Princeton University Society of Fellows

Current Fellows

Director (2009-2010)

Scott Burnham holds a B.M. from Baldwin-Wallace College, an M.M. in Music Composition from Yale University School of Music, and a Ph.D. in Music Theory and Analysis from Brandeis University. His scholarly interests include the history of tonal theory, problems of analysis and criticism, and 18th- and 19th-century music and culture. Burnham has taught graduate seminars on the music of Schubert and Beethoven, analytical issues in tonal music, and the history of tonal theory from Rameau to Schenker; he also teaches undergraduate theory and analysis. Among his publications are articles on Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte and Hugo Riemann's History of Harmonic Theory. His study of the values and reception of Beethoven's heroic-style music, Beethoven Hero (1995), won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory. He shares his home with his wife Dawna Lemaire, a registered music therapist, and their three children.

Executive Director

Mary Harper received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on Gérard de Nerval and the nineteenth-century European "voyage en Orient." Her current research projects include a study of women's memoirs in early nineteenth-century France, and the narratives of nineteenth-century European travellers to Egypt with particular focus on questions of gender, colonialism, and the interplay of ethnography and aesthetics. She has published articles on Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient and "Temple d'Isis," Delacroix's "Femmes d'Alger," and nineteenth-century French literature and historiography. Her teaching at Princeton University has included courses on nineteenth-century European literature and culture, the modern French novel, and Orientalism.

Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellows

New Fellows 2009-2012

On Barak recently completed a Joint Ph.D. in History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU. His dissertation, "Egyptian Times: Temporality, Personhood and the Techno-Political Making of Modern Egypt, 1830-1930," explores the history of communication and transportation in Egypt, examining the introduction of new technologies such as the railway and telegraph, which generated unique practices of timekeeping, conviviality, and personhood. Barak also holds a Joint B.A. in Law, Arabic Language and Literature from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, Netherlands. His undergraduate and graduate work were supported by numerous scholarships and awards, including an NSF dissertation grant and a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Among Barak's numerous publications are several works of prose and poetry; translations of short stories, essays and poetry from both English and Arabic into Hebrew; and a study of Islamic chat rooms, "Names without Faces" (2006). In addition he has served as a news editor, literary critic, and legal correspondent for Israeli newspapers. He brings teaching experience in subjects such as "What is Islam?" and the "Emergence of the Modern Middle East." At Princeton he will teach courses in the History department, including a seminar on Postmodernity and the modern Middle East. During his tenure at the Society of Fellows, he will revise his dissertation for publication and launch a new research project on energy and empire.

Cullen Blake recently completed his Ph.D. in Astronomy at Harvard University. He has conducted research on many topics, exploring such questions as the nature of the most energetic explosions in the universe and the rate of occurrence of extrasolar planets orbiting stars much smaller than our Sun. His dissertation, "Ultracool Dwarfs and Their Companions," explored the development of new techniques for making precise measurements of small stars known as brown dwarfs. These new experimental techniques may one day enable the detection of Earth-like extrasolar planets orbiting small stars. Today, these techniques enable astronomers to better understand the physical properties of brown dwarfs, enigmatic objects with properties intermediate between those of small stars and giant planets like Jupiter. As a graduate student, Cullen was supported by a fellowship from the interdisciplinary Harvard 'Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative', and he was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. While at Harvard, Cullen taught a number of undergraduate science courses and received an award for distinction in teaching. He has been involved in several programs that provide undergraduates with research experience and has helped advise students working on both undergraduate and Masters' theses. At Princeton, Cullen will continue to search for planets outside our solar system, teach undergraduate astronomy courses, and work to establish a nation-wide program to match talented high school students who are hoping to become involved in scientific research with young scientists who will act as their mentors.

