JOHN ABROMEIT
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
John Abromeit received his Ph.D. in 2004 in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on Max Horkheimer. His general scholarly interests include the Enlightenment, German Idealism, Marx, psychoanalysis, the Weimar Republic, the Frankfurt School and the protest movements of the 1960s. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication. He is co-editor of Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2004) and Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
Email: j_abromeit@yahoo.com

NAOMI BECK
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Naomi Beck received her PhD from the University of Paris-1 (Sorbonne-Pantheon) in 2005. Her research focuses on the history of science in the broad cultural context with an emphasis on the relationship between scientific ideas and socio-political theories. She is currently revising her dissertation entitled The Diffusion and Metamorphosis of Herbert Spencer's Evolutionary Theories in France and Italy (a comparative study) for publication. She is also working on a new study of the role played by evolutionary ideas in 20th century economic theories, especially in the Chicago School of Economics.
Curriculum Vitae
Email: nbeck@uchicago.edu

CRISCILLIA BENFORD
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
In 2004, I received my PhD in English literature (specializing in the nineteenth-century) from Stanford University. At the University of Chicago I teach in the Readings in World Literature sequence. In general, my research and teaching interests include the history and theory of the novel, narrative theory, and gender studies. My current book project, The Multiplot Structure and the Dynamics of Social Orders, is a historically-contextualized contribution to the field of formal narrative analysis. Through detailed examinations of British and American texts from the Renaissance through the present moment, I construct a model for thinking about how narratives structure social difference. In addition, my interpretive framework—which emphasizes the emplacement of plots within a plot system, their dynamic interaction, and the historical motivations for their syntactic structures—allows me to rethink our understanding of the relationship between form and mimesis and offer new perspectives on several key theoretical issues such as the translation of axiological systems into literary form, the relationship of character psychology to plot structure, and the pressure exerted by a text's formal construction upon interpretation.
Email: benford1@uchicago.edu

CRAIG CARSON
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
In 2007, Craig Carson received his doctorate from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation, “The Aesthetic Community: Eighteenth-Century Politics of the Spectacle,” focuses on the intersection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic, political and economic theory. While particularly concerned with the relation of image and text in early liberal theory, his dissertation also addresses the role of literary and medical texts in the reformation of eighteenth-century British and French society. Craig is currently revising this project for publication while teaching the course, Human Being and Citizen. His translation of Katia Genel’s “The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben” has been published in Rethinking Marxism and an article on Bernard Mandeville’s economic and medical work is forthcoming in an edition of “Les Lumières Internationales.”
Email: ccarson@uchicago.edu

SAMANTHA FENNO
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
(Weissbourd Conference Coordinator)
Samantha Fenno teaches in the Human Being and Citizen core sequence. She received her PhD from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. Her main research interests are English literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, Wittgenstein, critical theory, and the ways in which literature and philosophy can be said to influence one another. Her dissertation, Specters of Skepticism: Henry Fielding and the Problematic of Recognition, relates skepticism about other minds to the techniques of representing character to be found in Fielding's fiction and essay writing, and to the ideas about legal and social reform that he promoted (and wrote about) as a solicitor and magistrate. She is currently writing an article about Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and the aesthetics of the early English novel.

DORITH GEVA
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Dorith received her PhD in sociology from New York University in 2006. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book manuscript that traces how French and American policymakers confronted the question of whether men with families should be conscripted to serve in their national standing armies around the two World Wars. By uncovering how special considerations for men with dependents were incorporated into conscription rules, the book analyzes the politics of men’s obligations to the state, and proposes to classify states along their particular regimes of citizen obligation. As an antidote to the more popular analysis of rights, Dorith hopes that her scholarship on obligations will challenge prevailing interpretations of masculine autonomy within liberal states, republican notions of universalism, the public/private divide, and the ideological origins of modern conscription systems.
Email: geva@uchicago.edu

JUDITH GOLDMAN
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Judith Goldman received her PhD from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature (2007). She is currently revising for publication her doctoral dissertation, “Visible Hand: ‘System,’ Method, and Suasion in the Human Natural Science of Adam Smith,” an interdisciplinary project that theorizes the textual form of Smith’s paradigmatic Enlightenment system-building enterprise as his scientific method. Judith’s general scholarly interests include the intersection of law (criminal and intellectual property law, and critical race studies) with literature, material cultures of textual production and consumption (especially matters of authority and authorship), and the relationship of affective subjectivity to media; she also concentrates on gender and sexuality studies and contemporary American avant-garde poetry. Her new research directions include investigations of the relation of violence to representation in contemporary experimental poetry and of the relationship of various modes of late-eighteenth-century valorization and authentication to literary form in Britain, focusing especially on the works of Ann Radcliffe. Judith is also the author of two books of poetry, Vocoder (Roof 2001) and DeathStar/Rico-chet (O 2006), and the co-editor, with Leslie Scalapino, of War and Peace, an annual anthology of experimental writing against the war.
Email: jgoldman1@uchicago.edu

