Collegiate Fellows

2012-2013 FELLOWS

Tamar Abramov received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2008. She has since taught at the University of Minnesota’s German Department, at Deep Springs College and at Harvard’s Literature Concentration. She works in the intersection of philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis and is also interested in film theory. Her dissertation, To Catch a Spy: Explorations in Subjectivity, argues that literature and film become home to the spy when the disciplines charged with regulating his actions, especially international law, break down. It shows that by embodying one of the law’s blind spots the spy finds his home in literature, and that it is precisely to the law’s blindness that espionage literature responds. Articles on Brecht, Kleist, Conrad, Bennett, Valerie Plame and Levinas are submitted or forthcoming.

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Heather Badamo is an art historian working on the intersection of Christian and Islamic visual culture in the frontier zones of the medieval eastern Mediterranean.  Her interests include theories of cultural exchange, philosophies of religious violence, and strategies for communal self-fashioning as manifested in the visual arts.  She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, entitled “Image and Community: Representations of Military Saints in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean,” focusing on the cult of the warrior saints as seen through the lens of its icons – images of aggressive saints believed to perform miracles of salvation and conversion – which provide insights into issues of interfaith relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt and the Levant during the era of the Crusades.  Heather Badamo has been a fellow at the Fulbright Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC.  She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Michigan in 2011.

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Fadi Bardawil’s research, at the crossroads of anthropology and intellectual history, focuses on contemporary modernist Arab thought and the international circulation of theoretical discourses as well as their political effects in distinct contexts of reception. His dissertation examined the ebbing away of Marxist thought and practice in the Levant through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation (born around 1940) of disenchanted, previously militant, public figures. Through engaging memoirs, party documents, theoretical texts as well as interviews, this work explored ideological transformations in the region, the vexed relation of intellectuals to political militancy as well as the shifting articulations of Western metropolitan fields of cultural production to Levantine ones. His writings have appeared in al-Akhbar daily, the Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic Edition), Jadaliyya, and Kulturaustausch. In 2010-11, he was a EUME Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität (Berlin). Bardawil was trained in Sociology at the American University of Beirut; he received his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2010.

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Nathan received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2008. Much of his current research concerns Kant, both as a prominent figure in the history of philosophy and as a relevant guide to contemporary problems in the discipline. His dissertation, “Kant's Transcendental Deductions of the Categories,” examines Kant’s account of our relation to the world as thinkers by way of a detailed examination and comparison of the two versions of the Deduction-argument in the Critique of Pure Reason. The reading that emerges from this project is meant to get Kant right, while also suggesting a strategy for addressing a variety of current philosophical debates on topics including perceptual skepticism, the intentionality of thought, and the status of transcendental arguments. This reflects Nathan’s broader commitment to the view that the history of philosophy is itself a form of philosophical inquiry. When not pondering the starry skies above him, he enjoys the more down-to-earth pleasures of playing poker and skiing.

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Shanna Carlson received her Ph.D. from the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University in 2012. Her research specializes in cross-dressing narratives drawn from French medieval and early modern texts, narratives which have in common an anxiety about the unverifiable character of “sex” or “gender.” She is currently revising for publication her dissertation, “Sexed Being and the Limit: Writing Transgender Subjectivity,” which draws on French medieval and early modern literature and the discourses of gender studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and queer theory, to argue for an understanding of “transgender subjectivity” that would be irreducible to the fields of “sex,” gender identity, or gender expression. Reading the transgender characters of the texts considered as allegorical subjects, the project explores the notion that transgender subjectivity may be understood as a particular response to language’s inability to explain the “sexed being” of the subject, a response which orbits the paradoxical status of language and its limits, and a response which entails experiencing language’s limits in particularly acute form. Shanna’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in differences, Subjectivity, and the Transgender Studies Reader, Volume 2. Plans for future research include an article on the queerer sides of structuralism and a rereading of Freud’s case history of Little Hans. 