Russ Leo holds a Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University. His dissertation, "Affect Before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza," investigates affective approaches to faith in order to account for the revelatory and revolutionary possibilities of poetry, theology and philosophy in early modernity. His interdisciplinary interests span early modern studies, theology, philosophy and literary theory. He earned a B.A. in English from SUNY College at Fredonia, and at Duke won numerous scholarships for his graduate work, including a grant to attend The Folger Institute, Washington. Leo has published on topics ranging from Augustine to Spinoza and Lacan, and served in an editorial role for the special issue of a major journal in his field. He has broad teaching experience at Duke University, where he offered seminars of his own design on "Witchcraft in Early Modern Literature," and "How Horror works; Or, Readings in the Macabre." This fall at Princeton he will teach a Freshman Seminar on witchcraft, belief and agency in early modern literature, and in the spring will join the faculty team teaching Humanistic Studies 217-218, a course exploring interdisciplinary approaches to Western culture since the Renaissance. Leo will also begin developing his dissertation into a more comprehensive book project, tentatively titled "Enlightenment from Below: Milton, Spinoza and the Resources of Revolution."

Nikolaos Panou received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University with a dissertation on "How to do Kings with Words: Byzantine Imperial Ideology and the Representation of Power in Pre-Phanariot Admonitory Literature." His research examines the ways power and authority were conceptualized and represented in pre-modern philosophical discourse, with a particular focus on moral and political works produced in the Ottoman Balkans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He has won numerous fellowships and awards for his graduate studies, including a Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Research Grant and the Aristides Evangelus Phoutrides Scholarship in Modern Greek Studies. During 2008-2009, he held the Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in Princeton's Program in Hellenic Studies. His scholarly interests extend over a number of fields, such as late antique rhetoric and ideology, Radical Enlightenment and the skeptical tradition, European Romanticism, Surrealist literature and art, and early cinema. He has published on topics ranging from seventeenth-century satire and Greek-Romanian symbiotic patterns in the early modern period to Cypriot dialectic texts and contemporary Greek poetry. While a graduate student at Harvard, Panou taught a wide range of courses in the Department of Classics and the Core Curriculum, as well as in The Greek Institute, where he offered a series of self-designed seminars in modern Greek language, literature, and culture. During his tenure at the Society of Fellows, he will conduct an extensive study of the Phanariot Enlightenment and the processes of modernization it introduced to the Ottoman Empire. In 2009-2010, he will offer a comparative course on Islamic, Byzantine and West European "mirrors for princes," and a seminar on the late seventeenth-century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.

Hester Schadee has recently completed a D.Phil. in History at Oxford University, where she also earned a B.A. in Ancient and Modern History and an M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History. Her interdisciplinary dissertation, "Julius Caesar in the Early Italian Renaissance", examines the reception of Caesar in humanist prose, vernacular poetry, the visual arts and spectacle. She has won many prizes, awards and scholarships, including the Senior Paget Toynbee Prize (2007) for Dante studies. Schadee's articles on Caesar have been published in major journals of Renaissance and Classical studies. She has served as Tutor in Early Modern History and as a Teaching Assistant for specialist classes on Renaissance Art and Culture, both at Oxford University, as well as tutoring at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford. She has presented papers at several international conferences, and co-founded a seminar series on Early Modern topics. At Princeton Schadee will coordinate and participate in a faculty team teaching a year-long course in Humanistic Studies that offers interdisciplinary approaches to the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. Her research will focus on the revision of her dissertation into a book, and a new project in which she will examine the exploitation of figures drawn from history, legend and myth as exemplars in Renaissance Italy.

Kerim Yasar holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and a B.A. in Music from Wesleyan University. His dissertation, "Electrified Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern Japan," considers the roles played by technologies of communication and reproduction in the discursive, aesthetic, and ideological practices of post-Meiji Restoration Japan. He has won numerous fellowships over his graduate career, including the Fulbright, Weatherhead, Orient Finance, and Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) Research Scholarship. He has published translations from Japanese in a variety of genres and media, from contemporary Japanese novels to selections from pre-modern verse anthologies to subtitles and documentary materials for Japanese films. Yasar has also gained broad and deep teaching experience in Japanese Studies. He was Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese at Boston University from 2008-9, where he taught courses entitled "Sound Worlds in Japanese Popular Culture," "Masterpieces of Classical Japanese Literature," "Literature of the Fantastic in Modern Japan," and "Representations of the Family in Japanese Cinema." In addition, he served as a Teaching Fellow for three years while a graduate student at Columbia University. At Princeton he will join the faculty team in teaching the year-long interdisciplinary sequence "East Asian Humanities." He will also prepare his dissertation for publication in two volumes, with the first volume treating the period up to the end of World War II and the second, the postwar period to the present.

