Residential Fellows

IAS Residential Fellowships

Welcome to our 2019-2020 Faculty Fellows, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows, and Scholar in Residence!

Spring 2020 IAS Fellows

Back Row, L-R: Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag, Jimmy Patiño, Carrie Oelberger, Fernando Burga, Adam Coon, Kathryn Nuernberger
Front Row, L-R: Deniz Coral, Hana Maruyama, Kari Smalkoski, Hannah Ramer, Ateeb Ahmed, Elana Shever

IAS residential fellows comprise faculty, graduate students, and outside scholars who spend a semester or year in residence at the IAS. Together they constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which fellows work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas.

We offer multiple types of residential fellowships, including faculty fellowships, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowships and Community of Scholars fellowships (for graduate students). Applications are accepted once per year.

To view 2020-2021 IAS Residential Fellows, click here.

Application Deadlines

Residential Faculty Fellowships are currently closed. For more information and how to apply, please click here.

Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowships (graduate students only) are currently closed, and will reopen Fall 2020. For more information and how to apply, please click here.

Research and Creative Collaboratives: Applications are currently open, and are due to the IAS by January 31, 2020. For more information and how to apply, please click here.

Faculty Fellows, Fall

June Carbone

Law School, Twin Cities

From Tiers to Ladders: A Feminist Theory of Power

The challenge for modern feminism is to explain how women fit into a new era of inequality. Since the early nineties, winner-take-all practices in the top executive and professional ranks, finance, and Silicon Valley have increased the gender gap for college graduates as a group and entrenched male power in society as a whole. The new system reserves the greatest rewards for those who can “break the rules”—the laws, norms and social conventions that constrain self-interested behavior—and get away with it. This interdisciplinary project seeks to map the shift in institutional behavior and design a new strategy to combat it. At its core is an argument that the fight for gender equity needs to change from initiatives to ensure access to the relatively equal “tiers” that characterized mid-twentieth century organizations to efforts to police the “ladders” that grant winner-take-all rewards to those who succeed in today’s corporate, financial, and entrepreneurial tournaments. The project consists of two parts: completion of a book documenting the ways in which women have lost ground and a law review article addressing the legal and theoretical implications of the changes.

Cosette Creamer

Political Science, CLA, Twin Cities

In Courts We Trust: The Unseen Role of Legal Bureaucrats in Human Rights Courts

In light of mounting resistance to regional human rights courts, the question of how these judicial institutions can and do build trust among their various constituents acquires vital importance. In contrast to existing research, which tends to focus on the role of judges and their rulings, this project turns the limelight on the legal bureaucrats of these organizations. While scholars hint at their critical role in passing, it has rarely been the explicit focus of systematic research. The aim of the project I intend to develop while an IAS faculty fellow is to fill this gap by examining the trust-building practices of the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The project will seek to deepen our understanding of how specific court tasks, responsibilities, and practices might contribute to greater levels of trust and, critically, the role of legal bureaucracies in doing so. Given repeated and growing criticism of human rights courts in recent years, this research has important implications for the continued relevance of and political support for these institutions moving forward.

V. V. Ganeshananthan

English, CLA, Twin Cities

Movement: A Novel

Movement tracks the political evolution of its narrator, Sashi, who works in northern Sri Lanka as a “helper” with the separatist Tamil Tigers. In 1987, when she begins medical school, the Tigers charge her with caring for one of her childhood friends, a medical student-turned-Tiger, while he fasts on a stage they have built at the country’s most famous Hindu temple. With the Tigers’ encouragement, thousands come to keep vigil with him. The group’s goal is to protest the presence of Indian troops in Sashi's hometown, Jaffna. The Indian soldiers are ostensibly there to keep the peace, but in reality, unchecked violence and political corruption are destroying the townspeople’s lives and Sashi’s beloved university campus. As Sashi watches the Tigers’ meticulous and manipulative political theater, she realizes that although she understands the Tamil community’s grievances, she does not agree with the Tigers’ tactics or conception of martyrdom—and she isn't sure if her friend knows he is going to die. The book is narrated in a retrospective voice; in New York City, 2009, Sashi, now an emergency room physician, follows from afar as Sri Lanka's war hurtles to a brutal end.