SARAH R. GRAFF
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Sarah received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006. Her research examines the relationship between political authority and the economy during the advent and establishment of early states in the Middle East. She is especially interested in aspects of pre-capitalist economies that could be considered informal, or not under the control of the prevailing government. In addition to revising her dissertation for publication, she is currently co-editing a onograph called Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, which examines cooking as a social activity connected to strategies of statecraft, social change, religion and economics.
Email: s-graff@uchicago.edu

ELIZABETH HEATH
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Science)
Elizabeth Heath is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean. Her current research examines the emergence and institutionalization of differentiated forms of citizenship in the colonial and metropolitan regions of France prior to World War I. Through a comparative study of the metropolitan department of the Aude and the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, her work examines the process by which rural citizens in the two regions came to enjoy two very different forms of citizenship. This comparative study suggests new ways of understanding the possibilities for inclusion of racial and cultural differences in France during the early years of the Third Republic. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Chicago.
Email: eaheath@uchicago.edu

AARON JOHNSON
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Aaron Johnson (Ph.D. in Classics, University of Colorado, Boulder) specializes in Greek literature of the later Roman Empire, particularly in the areas of ethnic and religious identities and of Hellenism. He has held a junior fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies (Harvard University) for work on Eusebius of Caesarea. His publications include a book entitled Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford, 2006), as well as a number of articles in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, American Journal of Philology, Harvard Theological Review, and other journals. He is currently working on two book-length projects dealing with the religious thought of the Platonic philosopher Porphyry and Hellenicity in late antiquity, respectively. Aside from reading Greek, Dr. Johnson enjoys skateboarding, playing piano, and hiking.
Email: johnsona@uchicago.edu

MOGENS LAERKE
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Mogens Lærke received his Ph.D from the History of Philosophy Department at the University of Paris IV – Sorbonne in 2003, and has been a post-doctoral scholar in Denmark and in Israel. His field of interest is early modern philosophy, early modern intellectual history and the Enlightenment, and he has worked on themes such as the relations between theology and politics, the tradition of clandestine philosophy, early modern biblical exegesis, and methods of religious controversy. He has furthermore written articles on Spinoza’s metaphysics and Leibniz’s modal philosophy. He is the author of Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition complexe, forthcoming from Ed. Honoré Champion, and is currently editing a collective volume on censorship in the Enlightenment, forthcoming from E. J. Brill.
Email: mlaerke@uchicago.edu

HEDY LAW
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Hedy received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. Her main research interests include music, gesture, and non-verbal communication in the eighteenth century. She is currently revising her dissertation for publication, tentatively entitled "Gestural Rhetoric: The Paradox of Pantomime in the French Enlightenment," which examines the increasingly dominant role of naturalistic gestures in eighteenth-century French theater and the ways in which they constructed broader concepts ranging from sign, body, and silence to irony, seduction, danger and freedom. Looking at pantomimes in works by Rameau, Rousseau, Grétry, Gluck, Piccinni, and Salieri within the intellectual context of the French Enlightenment, Gestural Rhetoric argues that the obsession with pantomime cast doubt on the dominant mimetic theory and paradoxically established expression as a conceptual derivative of imitation.
Email: hedylaw@uchicago.edu

NOMI CLAIRE LAZAR
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Nomi Claire Lazar's research interests cluster around the problem of order in both its political and epistemological guises. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2005, with a dissertation on “The Ethics of Emergency Powers in Liberal Democracies,”; a subject on which she continues to pursue empirical and normative work. At the same time, Nomi is beginning a large-scale project examining how conceptions of the flow of time structure understandings of violence in the history of political thought. Her working papers include an engagement with Hegel's philosophy of punishment and an account of the relationship between epistemological and political order in Enlightenment and postmodern social criticism. Nomi holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Toronto and in legal and political theory from the School of Public Policy, University College, London. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked in the Criminal Law Policy section of the Canadian Justice Department. Nomi's work has appeared in the journals “Politics and Society,” "Political  Theory," and “Constellations.”
Email: nclazar@uchicago.edu

DESIRAE MATHERLY
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Desirae received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Ohio University in 2004, one of the few programs in the country offering a doctorate in nonfiction. Her tradition area includes the personal essay, autobiography, and memoir, with particular interest in prose that experiments with conventional language and the aesthetics of the page. Additionally, she studies the balance of autoanalysis and art in nonfiction, (writing for the self and writing for others), insisting upon more traditional terms like persona and occasion that describe the genre's topography more precisely than those of fiction. Her essays are written for the literary market, are freely digressive with regard to subject, and at conferences she collaborates on panels to encourage continuity between contemporary literary nonfiction and the classical essay of Montaigne.

