Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

A $1.16 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports two year postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities, humanistically oriented social sciences, or in new fields with close ties to the humanities. This generous grant will enable the Cogut Center to bring visiting faculty working in new fields to campus to enrich the curriculum and provide students with new areas for study and research. These Fellows will teach one class per semester for their home departments and will participate in the weekly Fellows' Seminar series to discuss their research and that of the Faculty, International Humanities Postdoctoral, Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows.

2008-10 Mellon Fellows

Rachel Price
PhD, Duke University
Research Interest: Rachel's dissertation is entitled "Future Measures in Atlantic Literatures (1868-1968)." Her research and teaching focus on circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature. Rachel is also interested in comparative imperial histories, poetry, media, and critical theory. She is currently working on a study of how late 19th and early 20th century Atlantic literatures engaged a perceived translatio imperii, or transfer of empire, economic power, and aesthetics in the region.

Her articles include "The Spirit of Martí in the Land of Coaybay," "La sombra del imperio," "Object, non-object, trans-object, relational object: from Concrete Poetry to the nova objetividade" and "Animal, Magnetism, Theatricality." Rachel will be teaching a course on Contemporary Cuban Literature and Visual Culture in Fall 2008 and a course on Messianisms and Utopias in the Hispanic Caribbean in Spring 2009.

Ipek Tureli
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Research Interest: Ipek’s research interests include the history of post-war urbanism, architectural historiography, architecture and media, and visual culture. Her dissertation, “Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity,” is an urban history of Istanbul in the post-War period. Examining exhibitionary sites at key moments, it interrogates the relationship between urban representations, production of subjectivity, and the built environment.

Ipek is currently co-organizing “Orienting Istanbul”, a conference scheduled for September 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley. Taking as a point of departure the selection of Istanbul as one of Cultural Capitals of Europe in 2010, this interdisciplinary conference and the ensuing publication will reflect on how cities and cultures have become key to imagining communities in a globalizing word. Among her publications are the paper “Modeling Citizenship in Turkey’s Miniature Park,” which appeared in the Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review in 2006, the entry on “Architecture: Contemporary Forms” in the forthcoming edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, and another co-authored entry on “Islamic Urbanism” with Nezar AlSayyad in the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Human Geography.

Ipek will be joining us in Spring 2009.

2007-09 Mellon Fellows

Nauman Naqvi
PhD, Columbia University
Research Interest: Nauman’s dissertation, “Mourning Indo-Muslim Modernity: Moments in Post-Colonial Urdu Literary Culture”, explores key moments in the development of modern Urdu literary criticism from the late 19th century in colonial North India to contemporary Pakistan, to understand how questions of modernity, nationalism, tradition, and criticism have been configured in this literary critical tradition. Nauman’s interests include modern Urdu literature, post-colonial studies, modern South Asian history and critical theory. He has taught at Columbia University, has been a producer in the Urdu section of the BBC World Service, and an assistant editor at Pakistan’s premier news magazine, Newsline.

His publications include, most recently, the paper ‘The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the Critique of Nostalgia’, published by the Interuniversity Center for Research on Sociology of Law, Information and Legal Institutionsin Italy (CIRSDIG, http://www.cirsdig.it/Pubblicazioni/naqvi.pdf ), the entry on ‘Civilization’ in the forthcoming second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and a co-authored chapter on transsexuals in Pakistan in Islamic Homosexualities. He is also the editor of the anthology, Rethinking Security, Rethinking Development, published by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, and has written and translated for various publications in both English and Urdu in Pakistan.

Ian Straughn
PhD, University of Chicago
Research Interest: Ian's research and teaching focus is the emerging subfield of Islamic archaeology. His research emphasizes the intersection of material and textual evidence, and the production of space and landscape in the early Islamic period Levant. His current project “Materializing Islam: An Archaeology of Landscape in Early Islamic Period Syria” stems from his dissertation research undertaken in the Anthropology Department at The University of Chicago. His work also looks to develop the theoretical intersections of archaeology and religion through an understanding of how materiality becomes a key vector in ritual practice and spiritual relationships.

Ian has conducted archaeological fieldwork in both the New World and Old, including Syria, Armenia, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. He was recently named to the editorial board of the journal Archaeological Dialogues.