Skip over navigation
Brown Home Brown Home Brown University Cogut Center for the Humanities Brown Home Brown Home Brown University

2007-09 Postdoctoral Fellows
in International Humanities

The Postdoctoral Fellows in International Humanities will explore and enhance Brown’s commitment to the humanities in an international context by teaching one class per semester, participating fully in the lives of their home departments, meeting at the Fellows' Seminars on a regular basis to discuss their work in progress, and convening a bi-weekly seminar on the humanities and the transnational university.

Visit Fellows' Seminars for a schedule of upcoming events and a look at our most recent offerings.

Lorenzo Benadusi
PhD, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Research Interest: "The Image of the Soldier: Militarism, Masculinity and Nation from the First to the Second World War."  Lorenzo's research aims at analyzing how the image of the soldier and masculinity has been exploited by nationalism and fascism for their own political ends. The research looks at army education and life, publications by the army and the activity of war veterans, as well as paintings and iconographic representations, novels and comics, newspapers, magazines and books, all contributing to define the image of the soldier between the two wars and highlighting the tight link between masculinity and militarism. Lorenzo will also examine the ways in which this image permeated culture and society, leaving its mark on the political system as well as on artistic, literary and scientific production and profoundly affecting the common mentality.

Yukiko Koga
PhD, Columbia University
Research Interest: “The Double Inheritance: The Afterlife of Colonial Modernity in the Cities of Former ‘Manchuria.’” Yukiko's research explores the process of coming to terms with the past in urban Northeast China, former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, where Japanese are once again present, this time as businessmen and tourists. Through an ethnography of three major cities––Harbin, Changchun and Dalian, Yukiko illustrates how the location and function of China’s colonial past within the historical narratives of each city has significantly shifted through the process of capitalizing on their colonial inheritance and interactions with the former colonizer.  In so doing, she locates the issue of coming to terms with the past within the daily articulation and pursuit of modernity in the emerging political economy of the new China.

Adrián López Denis
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
Research Interest: “Public Health and Popular Healing in Colonial Cuba.” Adrián is writing a book about the impact of epidemics on the articulation of modern sanitary practices in the Spanish Caribbean during the long nineteenth century. Combining insights coming from the historiography of slavery, science, and colonialism, this work is an attempt to explain the emergence of hybrid forms of both healing and policing the body of the nation. His ultimate goal is to explore the epistemic consequences of recasting Western medicine as an Atlantic, rather than a European invention.

Meida McNeal
PhD, Northwestern University
Research Interest: "Choreographing Citizenship in the Gayelle: Performing Trinidadian Nationalism." Meida is revising her dissertation into a book. This comparative ethnographic study focuses on four Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian dance companies.  Analyzing the relationship between cultural production and variables of difference (race/ethnicity, class and gender), the study contributes to current discourse about citizenship and nation-building in the post-colonial Caribbean through the arena of cultural production as both a local and globally situated enterprise.