closed in fine art by looking at philosophy, psychology and painting in fin-de-siècle France. She has recently returned from Paris where she researched the lithography and painting of Odilon Redon and wrote on Richard Prince’s uses of appropriation for Artforum. As a curator, her upcoming exhibition is “Women and Weaving.” Her next research project is on 19th-century photography.
Sonya Posmentier studies 20th -century American and postcolonial poetry, with particular interest in the political and cultural significance of literary form. Her current project explores how environmental experience —from agricultural labor to hurricane winds— has shaped modern and contemporary poetry of the black diaspora. She also writes poetry.
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.
Carol Rigolot is interested in modern French literature and culture, notably the Nobel Prize-winning poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse, who wrote epic poems and corresponded with a vast array of literary and political friends. Other recent interests include the genres of journalism and review writing as well as the influence of transatlantic relationships on writers from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot. Through her work at the Humanities Council, she also works closely with the many visiting writers who teach at Princeton.
Sajan Saini is a materials scientist and writer whose popular science articles examine the impact of complex technologies in our modern engineered society. He has conducted research in optical communications and solar cell devices, taught courses on introductory modern physics and astronomy at Queens College (CUNY), and authored two book chapters on silicon photonics and spectroscopy. He is currently working on a book that describes the processing challenges within densely integrated systems, such as civil engineering projects and computer chip assembly.
Andrea Scott studies the crossroads of poetry and intellectual culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is particularly interested in the reformulation of literary communities and values in the aftermath of historical upheavals. Currently, she is working on two projects. The first explores the relationship between American nation-building and the emergence of a transatlantic poetics during the early Cold War. The second project investigates the proliferation of experimental literary cultures in Europe and America after 1989.
Keith Shaw specializes in modern Western political theory and environmental philosophy. His current project studies the tensions between liberalism and sustainability to find ways of making our politics more accommodating to ecological concerns. In particular, he explores the conflicts between property rights and environmental regulation and shows how the liberal conception of the individual is more than compatible with a robust form of environmentalism. Other research interests include deep ecology, bioethics, the right to privacy, and American political thought.
Karen E. H. Skinazi studies multiethnic North American literature. She is particularly interested in narrative constructions of race, ethnic revisions of canonical literature, and representations of ultra-Orthodoxy in Jewish literature. Currently she is working on a critical edition of Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model, an out-of-print novel by Winnifred Eaton, the grandmother of Asian American fiction, which employs the trope of modeling as a metaphor for the experience of racial difference and ambiguity. The book is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Gregory Spears is a composer who writes instrumental and vocal music that blends together stylistic aspects of romanticism, minimalism, and early music. His music has won honors from BMI, ASCAP, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been played by So Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, and the American Composers Orchestra. His works have been commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony, the Present Music Ensemble, and the JACK Quartet. His opera Paul’s Case is currently being developed by American Opera Projects.
www.gregoryspears.com
Joshua Vandiver studies ancient Greek and Roman and Renaissance European political thought. In his current project, he studies ancient Greek concepts of esteem, honor, and anger in response to perceived insults in the political and social community. He is also studying the reception of these concepts by political thinkers in Renaissance Italy and England.
Olivia Weisser studies the history of medicine in early modern England. In particular, her work focuses on illness and the body from the patient’s point of view. Her current research examines how gender, religion, and writing practices shaped men’s and women’s perceptions of illness in the 17th century. She is also beginning a new project that explores interactions and negotiations between patients and practitioners in early modern surgical casebooks.
oliviaweisser.com
Leanne Wood is a historical musicologist who specializes in American musical theater and film studies. Her current project focuses on aural and visual representations of the Midwest in musicals of the mid- 20th century. She examines how nostalgia, pastoralism, and regional stereotypes shaped Broadway and Hollywood productions such as Oklahoma!, State Fair, The Pajama Game, and The Music Man . Her interdisciplinary work situates these place-based musicals within the context of post-war and Cold War culture, and explores how “Midwestern” musicals continue to influence popular conceptions of the nation’s heartland.
Marion C. Wrenn is a media historian whose current project focuses on a U.S.-led Cold War initiative to encourage international journalists to embrace the American model of a free and democratic press. She is also a cultural critic and literary editor whose interests range from satirical news shows to the new burlesque, and from debates about the future of news to the impact of new media on poetry, fiction, and the literary field.
Neil J. Young is a historian of modern U.S. religion and politics. His work focuses on the rise of the religious right. His current book project examines the relationship among Mormons, Catholics, and evangelicals active in the modern conservative movement and how religious disagreements and historical tensions affected their political strategies and outcomes. Other historical interests include the Civil Rights Movement, Southern history, and the rise of the suburban nation.
Andrew Zwicker is a physicist and science educator. His current laboratory research includes dusty plasmas in the lab and under microgravity conditions, atmospheric plasmas for use as a music speaker, and plasma-based production of diamond-thin films. His educational interests include project-based learning centered on energy efficiency and production as well as innovative methods for communicating science to the general public through science museum displays and the university's Art of Science competition.
