Current Fellows & Affiliates

Arianna Gass is an intermedia artist and scholar with an interest in the intersections of digital and embodied play.

Ben Van Zee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. He researches the entangled histories of human migration and empire-building.

Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan received an MA in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago, and his research interests lie in the intersection of AI and the social sciences.

Brandon Sward is an artist, writer, and doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. His work examines the relationship between colonization and the formation of knowledge from the 19th century to the present, especially the role of visual media in these developments. 

Christos Lazaridis is a neurointensivist who specializes in advanced monitoring in severe traumatic brain injury.

Clara del Junco's research interests include characterizing and promoting diversity in scientific research, and the importance of language and social context in science—how concepts flow and meaning changes between scientific fields and popular discourse.

Donghyun Kang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Sociology Department, affiliated with Knowledge Lab. His academic interest centers on understanding social conditions and processes that lead to robust scientific progress and dissemination of ideas. Donghyun aspires to extend insights from science studies and the history of sciences with natural language processing and network embedding models.

Emma Kitchen draws on the history of evolutionary biology to share a deeper understanding of history’s impact on contemporary science and public scientific understanding. Her current research focuses on the de-extinction of the aurochs, the ancestor to modern cattle, examining how societies access the past and seek to remake it.

Eve Ewing is a sociologist of education whose research is focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people.

Frazer Tessema is an MD Candidate at the Pritzker School of Medicine. He researches issues in health policy, law, and economics—focusing on solutions to improve access to and affordability of prescription drugs. Frazer also studies the pathophysiological mechanisms of heart failure, and researches policy initiatives to improve care for patients with sickle cell disease and trait. He has also written on the sociology of medical practice and naming.

James Evans' research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture of understanding.

Karin Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. 

Michael Fisch’s research is situated at the intersection of sociocultural anthropology, science, and technology studies.

Nory Peters is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature. Her research is most broadly concerned with the philosophical frameworks, representations, and politics of human rights. Her recent work is particularly interested in strategies of audience (de)politicization in 20th century global human rights literature and institutions. 

Patrick Jagoda works in the fields of new media studies and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture.

Shannon Lee Dawdy's fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods in the U.S. and Latin America.

SJ Zhang's research and teaching are both concerned with seventeenth through nineteenth-century archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean.