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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


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.

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.

2009-10 Mellon Fellow

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.

Adrián was a Cogut Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Humanities from 2007-09.

2009-11 Mellon Fellows

Catherine Bliss
PhD, New School for Social Research
Research Interest: Catherine’s dissertation, “The New Science of Race: Sociological Analysis of the Genomic Debate Over Race,” explores the resurgence of racial science in the field of genomics to show how commonsense ideas, norms, and values around race shape scientific knowledge production. Catherine’s interests include health movements and controversies, emergent scientific knowledge processes, and racial identity. Her current research looks at personal genomics and the construction of racial beliefs in large scale sequencing projects.

Stephen Groening
PhD, University of Minnesota
Research Interest: In his dissertation, entitled “Connected Isolation: Mobile Screens and Globalized Media Culture,” Stephen analyzed the implications of a changing cinema culture, from one constituted by theatrical exhibition and classical spectatorship to one characterized by proliferating screens and individualized media forms. 

His current research project is the history of in-flight entertainment and its links to globalization, mass tourism, and transnational Hollywood. The institution of in-flight entertainment media technology offers insight into cultural globalization, media convergence, the alliance between travel and entertainment industries, and the shifting boundaries between public and private.