2008-11

Lucia Allais earned her Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, and her M.Arch from Harvard. Her dissertation, Will to War, Will to Art: Cultural Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964, chronicled the emergence of a network of international agencies in the mid-20th Century to protect monuments worldwide from the destructive effects of war and modernization. This study uncovered new archival material on the maps and lists created by the Allied Air Forces to protect art and architecture from bombing during World War II, and situated this episode in a continuum of intellectual cooperation, from the League of Nations to UNESCO. While at Princeton she is turning her dissertation into a book. Allais has worked in design firms in Europe and the US, and won a number of awards and fellowships for her research. Her writings cover a range of subjects and periods, including baroque theories of architectural knowledge in France, the influence of Henri Bergson on 20th Century urban planning, and the institutional origins of American architectural theory. Her recent publications include the essay “International Style Heritage” in the journal Volume, and a forthcoming article on the patterns of monument-movement that were provoked by the building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. In the Fall she is teaching a graduate seminar in the Program in Media and Modernity,titled Monumental Modernity, on architecture and power in the 20th Century. In the Spring she will teach a Freshman seminar titled What’s the Plan? where students will develop their architectural literacy by devoting each week to the close reading of one plan and one text.

Eduardo Canedo earned his Ph.D. in History at Columbia University with a dissertation on "The Rise of the Deregulation Movement in Modern America, 1957-1980." His study, which he is revising for publication, examines the postwar origins of an anti-regulatory critique, the emergence of a broad-based coalition seeking structural reform, and the 1970s political ferment that produced successful deregulatory initiatives. His narrative and case studies offer new perspectives on the decline of New Deal liberalism, the emergence of economic conservatism, and the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past year he has supplemented this project with new research on the role of think tanks (such as Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for the Study of American Business) in fostering deregulation and the experience of administrative reform during the early 1980s. At Princeton, Eduardo is teaching an eclectic set of undergraduate seminars, including “The Wars Within: Patriotism, Protest and Propaganda in Modern America,” “American Economic Crises, 1873-2009,” and “America in the 1970s.” He is also the resident faculty fellow at Princeton's Whitman College.

Yaacob Dweck completed his PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, "The Critique of Kabbalahin Leon Modena's Ari Nohem," traces the redefinition of Kabbalah from its medieval status as esoteric wisdom to an exoteric system of religious thought and practice in the early modern period. During his graduate studies, Dweck was supported by several fellowships, including a Gates Scholarship at the University of Cambridge and a Wexner Graduate Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He has recently published English translations of modern Hebrew fiction by Haim Sabato and S. Yizhar. At Princeton, Dweck is revising his dissertation for publication and preparing a new Hebrew edition and English translation of Modena's Ari Nohem. In addition, he will begin a study of polemics about the Jewish soul in seventeenth-century Europe. In the fall he will teach a lecture survey of "Modern Jewish History," and in the spring, a seminar on "Moses Maimonides from Medieval Egypt to Modernity."

