University of Chicago Society of Fellows

TAMAR ABRAMOV
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 307
773-702-8557
abramov@uchicago.edu

Tamar Abramov received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2008. She has since taught at the University of Minnesota’s German Department, at Deep Springs College and at Harvard’s Literature Concentration. She works in the intersection of philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis and is also interested in film theory. Her dissertation, To Catch a Spy: Explorations in Subjectivity, argues that literature and film become home to the spy when the disciplines charged with regulating his actions, especially international law, break down. It shows that by embodying one of the law’s blind spots the spy finds his home in literature, and that it is precisely to the law’s blindness that espionage literature responds. Articles on Brecht, Kleist, Conrad, Bennett, Valerie Plame and Levinas are submitted or forthcoming.

HEATHER BADAMO
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Art History
hbadamo@uchicago.edu

Heather Badamo is an art historian working on the intersection of Christian and Islamic visual culture in the frontier zones of the medieval eastern Mediterranean. Her interests include theories of cultural exchange, philosophies of religious violence, and strategies for communal self-fashioning as manifested in the visual arts. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, entitled “Image and Community: Representations of Military Saints in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean,” focusing on the cult of the warrior saints as seen through the lens of its icons – images of aggressive saints believed to perform miracles of salvation and conversion – which provide insights into issues of interfaith relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt and the Levant during the era of the Crusades. Heather Badamo has been a fellow at the Fulbright Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Michigan in 2011.

FADI BARDAWIL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 330
773-702-1713
fbardawil@uchicago.edu

Fadi Bardawil’s research, at the crossroads of anthropology and intellectual history, focuses on contemporary modernist Arab thought and the international circulation of theoretical discourses as well as their political effects in distinct contexts of reception. His dissertation examined the ebbing away of Marxist thought and practice in the Levant through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation (born around 1940) of disenchanted, previously militant, public figures. Through engaging memoirs, party documents, theoretical texts as well as interviews, this work explored ideological transformations in the region, the vexed relation of intellectuals to political militancy as well as the shifting articulations of Western metropolitan fields of cultural production to Levantine ones. His writings have appeared in al-Akhbar daily, the Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic Edition), Jadaliyya, and Kulturaustausch. In 2010-11, he was a EUME Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität (Berlin). Bardawil was trained in Sociology at the American University of Beirut; he received his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2010.

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NATHAN BAUER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 330
773-702-1713
njbauer@uchicago.edu

Nathan received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2008. Much of his current research concerns Kant, both as a prominent figure in the history of philosophy and as a relevant guide to contemporary problems in the discipline. His dissertation, “Kant's Transcendental Deductions of the Categories,” examines Kant’s account of our relation to the world as thinkers by way of a detailed examination and comparison of the two versions of the Deduction-argument in the Critique of Pure Reason. The reading that emerges from this project is meant to get Kant right, while also suggesting a strategy for addressing a variety of current philosophical debates on topics including perceptual skepticism, the intentionality of thought, and the status of transcendental arguments. This reflects Nathan’s broader commitment to the view that the history of philosophy is itself a form of philosophical inquiry. When not pondering the starry skies above him, he enjoys the more down-to-earth pleasures of playing poker and skiing.

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GREG BECKETT
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 304
773-702-8562
beckett@uchicago.edu

Greg Beckett received his Ph.D. from the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago in 2008. His dissertation, “The End of Haiti: History Under Conditions of Impossibility,” is an ethnographic and historical analysis of the cultural dimensions of crisis in Haiti. His current research program combines three broad areas of study, all based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: (1) political crisis and international intervention, with a focus on the emergence of a complex and extensive network of international agencies and actors that collectively have taken over the primary tasks of governance, including providing security and services; (2) human insecurity and humanitarian intervention, with a focus on how vulnerability and disaster impact urban communities; and (3) the cultural basis of ethical practice, with a focus on how Haitians and foreigners (especially aid workers) understand the moral and ethical grounds for action. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled A New Haiti: Coming Through Crisis. In addition to his academic research, Greg has worked for several years with Haitian and American environmentalists to develop and promote a forest preserve (now a national park) in Haiti. He also works with HaitiCorps International, a US-based non-profit organization that fosters volunteerism, national civic service, and workforce-training in Haiti.