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James Chappel received his PhD in History from Columbia University. He studies modern European history, and is particularly interested in the intersection between religion and the social sciences. He is working on a manuscript, provisionally entitled "The Miraculous Economy: Catholicism and Political Economy in Europe, 1920-1950," which seeks to show precisely how Catholicism impacted the reconstruction of European societies after World War II. Drawing on dozens of periodicals and archives, the work shows how Catholic economists and sociologists developed a wide-ranging social theory in the 1920s and 1930s. After the war, they were able to put these insights into practice as theorists of the new Christian Democratic parties that swept to power across Western and Central Europe.

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Ian received his doctorate in history from the University of Oxford, where his dissertation was entitled “Producing the Mahatma: Communication, Community, and Political Theatre Behind the Gandhi Phenomenon, 1893-1942.” He is at present writing a book on Gandhi’s library and the relationship between knowledge and social movements. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, Ian taught South Asian history and literature at Yale University and Wesleyan University. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago.

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Jacqueline Feke received her Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science and technology from the University of Toronto.  She spent 2009-2012 as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and she will spend the summer of 2013 as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.  Jackie’s research examines the philosophical ideas and rhetorical practices of Greco-Roman mathematicians, including Claudius Ptolemy, Hero of Alexandria, and Theon of Alexandria.  She currently is working on her book manuscript, “Ethical Mathematics: Ptolemy on the Relationships between Physics, Mathematics, and Theology.”  The book takes Ptolemy’s ethical program as foundational to his other philosophical and mathematical pursuits.  It presents an intellectual history of Ptolemy’s entire philosophical system—his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics—as well as an analysis of how Ptolemy applies his philosophical ideas in his practice of the mathematical and physical sciences.

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Michael Gallope is a musicologist who studies the way musical practices of the twentieth century link up with problems in the philosophy and intellectual history of music. In 2011, he completed his PhD at New York University where he wrote a dissertation that developed an analytical vocabulary to compare diverging habits of speculative thought among the “musical” exemplars of continental philosophy (Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch, and Deleuze). While revising the dissertation for publication, he is working on three historical articles: one on the intellectual history of cold war experimentalism, another on Richard Hell as the mythical inventor of punk, and a third on music’s role as an "irrational" mediator in protest movements. He has also written articles about the technological mediation of music and the philosophy of musical improvisation.

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Roxana Galusca is a scholar of literature and cultural studies, working on visual culture, transnational feminism, the sexual politics of migration, and U.S. immigration literatures. Her book manuscript "Humanitarian Entertainment: The U.S. Culture Industry and the Global Fight for Women's Rights" tracks the contemporary centrality of U.S. media and entertainment in the global campaign against the traffic in women, with specific focus on the cultural and economic processes that turn the culture of entertainment into a transnational resource for humanitarianism. Bringing together diverse genres and cultural forms – from documentary film, photographic essays, and training manuals to memoirs and audiovisual testimonies – “Humanitarian Entertainment” investigates the material conditions underpinning the transnational articulation of cultural practices as forms of humanitarian intervention. The type of gender politics emerging from within the culture industry, this study argues, colludes many times with the political economy of advanced capitalism even as it constitutes women’s bodies as sites where national and transnational anxieties about reproduction, migration, and sexuality are played-out.  Besides work on anti-trafficking humanitarianism, Roxana has published essays on U.S. immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, investigative journalism, and on Ursula Biemann’s video art.

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Daragh Grant received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 2012. His dissertation, On the “Native Question”, which brings together his research interests in state formation and colonialism, focuses on the establishment of English settler colonies in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The project draws on early modern theories of sovereignty to illuminate the foundations on which English claims to authority over Indians and settlers in America were articulated. Exploring the tensions between the juridical foundations of such claims to authority and the day-to-day practices of colonization, he aims to explain the peculiar feature of the colonial state form by which indigenous peoples were subjected to the edicts of the colonial government whilst also being excluded from the moral community on whose behalf this government was imagined to rule. In addition to revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, he is currently working on a paper on the concept of colonialism and is exploring a project on piracy and empire from 1650 to 1730.