Amin Ghaziani earned a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and Organization Behavior from Northwestern University. His research is organized around the study of culture, social movements, sexuality, and cities. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008, his book -- The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington -- investigates the problem of infighting across four Marches on Washington that span 30 years of political organizing. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, he concludes that under certain conditions dissent may have unexpectedly positive, integrative, and generative effects. The book won the 2009 Charles Tilly Honorable Mention Award for Best Book in Collective Behavior / Social Movements from the American Sociological Association. His article publications have addressed the problem of measurement in the study of culture; how infighting informs the cultural development of small groups; the contested relationship between annual Gay Pride parades and Dyke March demonstrations; and the relationship between keywords and cultural change. Ghaziani is currently working on his next book, which investigates the residential choices of gay and straight-identified people who live in "gay neighborhoods." Ghaziani also has extensive teaching experience in both introductory and upper-level sociology courses, several of which have won him teaching awards. At Princeton, he has thus far taught a Freshman Seminar entitled, "Why Can't We All Just Get Along? Unity and Division in Political Life," along with "Queer Theory and Politics," and "Culture, Power, and Inequality."

Ricardo Montez received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a certificate in Culture and Media at NYU, where he taught most recently in the Latino Studies Program as a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow. His interdisciplinary dissertation, "Riding/Writing the Line: Keith Haring, Race and the Performance of Desire," engages racial and ethnic politics in the work of the Pop artist Keith Haring, generating new ways of thinking about race, sexuality, and ethnicity through a performance studies lens. Montez examines Haring's collaboration with figures from black and Latino "street" culture, focusing on the production and consumption of the artist's work in relation to his cross-racial queer desire. His publications and presentations include studies of Andy Warhol's Portraits of Keith Haring, the Paradise Garage, and the Whitney Museum's Haring Retrospective. He has taught courses in performance studies, LGBT studies, and expository writing at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at a number of institutions and programs in New York. Montez also served as Managing Editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2001-2005), and organized a recent conference on "Latina/o Sexualities" at NYU that brought together scholars working at the intersections of gender and sexuality studies, and Latino studies. At Princeton he will teach an upper-level course on "Latina/o Sexualities" in the fall and a Freshman seminar on Latino popular culture in the spring. During his tenure at the Society of Fellows he will work on revising his dissertation for book publication.

2007-10

Mayling Birney is a political scientist investigating how political institutions shape the nature of political relations, economic development, and human freedoms; and how they are in turn shaped by them. Her broad research interests include comparative democratization and authoritarian resilience; political economy; comparative local governance and politics; and democratic political theory. She is currently finishing a book on the political dynamics of electoral reform in China, which examines how village elections have reshaped local power relations yet had little spillover effects because of how effectively the democratic innovation has been isolated and constrained within the larger authoritarian system. Birney has also explored democratic politics in the U.S. from various angles and worked as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate. In 2006-7, she was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in D.C. She is currently the Wilson-Cotsen Fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School and Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Ph.D. Yale University.

Daniel Cloud, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Columbia University (2006). His dissertation, "Schrödinger's Crystal," explored Erwin Schrödinger's theory of the nature of life and its connection to issues in contemporary theoretical biology. Before coming to Princeton, he spent some time as a post-doc at Stuart Kauffman's lab at the University of Alberta at Calgary making models of gene regulatory networks in cancer cells. At Princeton, he has been working on a book, tentatively titled 'Something from Nothing', about some of the ways we've tried to explain life's complexity, and what the explanations tell us about ourselves. He also has taught two courses on the philosophy of biology - one a general survey, and one an exploration of our various answers to the question 'What is life?' - and has participated in teaching both the ancient and the modern halves of Princeton's core humanities course. His professional interests include the philosophy of biology and the social sciences, conservation biology, the philosophy of economics, political philosophy and political theory. He is a founding partner of Firebird Fund Management, and has given speeches or written or co-authored articles for organizations as diverse as the Conference Board, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, and (in a censored form) Shanghai Daily.