ANDREA MUEHLEBACH
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Andrea Muehlebach received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2007. Her scholarly interests focus on state-citizenship relations, neoliberalism and liberal-secularism, and on the connections between labor and notions of human agency, affect, and will. Her dissertation tracked the metamorphosis of modern state welfare through an ethnography and historical genealogy of public morality and every-day ethical practice in Italy. This focus on morality and ethics (specifically, on the emergence of voluntarism as a new form of “ethical citizenship”) allowed for broader reflections on the rise of what she calls the “moral neoliberal,” intimately tied to the “market neoliberal.” While working on her book manuscript, she is exploring two new research projects. The first looks at the emergence of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) from a cultural perspective by tracking the ways in which CSR intersects with the contemporary reformulation of Catholic Social Doctrine in Italy. The second is an investigation of the Italian anti-psychiatry movement as a utopic project, and its fate under neo-liberal conditions. Her previous work on the international indigenous rights movement at the UN appeared in Cultural Anthropology and Identities: Global Studies in Cultural and Power.
Email: akmuehle@uchicago.edu

LIESL OLSON
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Liesl received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. Her research interests include twentieth-century British and American literature, modern and contemporary poetry, Irish studies, and the visual arts. Her book, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008), addresses literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual and unselfconscious actions of everyday life. Looking primarily at the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Marcel Proust, Modernism and the Ordinary argues that a commitment to representing and valorizing ordinariness undercuts and threatens the very nature of modernism, as each of these writers is attracted to the ordinary in a way that tempers the very artfulness of their literary works. Liesl has also published essays on the work of Henry James, W.H. Auden, and the contemporary poet Robert Hass.
Email: liesl@uchicago.edu

GEOF OPPENHEIMER
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Visual Arts)
Geof Oppenheimer received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. His work addresses the formal manifestation of political values. Through his diverse artistic practice, Oppenheimer investigates political, social, and artistic binaries ranging from fascism vs. democracy, boutique vs. homespun and detention vs. agency. Exhibitions include the PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City. NY; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco; MC, Los Angeles; Cohan & Leslie, New York; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester; SF Camerawork, San Francisco. Awards include: Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2005), Eisner Foundation (2001), Grand Mariner Foundation (2001). He is represented by The Project, New York.
Email: opshop@uchicago.edu

GEOFFREY REES
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Jeff received his Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from Yale University in 2004. Through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ethics, integrating resources in traditional theological ethics, moral philosophy, theory of religion, contemporary literary and queer theory, and English literature, he seeks in his writings to address constructively the challenges of contemporary theory and methodology to traditional theological conceptions of personal identity and moral responsibility. Also, for the 2006-07 academic year Jeff is a Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Hospital.

SHALINI SATKUNANANDAN
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Shalini Satkunanandan received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests span the history of political thought and philosophy; contemporary political theory; the relation between politics and ethics; legal theory and the
limits of modern legal form; and the rhetoric of religion in political discourse. The overarching concern of Shalini’s research is the relentlessly “technical” character of modern thinking - where everything appears as transparent, demonstrable, orderable, and harnessable at will for man’s purposes - and the way engagements with the sacred offer, or appear to offer, a reprieve from this technicity. In her dissertation Shalini examines the phenomenon of “conversion,” the radical reorientation of one’s existence in response to a call, as this phenomenon appears in the thought of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger. She shows how the phenomenon of a conversion (or, to speak in non-Christian language, a “turn”) invites us to rethink contemporary, technical accounts of the relation between obligation, truth, and freedom. Shalini is currently revising her dissertation for publication as a book, provisionally titled “The Turn: Plato, Kant, and Heidegger on the Encounter with the Ground of Obligation.”
Email: shalinis@uchicago.edu

ODED SCHECHTER
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Oded Schechter came to the University of Chicago after spending 2006-2007 as an assistant professor at the school of philosophy at Potsdam University in Germany. He has held a variety of fellowships in Germany, the latest being a post-doctorate EUME Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His monograph On the Genealogy of the Hebrew Language is about to be published. He is currently writing on Spinoza's ontology. Oded received his BA and MA degrees in philosophy from the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Fostering Excellence at Tel Aviv University, and his PhD degree from the Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago.