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BRANDON FOGEL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 412
773-834-2573
bfogel@uchicago.edu

Brandon Fogel received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science in 2008 from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation examines the epistemological aspects of the debate between Einstein and Weyl over Weyl’s 1918 unified field theory, the first plausible candidate for a theory of everything, for their implications regarding the question of how physical theories in general are connected to experience. The dissertation concludes that a complete account of how a theory gains empirical content requires that certain aspects of observers be representable within the theory itself. Fogel’s current research focuses on Bell’s Theorem and the implications it holds for the separability of physical systems.

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ITAMAR FRANCEZ
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 317
773-702-0354
ifrancez@uchicago.edu

Itamar Francez is a linguist who works on natural language semantics and the philosophy of language. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2007. His current research centers on two domains. The first is the relation between semantics and pragmatics, in particular the interaction of rules of semantic composition with contextual factors in determining meaning. In this context, he has written about the interpretation of implicit content -- elements in the meaning of utterances that are not expressed by any overt expression, on the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals, and on the interpretation of temporal modifiers. His second main area of research is on crosslinguistic semantic variation. Together with colleagues in Manchester and Chicago, he started a project studying the way in which different languages express predication and comparison, focusing on less familar and understudied languages, such as the endangered Nicaraguan language Ulwa.

MICHAEL GALLOPE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 332
773-702-0512
mgallope@uchicago.edu

Michael Gallope is a musicologist who studies the philosophy and intellectual history of music. He is especially interested in using theoretical concepts to analyze processes of modernist self-justification in twentieth and twenty-first century music, both literate and vernacular, from Schoenberg and Ravel to free jazz and West African electronica. He completed his PhD at New York University, where he earned an Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory and wrote a dissertation that developed an analytical vocabulary to compare diverging habits of speculative thought among the “musical” exemplars of continental philosophy (Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch, Deleuze and Guattari). While revising the dissertation for publication, he is working on an article that examines the role of poetry and performance art in the musical culture of the late 1970s downtown “New Wave” scene (specifically via the work of Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith), and laying the groundwork for a longer-term project entitled “Music and the Force of the Political”—a philosophical examination of music’s role in the materialization of consequential socio-political transformations.

ROXANA GALUSCA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 403
773-702-7979
rgalusca@uchicago.edu

Roxana Galusca is a scholar of literature and cultural studies, working on the culture industries, transnational feminism, the sexual politics of immigration, and U.S. immigration literatures. Her dissertation “Projects of Humanitarianism: Sex Trafficking and Migration in the Twenty-First Century United States” identifies and traces the emergence in the culture industry of a humanitarian approach to gender justice that draws on historical discourses of sexual vulnerability to inscribe women’s migration into managed projects of humanitarian care and compassion. Bringing together diverse genres and cultural forms – from documentary film and photographic essays to audiovisual testimonies – “Projects of Humanitarianism” demonstrates that the culture industry has become a major social and economic resource in engendering a humanitarian ethics, especially for anti-trafficking activism. Besides work on anti-trafficking humanitarianism, Roxana has published essays on Ellis Island immigration, investigative journalism, and on Ursula Biemann’s video art. Her next project, tentatively titled: “Anti-Politics: the Aesthetics of Women’s International Resistance during Cold War” draws on archival research to examine literary and political writings by Eastern European women and international women’s groups in the context of Cold War politics. Roxana received her doctorate in English from the University of Michigan in 2011.

NICHOLAS GASKILL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 302
773-702-3318
ngaskill@uchicago.edu

Nicholas Gaskill received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. He is currently at work on two projects. The first, Vibrant Environments: The Feel of Color in American Literature, situates the literary hues of modern U.S. writers within the sweeping changes to the visual landscape wrought by synthetic dyes and vivid color media. In particular, it argues that literary authors engaged turn-of-the-century theories and technologies of color perception to investigate the sensory and affective impact of cultural environments and, ultimately, to craft an aesthetic attentive to the sensory effects of literary language. Nicholas is also co-editing, along with Adam Nocek, an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The volume, titled The New Whitehead will be published by the University of Minnesota Press.