Kate Lockwood Harris

Communications Studies, CLA, Twin Cities

Communicating Violence in the Academy: A Case Study of the 2015 Anti-Racist Protests and Backlash at the University of Missouri

This project extends my research program on the relationship between violence and communication in organizations. My existing work forwards an intersectional analysis of communication about U.S. campus sexual violence, and the project I am working on during my fellowship—a new book—begins to articulate more completely how communication, campus sexual violence, and campus racial violence are connected. Through participant observation, autoethnographic notes, and document analysis, the project considers how the label “violence” circulated around campus protests against systemic racism at University of Missouri in late 2015. I was a faculty member there at the time. The project traces how whiteness remained instantiated in the university, even though the protestors successfully ousted the university system’s president and other key leaders. My aims are twofold: to bring extensive and well-developed critiques of racism in higher education more fully into my own sub-discipline—organizational communication—while also drawing insights from my subdiscipline into ongoing interdisciplinary conversations about recent campus antiracist activism.

Enid Logan

Sociology, Twin Cities, CLA

American Indian Racialization and the Sociological Study of Race

I plan to spend my semester in residence at the IAS writing an article on American Indian racialization and the sociological study of race. I argue, here, that American Indian racialization should move from the extreme margins of sociological understandings of race in the U.S. to the very center. In the first section of the article, I address and critique the invisibility of AI people in the sociological scholarship on race. In the remainder of the piece, I offer a historical timeline and theoretical framework for understanding AI racialization through the lens of sociology. This work is interdisciplinary in that it brings into sociological debate key insights from Native American studies, indigenous studies, history, and related fields. It is intersectional in that it describes racialization as coarticulating, fundamentally, with colonization, nation building, and sexual violence. The article contributes both to the mission of “decolonizing sociology," (as discussed in Steinberg 2016; Go 2017; Connell 2018), and to my desire to produce scholarship in the area of theories of race.

Jennifer Marshall

Art History, CLA, Twin Cities

William Edmondson: Life and Work

“William Edmondson: Life and Work” offers the first single-author monograph on its subject. Active in Nashville during the 1930s and 40s, Edmondson (1874-1951) was a self-taught African-American sculptor. His oeuvre consists of angels, women, animals, birds, and tombstones, carved from limestone scrap. Edmondson’s work was collected by both black and white patrons; he was photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Edward Weston; and he anchored a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, its first for an artist of color. The book provides a critical biography, showing how Edmondson’s life and work magnify one another, producing meanings that relate both to the longer history of the artist in the West and, so also, to more local histories of American race, class, and region. While monographic in form and responsibility, the project is methodological and theoretical in emphasis. Engaging with critical race studies, nonrepresentational theory, the new materialisms, biography studies, phenomenology, and literary criticism, I take the unique singularity of Edmondson’s life and work seriously, while offering it also as an allegory with lessons relevant to disciplines across the humanities.

Elana Shever, Scholar in Residence

Anthropology, Colgate University

Finding Our Beasts: People, Dinosaurs, and Science in the American West

While at the IAS for the 2019-20 academic year, I will be writing Finding Our Beasts: People, Dinosaurs, and Science in the American West. This book-length ethnography explores paleontological science, education and entertainment at public parks, museums, research facilities, and entertainment sites in the northern Great Plains, the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and other sites where people find dinosaurs and recreations of the prehistoric world. The book examines how people’s encounters with prehistoric creatures incite them to reassess human exceptionalism and their own place in the evolution of life on earth. This rethinking occurs, for instance, when someone who regards dinosaurs as exotic beasts holds an Edmontosaurus vertebra the same shape as their own and recognizes commonalities in their bodies. Through such experiences, people question the dichotomy between humans and animals inherited from the European tradition. Dinosaurs further prompt people to ask whether kinship, sex, race, and species are natural or cultural categories; whether violence and competition are innate behaviors; and whether evolution equates with progress. Close examination of the interactions between people and prehistoric animal-objects reveals that the meanings and values of humanity, animality and materiality are not determined by people alone, but created through intimate yet power-laden relations among humans and matter.

Faculty Fellows, Spring

Fernando Burga

Urban and Regional Planning, HHH, Twin Cities

Mapping Transportation Accessibility for Culturally Relevant and Healthy Foods in Rural MN: Towards a Mixed-Methods Research Toolkit

This project brings ongoing fieldwork to the Institute for Advanced Studies to prototype a mixed-methods toolkit that intersects food access and transportation planning. Over the past six months I have collaborated with the Accessibility Observatory at UMN’s Center for Transportation Studies to investigate the challenges that Latinx residents in South Eastern Minnesota face to get healthy and culturally relevant food. Through this effort I developed an experimental research design deploying mixed methods that incorporate focus group research, survey instruments, cognitive mapping, and GIS spatial analysis. This preliminary research informs the question that I bring to the IAS fellowship: How can a mixed-methods research toolkit be modeled to addresses equity in food systems and transportation planning? The IAS fellowship will allow me to work in an interdisciplinary space where I will be exposed to critical questions that will help me re-tool the experimental research design and its preliminary fieldwork findings into a robust mixed-methods toolkit.