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Markus Hardtmann is a critic and scholar who works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and media theory. His dissertation, “Placeholders: Robert Musil’s Logic of Literature,” explores the ways in which Musil’s writing, in its very conception of literature, responds to contemporaneous debates surrounding the foundations of mathematics. Recasting well-known passages in The Man without Qualities in light of various texts in logic and mathematics, including path-breaking works by Cantor and Husserl, Frege and Russell, and Peano and Dedekind, the dissertation circumscribes the singular, and therefore exemplary, place Musil occupies within modernity. Plans for future research include an article on the digital photographer Andreas Gursky and an extended essay on the politics of mediality in the thought of Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk.

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Rafeeq received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2012. His research focuses on two areas of inquiry: (1) the history of modern political philosophy and (2) contemporary political philosophy in the Rawlsian tradition. With respect to (1) he is interested in how to understand the relation between the autonomy of individuals and the flourishing of states, especially in figures like Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. With respect to (2) he is interested in models of community consonant with late liberalism. Here he defends the idea that a liberal political order, properly understood, demands forms of ethical engagement on the part of its citizens that extend beyond mere respect for the rights of others and toward more robust forms of solidarity. Throughout his work he is oriented by the idea that historical inquiry ought to inform contemporary reflection and vice-versa, such that the division between (1) and (2) is artificial at best. In addition to revising his dissertation, Obligation and Happiness in Rousseau, into a book manuscript, he is currently working on papers on Kant’s argument for the duty to exit the state of nature and Rawls’s argument for the ‘congruence’ of the right and the good.

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Stefan received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to the US, Stefan studied sociology, law, and economics at the Free University of Berlin. He works on sociological theory, violence, armed groups, and historical sociology of political and cultural change. His dissertation “After State-Breakdown: Dynamics of Multi-Party conflict, violence, and paramilitary mobilization in Japan 1853-1877, Russia 1904-1920, and Germany 1918-1934 – A relational, micro-sociological approach” presents a micro-theory of the dynamics and patterns of power struggles during revolutionary state breakdown. It shows that revolutionary conflict is driven and shaped by micro-situational, emotional dynamics. Stefan’s approach advances the literature on social movements and contentious politics plus statebreakdown theory by combining it with Durkheimian sociology of emotions. In a separate research project, Stefan has spelled out a micro-sociological theory of civil war atrocities. He shows that local emotional dynamics flowing over time are crucial to explain where and when atrocities do or do not occur and which forms they take on the micro-level; part of this work has been published in ‘Sociological Forum’. His research at the University of Chicago will continue and extend his work in the field of paramilitary organizations and violence, moving towards a macro-historical comparative ‘Sociology of Paramilitaries’.

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Lisa Lee received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her area of specialty is modern and contemporary art, with a focus on recent sculptural practice in the European context. Lee’s dissertation, “Sculpture’s Condition / Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn,” addresses the works of two important living artists who insist upon the vitality of the category of sculpture even as they radically redefine that medium and its potential meanings in the public sphere. Her dissertation maps the work of Genzken (b. 1948) and Hirschhorn (b. 1957) at the intersection of sculpture’s materialization, mystification, and extension in the hands of Joseph Beuys; its dematerialization in the 1970s; and its avant-garde legacy of failed utopian potential. Overlaying that map is a second, in which she considers the particular urgency of sculptural practice in the context of ongoing post-war reconstruction in Europe and Germany in particular. Lee is co-editor, with Hal Foster, of Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn, forthcoming in 2013 from The MIT Press.

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Spencer Leonard received his Ph.D. from the departments of South AsianLanguages and Civilizations and History at the University of Chicago in 2009. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation, “A Fit of Absence of Mind? Illiberal Imperialism and the Founding of British India, 1757-1776.” Through an intensive study of the initial decades of East India Company state formation in Bengal, Spencer’s research attempts to revise received understandings of imperialism by reaching behind assumptions, whether imperialist or nationalist, that derive from the 20th century experience of decolonization. Contributing to the literature on late Mughal state formation, corporate and economic history, the political history of the British Empire, and the social theory of the Enlightenment, Spencer writes global history with an area specialist’s attention to local specificity.