MARKUS HARDTMANN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 318
773-702-6935
mhardtmann@uchicago.edu

Markus Hardtmann is a critic and scholar who works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and media theory. His dissertation, “Placeholders: Robert Musil’s Logic of Literature,” explores the ways in which Musil’s writing, in its very conception of literature, responds to contemporaneous debates surrounding the foundations of mathematics. Recasting well-known passages in The Man without Qualities in light of various texts in logic and mathematics, including path-breaking works by Cantor and Husserl, Frege and Russell, and Peano and Dedekind, the dissertation circumscribes the singular, and therefore exemplary, place Musil occupies within modernity. Plans for future research include an article on the digital photographer Andreas Gursky and an extended essay on the politics of mediality in the thought of Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk.

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STEFAN KLUSEMANN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 322
773-834-8678
klusemann@uchicago.edu

Stefan received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to the US, Stefan studied sociology, law, and economics at the Free University of Berlin. He works on sociological theory, violence, armed groups, and historical sociology of political and cultural change. His dissertation “After State-Breakdown: Dynamics of Multi-Party conflict, violence, and paramilitary mobilization in Japan 1853-1877, Russia 1904-1920, and Germany 1918-1934 – A relational, micro-sociological approach” presents a micro-theory of the dynamics and patterns of power struggles during revolutionary state breakdown. It shows that revolutionary conflict is driven and shaped by micro-situational, emotional dynamics. Stefan’s approach advances the literature on social movements and contentious politics plus statebreakdown theory by combining it with Durkheimian sociology of emotions. In a separate research project, Stefan has spelled out a micro-sociological theory of civil war atrocities. He shows that local emotional dynamics flowing over time are crucial to explain where and when atrocities do or do not occur and which forms they take on the micro-level; part of this work has been published in ‘Sociological Forum’. His research at the University of Chicago will continue and extend his work in the field of paramilitary organizations and violence, moving towards a macro-historical comparative ‘Sociology of Paramilitaries’.

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SPENCER LEONARD
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 441
773-834-8705
saleonar@uchicago.edu

Spencer Leonard received his Ph.D. from the departments of South AsianLanguages and Civilizations and History at the University of Chicago in 2009. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation, “A Fit of Absence of Mind? Illiberal Imperialism and the Founding of British India, 1757-1776.” Through an intensive study of the initial decades of East India Company state formation in Bengal, Spencer’s research attempts to revise received understandings of imperialism by reaching behind assumptions, whether imperialist or nationalist, that derive from the 20th century experience of decolonization. Contributing to the literature on late Mughal state formation, corporate and economic history, the political history of the British Empire, and the social theory of the Enlightenment, Spencer writes global history with an area specialist’s attention to local specificity.

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MARK LOEFFLER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 303
773-702-3085
mcloeffl@uchicago.edu

Mark Loeffler received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2011. His dissertation examines contestations of finance capital in Germany and Britain, between the first “Great Depression” of 1873-1896, through the interwar Depression and its aftermath. He treats the formation of critical discourses on finance as transnational phenomena, and his extensive research traverses popular and elite sources. Across these sites, he argues, three dimensions of “anti-financial” discourse emerged to general prominence: the tendency to reduce the axes of modern political-economic exploitation and conflict to binaries of the virtuous “producer” vs. the financial “parasite”; the imputation of economic crises exclusively to finance; and a tendency towards conspiracy theorizing, including anti-Semitism. Mark’s work contributes to economic, cultural and intellectual histories, and it develops social-theoretical perspectives on why such contestations of finance became meaningful and compelling to a wide cast of historical actors. He has taught widely in the College, and is currently revising his manuscript for publication.

MARA MARIN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 333
773-702-7992
mara@uchicago.edu

Mara Marin received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in feminist political theories, liberalism, theories of justice, oppression, authority, political obligation, history of political thought and social contract theory. In her current book manuscript, she elaborates a notion of commitment that advances our understanding of the obligations that individuals owe to each other under conditions of oppression. She argues that the actions that implicate us in oppressive structures cannot be understood through prevailing models of human relations that emphasize consent or contract. Instead, she proposes a notion of commitment as a conception of action and social relations that better explains how oppressive structures are supported by individual action. Her notion of commitment combines two features of action typically thought to be mutually exclusive: while voluntary, the actions one performs in a commitment are not fully under the control of the agent. In a commitment, the agent incurs obligations in virtue of his or her voluntary actions but without knowing in advance the precise content of these obligations in the future. The commitment model allows us to better describe the oppressive character of social relations, the obligation to overcome them, and even the means by which to do so.

