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2011-13 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.

Catherine Bliss
PhD, New School for Social Research
Research Interest:  Catherine's research explores the sociology of race, gender and sexuality in medicine, though she is especially interested in scientific controversies in molecular science. Bliss's book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice(Stanford University Press 2012) examines how genomics became today’s new science of race. Her latest research examines convergences in social and genetic science in the postgenomic age.

From 2009-11 Catherine was a Cogut Center Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow working in Africana Studies and BioMed. Catherine is now a Cogut Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Brown University Medical School and the Cogut Center. In 2011-12 she hosted the lecture series: “How Scientists Think.”

Bliss has joined the University of California faculty as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. For more about Catherine, see CatherineBliss.com.

Michelle Cho
PhD, University of California, Irvine
Research Interest: Michelle's specializations are contemporary East Asian film, media, and cultural studies, globalization and diaspora studies, and media aesthetics. Primarily interested in the way the affective register of the geopolitical is expressed via
contemporary film and video, Michelle analyzes genre transformation as a complex and ubiquitous site of cultural translation in the context of contemporary South Korean screen
cultures and transnational East Asian cinema, more broadly. Her dissertation was"Generic Realities: The Transnational Spaces of South Korean Cinema." Michelle’s current project expands the focus on genre translation to the generic construction of diasporic identity in films from Korean-Japanese, Korean-Chinese, and Korean-American filmmakers, as well as a recent increase in South Korean films centered on the growing population of North Korean defectors and Korean-Chinese migrants, part of a network of post-cold war migrant flows and realignments.


Felipe Gaitan-Ammann
PhD, Columbia University
Research Interest: Felipe's research draws on both archaeological evidence and historical texts to trace a critical, object-based narrative of the Atlantic slave trade to the Spanish colonies in the New World. More specifically, my dissertation uncovers the social lives of white-collar slave traders established in the late-17th-century city of Panama, interrogating their private object worlds and figuring the logics of their consumption practices as part of their nowadays unthinkable capitalist project. From a theoretical standpoint, my work strongly engages with both classic and recent approaches to the rich concept of materiality, which allows me to present African slaves as powerful agentive objects that European merchants both fetishized and feared.

Kevin Goldberg
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles

Research Interest: Kevin’s research examines the international trade in German wines between the French Revolution and the First World War. By investigating the period’s significant viticultural and winemaking transformations as well as regionally unique responses to the commercial challenges of a highly competitive trade, the work highlights nineteenth-century conceptions of taste, food politics, and marketing. Central Europe’s wine markets were distinct from those on the Mediterranean, in part, because of the high concentration of Jewish merchants. Kevin’s recent research explores the role of these Jews at the height of Riesling’s reputation in the late nineteenth century along with the concomitant evocations of the Jewish wine adulterator in popular and political culture. Recent publications include articles about the natural wine movement and German immigrant winegrowers to Northern California. As a Cogut International Humanities Fellow, Kevin will teach courses on nineteenth-century German Jews.