Adam Coon

Humanities, UM-Morris

The Serpent's Feathers: Nahua Philosophies in Migration

This first book project draws on Nahua perspectives as the theoretical framework for my analysis of contemporary Nahua cultural production in Mexico. Nahuas, more popularly known as Aztecs or Mexicas, constitute the largest Indigenous nation in that country. This study analyzes texts written from the 1980s to the present. I argue that Nahua artists use unique perspectives (namely, ixtlamatilistli, yoltlajlamikilistli, and tlaixpaj) to disarticulate the narrative frame of vanquished “Indians” that is exemplified in Mexican national discourse. They employ three key perspectives to defend their rights and challenge discriminatory practices: 1. ixtlamatilistli (“knowledge with the face,” which highlights the value of personal experiences); 2. yoltlajlamikilistli (“knowledge with the heart,” which underscores the importance of an affective intelligence); 3. tlaixpaj (“that which is in front,” which expresses a view of the past as in front of a subject, as opposed to behind as past and pasado suggest in English and Spanish). These three views are key in Nahua struggles, and effectively challenge those who attempt to marginalize their knowledge production.

Kathryn Nuernberger

English, CLA, Twin Cities

The Doctrine of Signatures: Essays

My central and ongoing project, across three poetry collections and two books of creative nonfiction, has been to challenge and break down many existing categories of knowledge and replace the isolation of specialization with a fretwork of understanding drawn from multiple perspectives. During this fellowship I intend to work on “The Doctrine of Signatures,” an essay collection of biographical portraits of people accused of witchcraft in trials that occurred across 800 years and multiple continents. Each essay considers the unique socio-political circumstances surrounding the accusations. These portraits then point towards powerfully relevant parallels to present-day struggles for justice and equity. In many cases, the accused emerge as fascinating and inspiring figures of courage and defiance, and sometimes prove to have been remarkably effective activists up to and even through their trials. Completed essays from this project have already been published widely in respected journals. The IAS’s support of cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration will be enormously helpful in bringing essays-in-progress on Tituba, Medea, Lisbet Nypan, and Maria Barbosa to fruition.

Carrie Oelberger

Leadership and Management, HHH, Twin Cities

Radical Re-Envisioning for a Just and Equitable Society: Interrogating and Theorizing Private Interests in Prosocial Work

How are people’s private lives influenced by doing paid social-justice work? How do private interests influence organizational efforts to advance equity? This project is a multiparadigmatic examination of “organized prosociality” (work intended to benefit others), especially of the roles played by private interests therein. My past research has identified micro-level mechanisms linking employees’ private interests and prosocial work, drawing upon original, longitudinal ethnographic engagements across two distinct work settings—grantmaking and international aid. At this juncture, I am eagerly poised to push the boundaries of my scholarly engagement into more interdisciplinary terrain, leveraging conceptualizations of public and private boundaries from across the humanities alongside empirical findings on prosociality from the social and biological sciences. This project grew out of an IAS 5x5 group that I spearheaded on prosociality, inspiring and emboldening me to study this question in a sustained, interdisciplinary way. I aim to craft a radical re-envisioning of organized prosociality that interrogates and effectively theorizes the nuanced roles played by private interests.

Jimmy Patiño

Chicano and Latino Studies, CLA, Twin Cities

“Our Oppressions are One, Our Dreams are One”: Black-Brown Solidarities in Movements for Self-Determination

This study investigates the conceptualization and historical practice of solidarity primarily through the lens of African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican sites of struggle in the twentieth century. Important to this investigation are the ways regional differences and geo-historical contexts facilitated articulations of Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic solidarities and how these articulations led to counter hegemonic activities and theories of revolution across local, national, and transnational boundaries. Through a relational and comparative framework, the study will ground these analyses in historical activities in the Midwest, Texas, California, and New York in the burgeoning Black and Brown Power movements at the mid- to late twentieth century.

Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag

French and Italian, CLA, Twin Cities

Shards: Spectacular Fragmentation in Francophone Postcolonial Literature

My first book project, Shards, deals with the specific historical weight, traumatic hauntings and political implications of fragmentation in writings from the Caribbean, Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa. (Post)colonial domination is spectacular: it dazes and dazzles through its theatrical displays and routine exhibitions of power. It simultaneously ensures that its subjects are under the constant surveillance of a crushing force that fragments the community as well as any sense of coherent identity. Shards examines one of the privileged ways that francophone literature has both registered the fracturing effects of strategies of subjugation and cut back against their mechanisms signaling a fragile interruption. I trace the testimonial, insurrectionary and critical valences with which francophone authors have infused an aesthetics of fragmentation and reappropriated elements of its ancient genealogy. Considering both formal and representational fragmentation, I ask: what is the specific significance of the disintegration and dismemberment foregrounded in this body of literature born of violence?

