Postdoctoral Fellows

Philip Francis explores questions of religion and the body, with attention to the shifting interrelations of aesthetics, gender, and sexuality in the modern West, especially in the context of American Christianity.

Sima Shakhsari’s research broadly focuses on sexuality and diaspora in the Middle East. Currently, they are conducting fieldwork research and writing about the politics of life and death in relation to the Iranian queer and transgender refugees in Turkey. In addition, they are working on a book manuscript that analyzes Weblogistan as a site of cybergovernmentality, where simultaneously national and neo-liberal gendered subjectivities are produced through online and offline heteronormative disciplining and normalizing techniques.

Zeb Tortorici’s research focuses on the intersections of sexuality and archives in colonial Latin America. At the Penn Humanities Forum he will complete his monograph on the "sins against nature" in colonial New Spain.

Durba Mitra is a historian of modern South Asia. She specializes in its social and intellectual history, as well as histories of sexuality and the history of science and medicine. At the Forum, she will be focusing on her book manuscript, Sex and The New Science of Society in Colonial India. In this work, she investigates how the figure of the sexually deviant woman, often depicted as the prostitute, was central in the making of a new sociological imagination in eastern India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.