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Mark Loeffler received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2011. His dissertation examines contestations of finance capital in Germany and Britain, between the first “Great Depression” of 1873-1896, through the interwar Depression and its aftermath.  He treats the formation of critical discourses on finance as transnational phenomena, and his extensive research traverses popular and elite sources.  Across these sites, he argues, three dimensions of “anti-financial” discourse emerged to general prominence: the tendency to reduce the axes of modern political-economic exploitation and conflict to binaries of the virtuous “producer” vs. the financial “parasite”; the imputation of economic crises exclusively to finance; and a tendency towards conspiracy theorizing, including anti-Semitism.  Mark’s work contributes to economic, cultural and intellectual histories, and it develops social-theoretical perspectives on why such contestations of finance became meaningful and compelling to a wide cast of historical actors. He has taught widely in the College, and is currently revising his manuscript for publication.

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Benjamin McKean is a political theorist whose research considers the role of dispositions in the achievement and maintenance of political freedom and social justice internationally and domestically. His manuscript Disposed to Justice offers a critical perspective on liberal political theory by restoring a citizen’s-eye view to the issue of global justice. In part by demonstrating the surprising extent to which John Rawls's theory of justice relies on elements of Hegel at key junctures, the project shows how citizens must shape their own dispositions in order for political society to function fairly. In doing so, it develops a criterion of solidarity to help individuals understand their political obligations in a social world that forces them to cooperate internationally with others whom shared institutions and practices fail to treat as free and equal. He is also at work on a second book project tentatively titled Political Freedom and Resentment that extends the conceptual language of dispositions to understanding the relationship between democracy and populism. His other research concerns questions of theory and practice, the relationship between aesthetics and power, and how natural and political catastrophes change our understanding of the meaning of human action. He received his PhD from the Princeton University Department of Politics in 2010.  

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Laura Montanaro is a political theorist who is working on democratic theory in the area of non-electoral representation. Her research focuses on two broad and related questions. How might democratic representation develop outside of electoral institutions, not only within established democracies, but also in those places where representative democracy is underdeveloped or entirely absent, including the global arena? And how should we theorize and normatively assess various forms of non-electoral representation? Her dissertation on “The Democratic Legitimacy of ‘Self-Appointed’ Representatives” considers representatives who might credibly claim democratic credentials, though not as a consequence of formal elections. Laura is currently revising her dissertation for publication as a monograph, as well as preparing articles on the constitutive effects of representation, and the legitimacy of citizen representatives. Laura received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in 2010.

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Poornima Paidipaty completed her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2009.  Her dissertation, entitled, "Tribal Nation: Politics and the Making of Modern Anthropology in India" explores the entangled histories of social science, colonial militarism, frontier politics, and tribal governance in India, starting in the nineteenth century.  Her thesis examines the agonistic relationship between anthropology as a formal discipline and contemporary tribal movements, which share common histories, archives, and conceptual formations that trace back to colonial policies of frontier pacification.  Her research shows that anthropology, in both its colonial and nationalist formulations, was deeply invested in the management of tribal areas, and therefore, as a modern techno-science, its history must be written in conjunction with the political moments and social challenges that shape its disciplinary practices, theories, methods, and conceptual frameworks.  As such, her work provides a new historical frame for analyzing state failure in India’s tribal regions, which have witnessed decades of development-related displacement, poverty, and armed insurgency.  Poornima is currently revising her manuscript for publication.  She is broadly interested in the history of anthropology and its relationship to decolonization; mercenaries, insurgents, and the problem of sovereignty in contemporary South Asia; and the impact of extractive activities, such as coal mining and timber logging, on India's democracy.

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Karthik Pandian is an artist whose practice seeks to unsettle the contradictions at the heart of the monument. The universal and contingent, sacred and profane, proximate and distant confront one another in his work. Concerned in particular with the way in which history lurks in matter, Pandian often uses 16mm film to excavate sites for fragments of political intensity. The sculptural works that support, enshroud and sometimes obscure his film projections are produced from materials drawn from his site research and assume the form of architectural constructions. Through moving image, sculpture and syntheses of the two, his work imagines freedom in relation to the impositions of architecture. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna. His work has been the subject of numerous published writings, including a feature in Artforum and a catalogue essay by Michael Taussig. Pandian's exhibitions have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Durfee Foundation amongst others. In 2008, he received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA after completing his BA at Brown University, Providence, RI in 2003.