BENJAMIN McKEAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 309
773-702-3700
mckean@uchicago.edu

Benjamin McKean is a political theorist whose dissertation seeks to understand what the obligation to achieve global justice requires of individuals. In part by demonstrating the surprising extent to which John Rawls's theory of justice relies on elements of Hegel at key junctures, the project shows how citizens must shape their own dispositions in order for political society to function fairly. The dissertation then develops a criterion of solidarity to help individuals understand their political obligations in a social world that forces them to cooperate internationally with others whom shared institutions and practices fail to treat as free and equal. In doing so, the project also advances a methodology for better linking ideal and non-ideal theory. His other research projects include work on questions of theory and practice, the relationship between aesthetics and power, and the attitudes of resentment and friendship in democracies. He received his PhD from the Princeton University Department of Politics in 2010.

TIMOTHY MICHAEL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 312
773-834-2478
tdmichael@uchicago.edu

Timothy D. Michael is a scholar, critic, and teacher of British Romanticism, having received his PhD in English from Harvard University in 2009. His current project, British Romanticism and the Principles of Political Knowledge, reassesses the inward turn readers of Romanticism have long recognized as essential to its literature: the turn to the mind, for the major Romantics, is not an escape from history but a necessary precondition of political regeneration. It demonstrates how the drama of knowledge, specifically the competition among various models of epistemic justification, unfolds in the poetry and political prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, and Wollstonecraft. Related research and teaching interests include eighteenth-century poetry and philosophy, Victorian poetry, German and American Transcendentalism, philology, and the history of literary criticism and theory. While at the University of Chicago, Timothy has taught courses on British Romantic poetry and world literatures. He holds a BA from New York University and has served as Scholar-in-Residence at the Dactyl Foundation in SoHo.

LAURA MONTANARO
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 320
773-702-3084
montanaro@uchicago.edu

Laura Montanaro is a political theorist who is working on democratic theory in the area of non-electoral representation. Her research focuses on two broad and related questions. How might
democratic representation develop outside of electoral institutions, not only within established democracies, but also in those places where representative democracy is underdeveloped or entirely absent, including the global arena? And how should we theorize and normatively assess various forms of non-electoral representation? Her dissertation on “The Democratic Legitimacy of ‘Self-Appointed’ Representatives” considers representatives
who might credibly claim democratic credentials, though not as a consequence of formal elections. Laura is currently revising her dissertation for publication as a monograph, as well as preparing articles on the constitutive effects of representation, and the legitimacy of citizen representatives. Laura received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in 2010.

POORNIMA PAIDIPATY
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 439
773-702-7993
paidipaty@uchicago.edu

Poornima Paidipaty completed her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2009. Her dissertation, entitled, "Tribal Nation: Politics and the Making of Modern Anthropology in India" explores the entangled histories of social science, colonial militarism, frontier politics, and tribal governance in India, starting in the nineteenth century. Her thesis examines the agonistic relationship between anthropology as a formal discipline and contemporary tribal movements, which share common histories, archives, and conceptual formations that trace back to colonial policies of frontier pacification. Her research shows that anthropology, in both its colonial and nationalist formulations, was deeply invested in the management of tribal areas, and therefore, as a modern techno-science, its history must be written in conjunction with the political moments and social challenges that shape its disciplinary practices, theories, methods, and conceptual frameworks. As such, her work provides a new historical frame for analyzing state failure in India’s tribal regions, which have witnessed decades of development-related displacement, poverty, and armed insurgency. Poornima is currently revising her manuscript for publication. She is broadly interested in the history of anthropology and its relationship to decolonization; mercenaries, insurgents, and the problem of sovereignty in contemporary South Asia; and the impact of extractive activities, such as coal mining and timber logging, on India's democracy.

KARTHIK PANDIAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
Gates-Blake 405
773-702-8673
kpandian@uchicago.edu

Karthik Pandian is an artist whose practice seeks to unsettle the contradictions at the heart of the monument. The universal and contingent, sacred and profane, proximate and distant confront one another in his work. Concerned in particular with the way in which history lurks in matter, Pandian often uses 16mm film to excavate sites for fragments of political intensity. The sculptural works that support, enshroud and sometimes obscure his film projections are produced from materials drawn from his site research and assume the form of architectural constructions. Through moving image, sculpture and syntheses of the two, his work imagines freedom in relation to the impositions of architecture. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna. His work has been the subject of numerous published writings, including a feature in Artforum and a catalogue essay by Michael Taussig. Pandian's exhibitions have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Durfee Foundation amongst others. In 2008, he received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA after completing his BA at Brown University, Providence, RI in 2003.