Mischa Gabowitsch received his Ph.D. with distinction from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 2007. He is currently working on a book, in English, based on his doctoral dissertation, "The Specter of Fascism: Russian Nationalism and its Opponents,1987-2007," which analyzes the ways in which Russian nationalism has been dealt with, conceptually as well as practically, in Russia and internationally, since perestroika. His approach is multi-disciplinary, employing oral history and archival research as well as ethnographic observation and interviews. Past distinctions include the first Einstein Fellowship awarded to live and work in Albert Einstein's summer house in Caputh, Germany. At Princeton he has taught a seminar entitled “Loving and Hating the West,” a comparative historical and sociological analysis at pro- and anti-Western movements across the world, as well as a course on “People, Things, and Animals,” which dealt with classification and the construction of boundaries within and around humanity. He has also offered seminars on French pragmatic sociology and the sociology of memory. In addition to his book manuscript, he is working on a comparative research project on antiracist and antifascist traditions and organizations in different countries, as well as a number of smaller projects on collective memory and cultural institutions in post-Soviet Russia. A past editor of the Russian journal NZ, he is now the editor-in-chief of Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, a bilingual (Russian/English) journal launched in Saint Petersburg in 2009.

Graham Jones is a social anthropologist with a background in linguistic anthropology, whose research focuses on knowledge and rationality in practice, performance, and interaction. He earned his BA in literature from Reed College in 1998 and his PhD in anthropology from New York University in 2007. He is currently working on a book about the dynamics of concealment and revelation in the secretive subculture of entertainment magic, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary France. He has won numerous grants and awards to support his research, including a Fulbright Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council IDRF Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Diversity Fellowship. His recent publications have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Language & Communication, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. After spending two years co-teaching a year-long course in Humanistic Studies on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, in 2009-2010 Jones will offer an anthropology course on the acquisition of skilled practices through apprenticeship.

Current Faculty Fellows

Paul DiMaggio, Professor of Sociology, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979. His publications include: 2001. The Twenty-First Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective (Editor). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reprinted in paperback edition by Princeton University Press, 2003; 2004. "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A Literature Review and Agenda for Research on Digital Inequality." With Eszter Hargittai, Coral Celeste, and Steven Shafer. In Social Inequality, edited by Kathryn Neckerman. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; 2003. "Social Division in the United States: The Disparity Between Private Opinion and Public Politics." In Fractious America: Divisions of Race, Culture and Politics at the Millenium, edited by Jonathan Rieder. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Daniel Garber, (Ph.D. Harvard, 1975) joined the Philosophy Department faculty at Princeton after many years at the University of Chicago. He is also an Associate Member of the Program in History of Science. His principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. Garber is the author of Descartes' Metaphysical Physics (1992) and Descartes Embodied (2001), and is co-editor with Michael Ayers of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). Garber is also the co-editor with Steven Nadler of the Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, an annual. He is currently working on a variety of topics, including studies of Aristotelianism and its opponents in early seventeenth-century France and physics and philosophy in Leibniz's thought. In addition, he is the editor-in-chief of a new edition of the works of the seminal seventeenth-century thinker, Jacobus Fontialis.

Molly Greene, (Ph.D. Princeton, 1993) studies the history of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule, Mediterranean piracy, and the institution of the market. Her first book, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000), examines the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule on the island of Crete, which the Ottomans conquered in 1669. Greene is currently working on a study of the relationship between Greek commerce and Catholic corsairing (piracy) in the 17th-century Mediterranean. Future projects will study commercial fairs in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the Middle Eastern bazaar. Her teaching includes courses on Mediterranean history (16th century to 20th century); early modern commerce in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean; national identity in the Balkans; Greeks and Jews in the late Ottoman Empire; and the history of Jerusalem. She is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the History Department.

Stan Katz, (Ph.D. Harvard University) is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is also a commentator on higher education policy. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Katz is leading expert on American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is the editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Legal History (OUP, 2009). At Princeton he is a Lecturer with rank of Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and Director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.

