When funding permits, the Center has been pleased to host postdoctoral fellows.  Working in fields related to the public humanities, postdocs are appointed for terms varying from one to two years. In addition to working on their own scholarship and publishing, postdocs teach public humanities courses and participate in the Center by offering workshops and lectures, developing public projects, and mentoring students.  Our current and recent postdocs include:

Tyler Denmead, 2012-2013. Tyler teaches courses in community arts pedagogy with young people and digital storytelling.  He is engaged in a collaborative ethnographic research project with New Urban Arts, a studio for artists and high school students in Providence that he founded and led from 1997-2007.  In 2007, he went to the University of Cambridge where he received a MPhil in Education Studies (distinction-level) in 2008 and his doctorate in 2011.  His dissertation, “Beautiful Little Moments” investigates the pedagogies of so-called community artists working with toddlers and their parents in outdoor settings.  

Today, his scholarly interests concern creating the pedagogic conditions for marginalized secondary students to develop the agency they need to redress the inequities they face and choose lives they have reason to value.  He is animated by how arts collectives and non-schooling environments inform understanding of what those conditions might entail.  He considers community artists helpful when considering emancipatory pedagogies.  Their attention to the distribution of power, different ways knowledge can be generated and represented, material and visual culture, and dwelling in uncertainty are a few reasons why. He is interested in how researchers, community artists, and other educators can use qualitative multimodal research methodologies to extend possibilities for emancipatory pedagogies in ways that might be transferable for others. Visit his blog.

 Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, 2012-2013 (shared with the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World). Rachel’s research and teaching interests includes a wide range of fields, including archaeological ethnography in Ghana, Islamic Material Culture, African Art/Material Culture, Slavery, African Diaspora, Colonial Photography, Public Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage, Museums and Development.

Rachel’s Ph.D. dissertation, Hidden Palimpsests: Unraveling Nineteenth Century Islamic Talismans in Asante, is a study of the relationship between objects, texts, religion and empire. Her second project, Slavers in the Family: The Archaeology of the Slaver in Eighteenth Century Gold Coast, focuses on Christiansborg Castle in Accra, a 17th century European colonial trading castle exploring slavery, cultural heritage and development.

Rachel continues to work as a consultant for several non-profit organizations working on development in Africa.

Emily Stokes-Rees, 2010-2012 (shared with the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology). Emily’s doctorate is from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation was a comparative study of the roles of new national museums in postcolonial Asia. She had previously worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as a number of museums in Canada. Emily is now Allston Burr Resident Dean of Cabot House, Harvard.

Ian Russell, 2009-2011. Ian Alden Russell is a curator, researcher and creative mediator working between Europe and the United States. He is currently the curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. With a background in contemporary art, heritage studies and archaeology, he regularly curates gallery exhibitions but also specializes in working with artists to creatively activate public spaces and cultural heritage through collaborative arts practice. He is also interested in the application of new media in the arts, cultural and heritage sectors. To date he has held major research fellowships in Ireland and the United States ranging in focus from public art to material culture studies and digital humanities initiatives.  For more about Ian, please visit his blog.

Postdoctoral fellow positions, when available, will be advertised through media that post academic opportunities.  Please do not send unsolicited applications.