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Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

The Cogut Center has been the chosen recipient for a second five-year $1.2+mil grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that 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 enables 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 teach one class per semester for their home departments and participate in the weekly Fellows' Seminar series to discuss their research and that of the Faculty, International Humanities Postdoctoral, Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows.

2010-12 Mellon Fellows

Maud Kozodoy
PhD, Jewish Theological Seminary
Research Interest: Maud's dissertation title was “The Life and Works of Profiat Duran.”  Her research interests are focused on medieval Jewish philosophy and literature, Jewish-Christian relations in the later Middle Ages, the history of medieval science and medicine, and the incorporation of science and philosophy into literature, secular poetry and liturgy.

She has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hunter College and was named a Simon H. Rifkind Scholar in Advanced Jewish Studies by the Charles H. Revson Foundation (1999-2003, 2004-2005).

Katherine Smith
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles

Research Interest: Katherine 's research focuses on religious frameworks for understanding displacement, death and regeneration in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  She has studied urban Vodou and contemporary Haitian art for more than ten years.  Through extensive ethnographic research, Katherine's dissertation, titled “Gede Rising: Haiti in the Age of Vagabondaj,” examined historical transformations of the trickster spirit Gede in visual and embodied cultures of Vodou.  She has forthcoming publications in Southern Quarterly (Summer 2010), e-misférica (Summer 2010), and Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Duke 2011). 

In 2012, Katherine will co-curate an exhibition of post-earthquake art titled Haiti In Extremis: Vodou Arts at the Crossroads at the UCLA Fowler Museum.

Madhumita Lahiri
PhD, Duke University

Research Interest: Madhumita's scholarship lies broadly in postcolonial studies, with particular interest in South Asian and South African literature and film. Her dissertation focused on the links between literary internationalism and the romance novel, examining the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Rabindranath Tagore, and Cornelia Sorabji. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, she researched Mahatma Gandhi's narration of his African experience and taught for the Department of African Literature. Her work has appeared in the journal Callaloo (2010) and is forthcoming in the volumes Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain, 1870-1950 (Palgrave-Macmillan, UK) and Cinema in South Africa, post-1994 (National Film & Video Foundation, SA).

Stephanie Malin
PhD, Utah State University

Research Interests: Stephanie's research focused on environmental justice, environmental health, and political-economic contexts surrounding energy development, particularly in rural communities in the American West. Stephanie primarily examines impacts of uranium mining and milling, but she has begun to interrogate hydraulic fracking's environmental sociological outcomes as well. Her dissertation work focused on emergent social movements surrounding the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill in southwestern Colorado. Stephanie contends that observing related environmental justice, health, and grassroots movement contexts helps social scientists identify and anticipate sociological outcomes likely to emerge as societies re-examine energy development options in an era of climate change mitigation. Her publications include: "Left in the Dust: Uranium's Legacy and the Victims of Mill Tailings Exposure in Monticello, Utah" in Society and Natural Resources, which examined uranium's environmental legacy on the Colorado Plateau; and "Community Development among Toxic Tailings: An Interactional Case Study of Community Health and Extralocal Institutions," which examines interactions between grassroots movements and responses from public institutions, such as the ATSDR. Currently, Stephanie teaches graduate seminars in natural resource sociology and environmental health at Brown and is working on several articles and a book manuscript.