GENEVIEVE ROUSSELIERE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 432
773-702-6436
rousseliere@uchicago.edu

Geneviève Rousselière is a political theorist whose research focuses on the concepts of freedom, subjection and state intervention in modern European political thought. Her dissertation, Freedom and the State in the Age of Market Economy, presents a novel history of freedom in early nineteenth century France that uncovers the role of Constant, Tocqueville, as well as radical figures such as
Sismondi and Blanc in building a distinct modern and social republican theory of freedom. The dissertation examines the contributions of these authors to think
through the material conditions of individual freedom as self-development before the dual threats of subjection posed by other individuals as competitors in the market and by the growing power of the state. Secondary fields of research include contemporary normative political theory, in particular the
debate over government neutrality. An alumna of the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris) and the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), where she was trained in philosophy, she received her PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2011.

LAUREN SILVERS
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 408
773-702-3083
lsilvers@uchicago.edu

Lauren Silvers received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in Comparative Literature in 2010. Her areas of specialization are nineteenth-century French poetry and the history of science and psychology. Her work focuses on revising the ideas of modernity that typically inform literary studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, “Psychological Subjectivity
and the Aesthetics of Reading in the Symbolist Literary Era (1880-1905) examines the psycho-physiological underpinnings of French poets’ and hypnotists’ ideas about language and argues for their mutual influence in the emergence of literary modernism. In charting a shift in fin-de-siècle literary production from a poetics of communication to an aesthetics of communicability, this study offers an alternative account of literary modernity—not as voicing the traumas of urban experience, but as productive of knowledge and innovative ideas about the self, society, and the body. In addition to preparing her dissertation for publication, Lauren is currently working on several articles: one on physiological reading and performance at the fin-de-siècle, and another on the philosophy of habit in France and England in the nineteenth century. Lauren has taught for several years in the Media Aesthetics sequence of the College Core at the University of Chicago and has edited several books for fine artists to accompany exhibitions in New York. In her spare time she loves the state of Vermont from afar.

EMILY STEINLIGHT
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 316
773-702-9918
esteinlight@uchicago.edu

Emily Steinlight completed her Ph.D. in English at Brown University in 2009. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, the emergence of the social sciences, and the relationship between political thought and literary form. Her current book project aims to explain why Romantic and Victorian writing so pervasively overcrowds its imagined social worlds. Far from reflecting any simple demographic fact, she argues, texts and genres from Wordsworth's Prelude to the Dickensian city novel to domestic sensation fiction formulate a new politics of population and a range of aesthetic responses to the rise of biopower. Her readings reveal how the task of managing human life in the aggregate shapes the narratives of development for which the nineteenth century is known. In works by Malthus, Mary Shelley, De Quincey, Engels, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, she identifies the making of the masses as a necessary condition for literature and modern political discourse alike. Her recent and forthcoming articles appear in such journals as ELH, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Narrative.

BETTINA STOETZER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 434
773-702-3446
stoetzer@uchicago.edu

Bettina Stoetzer is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, nationalism, and urban life. Her dissertation, “At the Forest Edges of the City: Nature, Race and National Belonging in Berlin,” engages several sites – gardens, forests, urban parks and a post-unification era nature park at Berlin’s fringes – to examine how “natural” landscapes become sites of contestation over citizenship and race. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with different immigrant communities, as well as environmentalists, urban planners, and German nature lovers, her research shows that “nature” becomes a key register through which current forms of urban marginality and belonging are articulated in a new Europe. Bettina holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Goettingen and she completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Her current book project, tentatively titled Ruderal City, expands her doctoral thesis and develops an analytic framework that attends to heterogeneity in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Bettina has previously published a book on feminism and anti-racism in Germany (InDifferenzen, argument, 2004) and has co-edited Shock and Awe. War on Words (New Pacific Press, 2004) – a collection of essays that explores the current global situation through the political lives of words.