TARA SCHWEGLER
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Tara received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2004. Her research focuses on developing an ethnographic understanding of the relationship between state power, forms of economic knowledge, and the dynamics of political economy in Mexico. Her doctoral thesis, “;Economics in Action: Negotiating Authority and Building Markets in Mexico,”; examined the role of neoliberal economics in the genesis and development of the 1995 New Law of Social Security in Mexico. Drawing on ethnographic field research with Mexican technocrats, the dissertation considers how economic ideas work in practice, a move that entails conceptualizing economic discourse not simply as an abstract paradigm, but as a fluid set of meanings that are contested and reconfigured as they are incorporated into specific political matrices. In addition to preparing the dissertation for publication, she is developing a new project that involves reconstructing the interactions between NAFTA negotiators from the U.S. and Mexico in order to gain a deeper understanding of how personal networks and exchanges have shaped the infrastructure of the contemporary geopolitical order.

OLGA SEZNEVA
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
(Weissbourd Conference Coordinator)
Olga Sezneva received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2005, where she developed her expertise in the sociology of culture and historical sociology. Olga's interests lie at the intersection of migration, social memory and post-communist changes. Her forthcoming book, Contingent Place, Tenacious Homeland, follows the transformation of the German city of Koenigsberg into the Soviet, and recently Russian, city of Kaliningrad after the Second World War. Olga Sezneva demonstrates that although Koenigsberg has vanished, its memory lingers among Russian migrants and their children. The book traces the forms and practices of the settlers' commitment to acts of preservation, despite official sanctions against them. Her analysis uncovers an imperative among the new population to maintain a “collective memory”; of the German city. The book follows different strategies of forging a collective past, the goals they accomplish, and the transformation of these strategies in the context of social change. Olga's work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the social construction of the past and the emergence of new social forms, whether in immigrant urban communities or the post-communist generation.
Curriculum Vitae
Email: sezneva@uchicago.edu

BRIAN SOUCEK
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
(Humanities Co-Chair, Society of Fellows)
Brian received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2005. His dissertation and much of his current work centers on the personification of art: the way that notions such as autonomy, agency, authenticity, or expression are invoked analogously in discussions both of persons and of artworks. His work examines the widespread personification of art in contemporary aesthetics and criticism, and traces it back to the 18th century's entangled conceptions of moral and aesthetic judgment. Brian also writes on the philosophy of music, particularly opera. An essay on Mozart and Strauss is forthcoming in The Don Giovanni Moment (Columbia University Press, 2006).
Email: soucek@uchicago.edu

ERIK THOMSON
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
(Social Sciences Co-Chair, Society of Fellows)
I am a historian of early modern Europe. In my dissertation, I compared how war, commerce and governance came together in the statecraft of Swedish Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna and the French minister Cardinal Richelieu. After revising it for publication, I plan to begin my next project, an exploration of the problems faced by those people from many trades—from artists to arms-dealers, from scholars to diplomats—who depended simultaneously upon broad European networks and upon the grace and favour of a particular monarch or state.
Email: ethomson@uchicago.edu

RICHARD WESTERMAN
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Richard Westerman received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2006. His thesis on “The Concept of the Conscious Self in Western Marxism” examined the accounts of personhood and self-recognition underlying the social theories of thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno. For these writers, the experience of living in modern industrialised society shaped the self-consciousness of the individual. His current research interests expand the theme of experience in the modern world, by examining the way memory and identity are related in early twentieth century European philosophy and literature.

CHRISTOPHER N. WARREN
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities)
Christopher Warren is a literary scholar who for his doctorate at the University of Oxford studied the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and the emergence of modern international law. Arising out of this work, the book he is currently preparing for publication, Literature and the Law of Nations in England, 1585-1673, illuminates literature’s neglected contributions to modern international law by tracing the Roman-law concept of the law of nations through literary works by John Milton, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius, among others. An article on Milton and Hobbes recently appeared in English Literary Renaissance, and an article on Hobbes and the history of international law is forthcoming in The Seventeenth Century. His related interests include rhetoric, the history of political thought, Renaissance civic humanism, and the history of the book. He teaches the “Human Being and Citizen” core sequence.

KARIN ZITZEWITZ
(Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
Karin Zitzewitz received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2006. Her dissertation, “The Aesthetics of Secularism: Modernist Art and Visual Culture in India,” considered the social place of modernist art in post-colonial India. The developments in Indian art call into question everyday assumptions about the function of art, its representativeness, and its historical progression. In the context of Nehruvian India, modernist art was also a staging ground for the development of a secular national culture. This aspect of her project is the focus of Zitzewitz's present work, as she develops her dissertation into a book. Other research interests include popular and “folk” visual culture, semiotic approaches to the image, the historical and anthropological study of secularism, and cosmopolitan cities.
Email: karinz@uchicago.edu

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