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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.

2011-13 Mellon Fellows

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.

2012-14 Mellon Fellows

John Moreau
PhD, Princeton University

Research Interests: John Moreau has a BA in Languages and Literatures from Marlboro College, an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, and a PhD in French from Princeton University. His work has focused on medieval literature in a number of European languages, and he is presently completing a book on the representation of divine judgment in French poetry of the fourteenth century. His current research project is on hostages and prisoners of war in medieval literature. Other particular research interests include the ethics of literature, modern critical theory, medieval debate poetry, and the troubadours. John has taught French language for several years, as well as courses in French theatre and English composition. This year, he looks forward to offering courses at the Cogut Center based on his research on hostages and prisoners of war (Fall) and medieval literary ethics (Spring). When he is not working, he enjoys exploring the wilderness in his home state of Maine.

Richard Parks
PhD, University of Minnesota

Research Interests: Richard Parks is a historian of medicine, with a particular interest in the public health of Jewish communities in North African during the colonial era.   As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, he is currently working on an article examining the medicalization of childbirth and motherhood in colonial Tunisia's Jewish community.  He has published several articles, including "The Jewish Quarters of Interwar Paris and Tunis: Destruction, Creation, and French Urban Design," in Jewish Social Studies and "Divide et Impera: Public Health and Urban Reform in Protectorate-era Tunis," in the Journal of North African Studies.  Richard's next project will be a monograph examining the reception of Darwinian social science in colonial North Africa.