Elana Shever, Scholar in Residence

Anthropology, Colgate University

Finding Our Beasts: Encountering Dinosaurs and Science in the American West

While at the IAS for the 2019-20 academic year, anthropologist Elana Shever will be writing Finding Our Beasts: Encountering Dinosaurs and Science in the American West. This book-length ethnography explores paleontological science, education and entertainment at public parks, museums, research facilities and tourist sites. The book examines how people’s encounters with prehistoric creatures incite them to reconsider their own humanity and animality. This rethinking occurs, for instance, when someone who regards dinosaurs as exotic beasts holds an Edmontosaurus vertebra the same shape as their own and recognizes commonalities in their bodies. Through such experiences, people question the dichotomies among humans, animals and things inherited from the European tradition. Her central claim is that the meanings and values of humanity, animality and prehistory are not determined by people alone, but are created through intimate and power-laden relations among humans and animal-objects, such as dinosaurs.

Kari Smalkoski, Community Engagement Fellow

Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities

Minnesota Youth Story Squad

Kari Smalkoski is a postdoctoral associate and research scholar in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and scholarship focus on masculinity, gender and identity, education, and political economy, as well as youth sports and social capital. Her current book project, American Dream Disrupted: Reframing Narratives on Asian American Youth, Gender, and Inequality in Schools, examines the impact of educational reform programs and community league soccer on Hmong youth in the Twin Cities. Dr. Smalkoski is co-founder and co-director of Minnesota Youth Story Squad. MYSS addresses educational opportunity gaps and amplifies the voices of youth through digital storytelling and offers internship opportunities to UofM undergrads in urban public school classrooms. For the last four years, MYSS has established community-engaged partnerships with secondary schools in the Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts. Dr. Smalkoski is Principal Investigator on a longitudinal study that examines the short and long term impact of MYSS on thousands of youth who have participated in its programming. She is a former high school teacher who has worked with youth for almost two decades and is actively involved in youth sports as a board member on youth serving organizations and as a parent.

Interdisciplinary Doctoral Graduate Fellows

Ateeb Ahmed

Geography, Environment, and Society, CLA, Twin Cities

Between Speculation and Dispossession: Pakistan Military's Urban Coup d'Etat

Peasant dispossession and ‘withdrawal of the state’ are seen as key features defining neoliberal forms of governance in the South. My ethnographic research disrupts this conventional picture by exploring DHA’s (Defense Housing Authority) expansion into the rural hinterlands, making it the largest commercial and residential housing enclave in Lahore, managed by the military. How do we understand military-led urban development? My dissertation traces multifaceted linkages between military, bureaucrats, peasants, real-estate agents, and politicians to reveal the dense web of connections through which development proceeds with the financialization of land and the fusion of state and capital.

Deniz Coral

Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities

The Humorous Reaction to Trepidation: Jokes on the Trading Floor

Financial trading is a serious practice. In an increasingly unstable and weakening emerging market, it is seriously a risky practice. In all of its seriousness, my research takes the jokes traders and brokers (whom I call “financial players”) in Turkey make when they engage with Turkish financial markets as manifestations of how they comprehend and deal with 1) the precarity of Turkish financial markets in global finance and the prospect of a local financial crisis; and 2) their own precarity and self-censorship within the increasingly polarized political, social, and ideological atmosphere of Turkey, especially after the failed coup attempt in 2016.

Hana Maruyama

American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities

Alien Nation: The Role of Japanese Americans During WWII Incarceration in Native Dispossession

My dissertation shows that the U.S. systematically employed its World War II Japanese American concentration camps to alienate indigenous peoples from their lands and convert them into exploitable labor. I draw on history, anthropology, literary studies, and archaeology to interrogate the power dynamics that exclude certain voices while privileging others—preventing us from understanding these histories as interrelated. Reading these histories together, I argue that race is only legible to the Settler State as exploitable labor, and that it used Japanese American incarceration to mold indigenous and other racialized bodies into this role.

Hannah Ramer

Natural Resources Science and Management, CFANS, Twin Cities

(Re)Imagining the City: Urban Agriculture, Policy, & Social Justice in Minneapolis

At their core, debates over urban agriculture are about who has the right to control land, for what purposes, and who has the power to decide. While often framed as a new phenomenon, urban agriculture has long been used to inscribe and contest social hierarchies on the physical landscape. Taking Minneapolis as an example, I use methods from history and social science to trace urban agriculture debates over the last century beginning with Progressive Era city beautification efforts through to contemporary policies that govern access to land. My project speaks to pressing issues in urban history, food studies, and participatory policymaking.

Programs