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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.

Shiva Balaghi
PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Research Interest: Shiva Balaghi is a historian of the modern Middle East, with special interests in the interrelated histories of colonialism, nationalism, gender, and visual culture. As a Cogut International Humanities Fellow, she will be completing a book on the cultural history of Iran from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. She is the Vice-President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies and an editor of MERIP. Her publications include Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (co-edited, 1994), Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution (co-edited, 2002), and Saddam Hussein: A Biography (2005). She has published numerous articles on Iranian intellectual history and visual culture, and her writing has been translated into Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. She has taught History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, the University of Vermont, and New York University.

Catherine Bliss
PhD, New School for Social Research
Research Interest:  Catherine’s book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford University Press 2012) explores how commonsense ideas, norms, and values around race have motivated genomic scientists to produce a new science of race. Catherine’s interests include health movements and controversies, emergent science, and racial and gender identity. Her current research looks at personal genomics and the construction of race in large scale sequencing projects.

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. She is hosting a lecture series in 2011-12: “How Scientists Think.” 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.

Bianca Dahl
PhD, University of Chicago
Research Interest: Bianca’s research looks at the social and individual effects of humanitarian aid interventions during Botswana's HIV epidemic. Her book manuscript (Great Expectations: Humanitarianism and the Invention of AIDS Orphans in Botswana) is an ethnographic study of Western charities aiming to provide “culturally sensitive” support to orphans and their kin. Focusing on the politically charged spaces forged at the interstices between foreign and local childrearing ideologies, Bianca’s work demonstrates how orphans have emerged as symbols of demographic upheaval, as well as skilled political actors in their own right. Her manuscript seeks to rethink notions of "crisis" by tracing the interplay between material and emotional economies engendered by both aid and AIDS.

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.