COREY TAZZARA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 435
773-702-7996
ctazzara@uchicago.edu

Corey received his PhD in history from Stanford University in 2011. His research focuses on the economic and political history of early modern Italy. His dissertation is entitled, "The Masterpiece of the Medici: Commerce, Politics, and the Making of the Free Port of Livorno, 1574-1790." By examining the theory and practice of the free port from its inception to the dawn of liberalism, his thesis establishes a distinctive Italian contribution to the debates over political economy whose history has been organized around the English and French contexts. In other projects he is interested in material culture, the problem of customs fraud in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, and information flows between Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

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ZHIVKA VALIAVICHARSKA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 407
773-834-0087
zhivka@uchicago.edu

Zhivka Valiavicharska received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. She works in the fields of modern social and political thought and critical theory. Her dissertation examines the political uses, material effects, and the structuring agency of the Stalinist discourse in socialist and post-socialist East-European philosophy. Her current book project aims to disarticulate Lenin’s contributions to political thought from their Stalinist uses. Offering new readings of Lenin’s work, she traces the discursive production of a coherent theory of “Leninism” during Stalinist Soviet Union and shows how twentieth-century intellectual histories of Marxist thought have retained unquestioned assumptions about Lenin’s work, which continue to reproduce the Stalinist legacy. Her other work in progress includes a project on Evgeny Pashukanis and the radical legal theorists from the 1920s Soviet Union, and a project on the intellectual and political contributions of Marxist humanist movements in Eastern Europe from the 1960s and 1970s, which called for a “third way” for socialism’s future.

NEIL VERMA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 409
773-702-3299
swamp@uchicago.edu

Neil Verma received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He has taught a range of
subjects including media aesthetics, cinema studies, art history,
literature, critical theory and intellectual history. His current work
explores the theory, aesthetics and history of radio drama. Recent
publications include an article on the plays of Lucille Fletcher. His
first book, “Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and
American Radio Drama,” will be published by the University of Chicago Press in June, 2012. Areas of ongoing research include: film noir and aesthetic history; the radio plays of Wyllis Cooper; the prose of James Agee; eavesdropping and ventriloquism; false alarms and publicity stunts; and the role of media in the construction of intimacy.

AUDREY WASSER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 433
773-702-8569
acwasser@uchicago.edu

Audrey Wasser earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University in 2010. Her research focuses on French and English modernism, theories of the literary object, and continental philosophy. Tentatively titled “The Work of Difference: Form and Formation in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory,” her book
project traces the origin of modern and contemporary conceptions of literary form back to German Romanticism in order to examine some of their metaphysical assumptions. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Benedict de Spinoza, this book argues for a notion of form that departs from the unity of selfreflection as well as from the closure implied in literature’s supposed autonomy from other creative processes. Audrey’s writings and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Angelaki, diacritics, and Modern Philology.

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MAX WHYTE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 440
773-702-8554
maxwhyte@uchicago.edu

Max Whyte received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge in 2007. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century European intellectual history. His doctoral thesis, ‘Philosophy and Politics in the Third Reich: The Case of Alfred Baeumler’, examines the function of philosophy within the ideational framework of the Third Reich and the significance of National socialism for our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics, theory and practice, ‘truth’ and power. A related article on the Nietzsche reception in the Third Reich has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History. Along with preparing his dissertation for publication, he is also beginning a major new research project on the history of the ‘National Bolshevism’ in inter-war Germany. This diverse movement, which drew on a wide variety of intellectual sources — from Hegel to Nietzsche, and Georges Sorel to Stalin — sought to fuse the politics of the left and right into a single, anti-capitalist, ideological amalgam. The work aims to throw new light both on the complex intellectual forces at work in the Weimar Republic and on the ideological origins of fascism.

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JAMES LINDLEY WILSON
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 308
773-702-8564
jimw@uchicago.edu

James Lindley Wilson received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2011, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2007. Jim’s research interests span political philosophy, ethics, and law. Most of his work has focused on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and questions of what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions. His dissertation, “Finding Time for Democracy: A Theory of Political Equality,” attempts to articulate the moral force of the democratic idea that all citizens are equal political authorities, and to explain how that abstract idea ought to regulate the design and operation of political institutions. Jim also researches election law and the history of political thought, including the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and the Federalists. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, and Representation. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, and writing related articles on applied problems in democratic institutional design.