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GENEVIEVE ROUSSELIERE Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences Gates-Blake 432 773-702-6436 rousseliere@uchicago.edu Core: Power, Identity and Resistance

Geneviève Rousselière is a political theorist working at the intersection of the history of modern European political thought, social and economic philosophy, and contemporary theory. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled “Freedom and the State in the Age of Market Economy”, which identifies a theory called modern social republicanism, that emerged in France in the aftermath of the Revolution. Uncovering the influence of thinkers traditionally considered liberal, such as Constant and Tocqueville, as well as radical figures, from the 1848 revolutionary Blanc to the founding father of French sociology Durkheim, the book develops a singular political and social model based on an original idea of freedom as self-development, a democratic commitment to equal opportunity, regulation of free markets and an emphasis on strengthening “the social fabric”, threatened by economic changes and political unrest. Other fields of research include normative theory (notably questions of neutrality and equality), the history of political economy and an ongoing project comparing the republicanism of the Ancients and the Moderns. She has taught her own classes and discussion sections at Northwestern University, the Sorbonne (Paris I) and Princeton University. An alumna of the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris) and the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), where she was trained in ancient and early modern philosophy, she received her PhD in Politics from Princeton in 2011.

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Jared Secord studies the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic World. His dissertation focused on the diverse community of Greek-speaking scholars active in the city of Rome from 100 BCE to 200 CE, and traced how the influential classical revival of Greek culture under Roman rule served to marginalize scholars who were unwilling or unable to link themselves to the classical past and literature of Greece. Areas of current research include the transformation of Roman intellectual life in the third century CE, and the interactions between Christian scholars and Greek physicians at Rome in the second and third centuries. Forthcoming and in-process articles are devoted to Aelian, Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Polybius, and Tatian. Jared received his Ph.D. in Greek & Roman History from the University of Michigan in 2012.

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Lauren Silvers received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in Comparative Literature in 2010. Her areas of specialization are nineteenth-century French poetry and the history of science and psychology. Her work focuses on revising the ideas of modernity that typically inform literary studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, “Psychological Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Reading in the Symbolist Literary Era (1880-1905) examines the psycho-physiological underpinnings of French poets’ and hypnotists’ ideas about language and argues for their mutual influence in the emergence of literary modernism. In charting a shift in fin-de-siècle literary production from a poetics of communication to an aesthetics of communicability, this study offers an alternative account of literary modernity—not as voicing the traumas of urban experience, but as productive of knowledge and innovative ideas about the self, society, and the body. In addition to preparing her dissertation for publication, Lauren is currently working on several articles: one on physiological reading and performance at the fin-de-siècle, and another on the philosophy of habit in France and England in the nineteenth century. Lauren has taught for several years in the Media Aesthetics sequence of the College Core at the University of Chicago and has edited several books for fine artists to accompany exhibitions in New York. In her spare time she loves the state of Vermont from afar.

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Bettina Stoetzer is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, nationalism, and urban life. Her dissertation, “At the Forest Edges of the City: Nature, Race and National Belonging in Berlin,” engages several sites – gardens, forests, urban parks and a post-unification era nature park at Berlin’s fringes – to examine how “natural” landscapes become sites of contestation over citizenship and race. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with different immigrant communities, as well as environmentalists, urban planners, and German nature lovers, her research shows that “nature” becomes a key register through which current forms of urban marginality and belonging are articulated in a new Europe. Bettina holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Goettingen and she completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Her current book project, tentatively titled Ruderal City, expands her doctoral thesis and develops an analytic framework that attends to heterogeneity in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Bettina has previously published a book on feminism and anti-racism in Germany (InDifferenzen, argument, 2004) and has co-edited Shock and Awe. War on Words (New Pacific Press, 2004) – a collection of essays that explores the current global situation through the political lives of words.

