Postdoctoral Fellows

Delia Duong Ba Wendel is interested in how communities recover and rebuild from conflict and disaster. Her current research explores peacebuilding in post-genocide Rwanda as a socio-spatial endeavor; one that is defined and challenged in the design of homes, settlements, and civic space. This project, The Ethics of Stability, was recognized by grants from the Social Science Research Council, Harvard Center for Ethics, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and American Council of Learned Societies.

James Bergman is a historian of science studying the history of climate science in the middle of the twentieth century. He is writing a book manuscript, Climate on the Ground: Data, Planning, and the Pursuit of Community Stability in the United States, 1933–1963, that will be part of the University of Pittsburgh Press’s new Intersections series. In the book, he explores the interaction between data, economic planning, and concerns about community stability in the United States from the New Deal to the early 1960s.

Meg Leja is a scholar of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, who specializes in the history of medicine. Her current research explores changing perceptions of the body and the value of medical knowledge in the early medieval period. While at the Center, she is looking forward to examining the ninth-century development of visionary accounts of the afterlife and how these impinged on beliefs about the soul’s embodiment in the temporal world.

Jacob Doherty is an anthropologist studying urban infrastructures and environments. His work focuses on the production of disposability as a social and material condition, and the ways lives cast as disposable are, nonetheless, lived. At the Wolf Humanities Center, he will be preparing an ethnographic monograph describing the diverse worlds of waste in Kampala, Uganda and theorizing the everyday entanglements of morality and materiality, respectability and disposability, progress and pollution.

Leon J. Hilton received his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2016. His research focuses on modern and contemporary theater and performance; disability studies; feminist and queer theory; critical race studies; psychoanalysis; and the history of science and medicine (especially psychiatry).

Brian Long is an intellectual and cultural historian of the medieval Mediterranean. His work focuses on the production and reception of medical and scientific translations from Arabic into Latin and Greek in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At the Forum, he will be focusing on his book manuscript, a comparative study of the tentative strategies used by two early translators from Arabic: Symeon Seth in Byzantium and Constantine the African in southern Italy.

Susie Hatmaker is interested in the valuation and transformation of matter as site of socio-cultural change. At the Humanities Forum, she will conduct research for a book project titled Silica, Silicon, Silicosis, on the translation of the mineral, silica, into life-altering technologies, bodily configuration, and social histories.

Avery Slater's work investigates the role of technology in re-conceptualizing human and nonhuman forms of linguistic creativity. She will spend the year at the Penn Humanities Forum completing her first book, Apparatus Poetica, a project exploring how mid-twentieth-century poets rethink modernist theories of poetic process in response to rapidly emerging technologies of language (computation, machine translation, information theory).

Judy Kaplan is a cultural and intellectual historian of the human sciences with a special interest in the history of linguistic research. At the Forum, she will be developing her book manuscript in progress, Big Data and the Reconstruction of Linguistic Prehistory, through an investigation of the role of machine translation in mid twentieth-century comparative and anthropological linguistics.

Kadji Amin’s research focuses on the disorienting effects of the queer past on Queer Studies. He will complete his book manuscript, tentatively titled Queer Attachments, during his fellowship year at the Humanities Forum. Amin earned his PhD in Romance Studies (French) with a graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University.