2021-2022 Faculty Fellows
Environments
Carwil Bjork-James
Carwil Bjork-James is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia. He conducts immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, environmental struggles, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia. His research project, Perspectives on Space and Territory in Socio-Environmental Conflicts, looks at the political, ethical, and legal tensions that surround resource extraction projects pursued by “post-neoliberal” governments in South America. Building on his past work in this area as both a researcher and a policy advocate, this project focuses on indigenous opposition to environmentally damaging projects on their traditional territories.
Teresa A. Goddu
Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, slavery and antislavery, as well as print, material, and visual culture. She is the author of two books: Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (Columbia University Press) and Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press). Her current research focuses on the environmental humanities, specifically contemporary climate fiction.
Jessie Hock
Jessie Hock is Assistant Professor of English. She works on English and French early modern poetry, classical reception history, the history of philosophical materialism, and contemporary theory and continental philosophy. Her 2021 book, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and she has articles and book chapters on Lucretius, Remy Belleau, Gilles Deleuze, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Michel de Montaigne. She is also the co-translator (with Alex Dubilet) of two book by contemporary French philosopher François Laruelle.
Ken MacLeish
Ken MacLeish is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Anthropology. His research focuses on bodily and emotional experiences of contemporary war; the emergence and contestation of war-related illness and injury; and the representation of US war-making in policy, veteran care practices, and American public culture. He is the author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013), and his scholarship has appeared most recently in BioSocieties, Ethnos, Security Dialogue, and Cultural Anthropology.
Karen Ng
Karen Ng is Associate Professor of Philosophy. She specializes in nineteenth-century European philosophy (esp. Hegel and German Idealism) and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Her book, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic, is published with Oxford University Press (2020). In addition to her research in post-Kantian philosophy, she is also interested in the ongoing influence of Hegel and Marx for critical social theory, particularly as their legacies help us understand the relation between human beings and nature, possibilities and failures of mutual recognition, and conceptions of progress and critique.
Samira Sheikh
Samira Sheikh is Associate Professor of History and a historian of South Asia. She is wrapping up a book on the hectic politics of Bharuch, a small town in Gujarat, India, on the eve of British colonialism in the eighteenth century. She has previously written on fifteenth-century South Asia, Isma‘ili and Hindu devotionalism in Gujarat, the notorious Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and early colonial land-revenue systems. Her early work on an eighteenth-century Gujarati pilot book is the jumping-off point for a new project on knowledge systems and politics in Gujarati maps from the eighteenth century.