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Karl Swinehart earned a dual PhD in Education and Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. He is a linguistic anthropologist with a background in applied and educational linguistics whose ethnographically informed work illuminates institutional interventions in the linguistic, and more broadly semiotic, mediation of social groups. His dissertation, Ayllu on the Airwaves: Rap, Reform, & Redemption on Aymara National Radio,  compares three Aymara-Spanish bilingual media platforms in Bolivia from which diverse cultural brokers project differing models of indigenous nationhood. Whether among rappers, Jesuits, or nationalist education activists, a linguistic register of dehispanicized Aymara was heard operating as a complex, sonic icon of national belonging across the three case studies. He is expanding the dissertation’s section on hip-hop into a book-length manuscript--Clear, Hidden Voices: Language, Indigeneity and Hip-hop in Bolivia. In 2012, he co-edited and contributed to a special issue of Language & Communication, titled Languages & Publics in Stateless Nations. He has also published work in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, International Multilingual Research Journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and has articles in press with Language in Society and Social Text. At the UofC he co-teaches Language and the Human together with faculty in the Linguistics Department.

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Corey received his PhD in history from Stanford University in 2011. His research focuses on the economic and political history of early modern Italy. His dissertation is entitled, "The Masterpiece of the Medici: Commerce, Politics, and the Making of the Free Port of Livorno, 1574-1790." By examining the theory and practice of the free port from its inception to the dawn of liberalism, his thesis establishes a distinctive Italian contribution to the debates over political economy whose history has been organized around the English and French contexts. In other projects he is interested in material culture, the problem of customs fraud in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, and information flows between Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

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Zhivka Valiavicharska received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. She works in the fields of modern social and political thought and critical theory. Her dissertation examines the political uses, material effects, and the structuring agency of the Stalinist discourse in socialist and post-socialist East-European philosophy. Her current book project aims to disarticulate Lenin’s contributions to political thought from their Stalinist uses. Offering new readings of Lenin’s work, she traces the discursive production of a coherent theory of “Leninism” during Stalinist Soviet Union and shows how twentieth-century intellectual histories of Marxist thought have retained unquestioned assumptions about Lenin’s work, which continue to reproduce the Stalinist legacy. Her other work in progress includes a project on Evgeny Pashukanis and the radical legal theorists from the 1920s Soviet Union, and a project on the intellectual and political contributions of Marxist humanist movements in Eastern Europe from the 1960s and 1970s, which called for a “third way” for socialism’s future.

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Neil Verma received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He has taught a range of subjects including media aesthetics, cinema studies, art history, literature, sound studies, critical theory and intellectual history. His current work explores the theory, aesthetics and history of radio drama. His book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, is published by the University of Chicago Press. Other recent publications include an article on the plays of Lucille Fletcher and a chapter on eavesdropping in film noir. Areas of ongoing research include: film and mental images; science fiction; the radio plays of Wyllis Cooper; the prose of James Agee; theory of ventriloquism; intimacy and media; and false alarms.

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Audrey Wasser earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University in 2010. Her research focuses on French and English modernism, literary theory, and continental philosophy.  Provisionally titled “The Work of Difference: Form and Formation in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory,” her book project traces the origin of modern and contemporary conceptions of literary form back to German Romanticism in order to examine some of their metaphysical assumptions. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Benedict de Spinoza, this book argues for a notion of form that departs from the unity of self-reflection as well as from the closure implied in literature’s supposed autonomy from other creative processes.  Audrey’s writings and translations have appeared in Angelaki, diacritics, SubStance, and Modern Philology.

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James Lindley Wilson received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2011, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2007. Jim’s research interests span political philosophy, ethics, and law. Most of his work has focused on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and questions of what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions. His dissertation, “Finding Time for Democracy: A Theory of Political Equality,” attempts to articulate the moral force of the democratic idea that all citizens are equal political authorities, and to explain how that abstract idea ought to regulate the design and operation of political institutions. Jim also researches election law and the history of political thought, including the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and the Federalists. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, and Representation. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, and writing related articles on applied problems in democratic institutional design.

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