Sarah Kay (D.Phil., Oxford) is Professor of French and a specialist in medieval French and Occitan literature. She taught in the UK at the University of Liverpool and then at Cambridge, where she was head of the department of French (1996-2001) and Director of Graduate Studies (2003-5); she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004 and awarded the degree of Litt.D (Cambridge) in 2005. Her major publications are an edition of Raoul de Cambrai (Oxford, 1992) and three monographs on aspects of medieval literature (Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, Cambridge, 1990; The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance, Oxford, 1995; Courtly Contradictions, Stanford, 2001). She also co-edited Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994) with Miri Rubin, and The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1999) with Simon Gaunt. With Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave she co-wrote A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003). Her interest in modern thought and theory lead her in 2003 to publish the first monograph in English on the work of Slavoj Zizek. Her current research is on the relationship between poetry and knowledge in late medieval France, a 4-year project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council

Rena Lederman (Ph.D. Columbia, 1982) has done research in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. She is the author of What Gifts Engender and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political economy of gift exchange; inequality and leadership; gender roles and ideologies; and historical representations and socio-cultural change. She is currently completing a book entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines that situates ethnography's peculiar form of expertise comparatively among related kinds of knowledge. She is also planning a study, co-authored with Maria Lepowsky, of gift/market entanglements. In 2006 she edited and contributed to Anxious Borders between Work and Life in an Era of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation (American Ethnologist Forum) and is co-organizer of a 2007 New York Academy of Sciences symposium on institutional review boards. Her other ongoing research concerns problems in representing science in schools and lay media. Professor Lederman teaches courses on gender, Pacific Island cultures, economic anthropology, disciplinary methods, the anthropology of science, and a new course on "The Uses of Deception in Magic and Science."

Carol Rigolot, Executive Director of the Humanities Council, teaches in the French and Italian department and the Princeton Writing Program. She has published two books about the Nobel Prize-winning French poet and diplomat, Saint-John Perse, and is currently editing his correspondence with T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate. She is co-editor with John McPhee of The Princeton Anthology of Writing, a volume of favorite writings by distinguished writers who have taught at Princeton. This book serves as the text for her freshman writing seminar on Contemporary American Prose.

Gideon Rosen (Ph.D., Princeton, 1992) joined the faculty in 1993, having taught previously at the University of Michigan. His areas of research include metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy. He is the author (with John Burgess) of A Subject With No Object (Oxford, 1997). Gideon Rosen is Chair of the Council of the Humanities.

Old Dominion Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows

This new program offers faculty members the opportunity to spend a year of academic leave in the Humanities Council, pursuing research and participating in the Society of Fellows.

Susan Naquin (Ph.D. Yale, 1974) works on the social and cultural history of early modern and modern China (1600-1900). She has written about millenarian peasant uprisings, families and rituals, pilgrimages, temples, and the history of Beijing. She is the author of Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976), Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (1981), and Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 (2000); the coauthor with Evelyn Rawski of Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (1987); and the coeditor of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (1992). Her interests include the material culture of China in the Ming and Qing periods, and the related topics of museums and collecting. She has a joint appointment in the Department of East Asian Studies and teaches undergraduate courses on modern East Asia and early modern China, on history and collecting, and on fakes and forgeries. Her graduate courses have dealt with Qing history, religion, and material culture (1600-1800). Naquin is currently working on religion and regional culture in north China.

Esther Schor (Ph.D. Yale, 1985) specializes in British Romanticism, teaching courses in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, Romantic Historicism, Romantic Drama, and Travel Literature. Active in the program in Judaic Studies, she also teaches American Jewish Literature, Introduction to Judaism and Yiddish literature in Translation. Her other strong teaching interest is the Bible (Bible as Literature; Bible, Criticism and Theory). She is the author of Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, 1994) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. She co-edited The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond "Frankenstein" (Oxford, 1993) and Women's Voices: Visions and Perspectives (McGraw-Hill, 1990). Her most recent book, Emma Lazarus (Nextbook/Schocken), won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award. She has also published a volume of poems, The Hills of Holland (Archer Books), and her most recent web project is a site dedicated to the writings of her mother, Sandra Schor.

Susan Stewart is a poet and critic. A former MacArthur Fellow, she holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature. Her most recent books of criticism are Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art. Her most recent books of poetry are Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. She worked with the composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that had its premiere in the Spring of 2006. In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.