Zachary Barr was a graduate student in the History Department studying the history of science. His dissertation argued that popularization and popular science, broadly construed as modes of interaction between credentialed experts and non-experts, were productive of knowledge in Austrian natural science from 1860 to 1934.

During his time as a 2017-2018 IFK Dissertation Research Fellow, he concentrated on two aspects of his dissertation. First, he examined popularization efforts at two biological research stations, looking at the ways in which scientists’ attempts to engage with non-expert publics influenced their research. Second, he studied science popularization and popular science in more marginal venues, focusing on the ways in which these organizations played a role in defining—if only negatively—the limits of engagement with non-experts as a form of scientific practice.

Mario Biagioli visited the Institute in Fall 2017-18 to teach an 8-week graduate seminar titled "The Commons & the Public: Figuring Collaborative Knowledge Production" (KNOW 40102).

Mario Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Director of the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. At the UC Davis Law School, he teaches courses on intellectual property in science, and on the history and philosophy of intellectual property. Previously, Biagioli was Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, specializing in intellectual property in science. He has also taught at UCLA, Stanford, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Science Sociales (Paris), and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland).

Jordan Bimm is a historian of science, technology, and medicine focused on the human and biological aspects of space exploration. His forthcoming book, Anticipating the Astronaut, examines the surprising history of pre-NASA space medicine test-subjects contributing to early visions of an ideal spacefaring body, including push-button soldiers, high-altitude Indigenous people, mountaineers, women pilots, and animals. 

Brad Bolman is a historian of science, medicine, and technology focused on the history of capitalism and inquiries into nonhuman life. His first book project, The Dog Years, explores how the beagle became the de facto and de jure breed of experimental dog in disciplines as far afield as radiobiology, pharmacology, periodontology, inhalation toxicology, and Alzheimer’s research.

Nicolette I. Bruner was a IFK 2018-20 Postdoctoral Scholar whose interdisciplinary literary research focused on nonhuman personhood from the nineteenth century to the present. She received her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Her book examines how the human community incorporates "thing people"—a category that includes corporations, animals, plants, artificial intelligence, and more. She teaches widely in American literature, posthumanism, biopolitics, environmental studies, and legal studies.

Katherine Buse uses methods from science and technology studies, science fiction studies, and the environmental humanities to study how science shapes and is shaped by its cultural milieu. She is working on a book project, titled Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture, and the Building of Model Worlds

Brian Callender is a recipient of the Faculty Research Grant for 2019-21. He is interested in clinical education, global health education, clinical ethics, the patient experience, and the use of graphic narrative in medicine. More specifically, he isinterested in how graphic medicine portrays the experience of illness and how comics, as a mediumand practice, can be used for self-discovery and personal knowledge formation about illness and health.

Alexander Campolo studies the history of media, technology, and science, with an interest in epistemologies of data. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and teaches widely in the history of science, philosophy, and visual culture.

Rachel Carbonara is a Doctoral Candidate in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion.  She studies the formation of alternative knowledge cultures in the contemporary Americas. Her current research examines healing practices in the United States and their complex entanglements with theoretical physics and South American indigenous medical knowledge. 

Margaret Carlyle was a former Research Associate whose research focused on the production of scientific, medical, and technological knowledge in seventeenth- and eigheenth-century France and its colonies. She is particularly interested in the enterprising efforts of women and other "invisible assistants" in forging scientific careers, both outside of and within institutional settings. Margaret is currently completing two projects. The first is a cultural history of Enlightenment anatomy stemming from her doctoral thesis completed at McGill University (2013). The second is a history of obstetrical technology in early modern Europe. Margaret has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013–15) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota (2015–17). 

Iris Clever is a historian of science, medicine, and technology whose research explores why and how science measures what it measures. Much of her work is concerned with the quantification of bodies, the human experience of measurement practices, and the role bodies and technologies play in defining the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in science. 

Patrick Crowley is a recipient of the Faculty Research Grant for 2018-20. Patrick R. Crowley specializes in the art and archaeology of the Roman world. In addition to traditional categories of Roman art such as sarcophagi and portraiture, his research interests include ancient aesthetics, theories of vision and representation, and phenomenological approaches to the matter of visual evidence, including the historical intersections among documentary photography, digital media, and the production of knowledge in classical archaeology. His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. His current book project, provisionally titled “The Phantom Image: Visuality and the Supernatural in Ancient Rome,” is the first major historical study of ghosts in the art and visual culture of classical antiquity.

Jennifer P. Daly's book project at IFK explored the development of evolutionary thought beyond the boundaries of organic species change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her central argument was that the development of evolutionary theories in this period took place across fields of inquiry—including natural history, cosmology, the human sciences, and even theology—and that this interaction was catalyzed by a cultural movement known as Romanticism. More broadly, her research engaged with the question of how scientists have adapted and transformed scientific method in response to the challenges of interpreting nature at or beyond the boundaries of observation and experiment. She received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and her A.B. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard College.

As a 2017-19 Faculty Fellow, Alireza Doostdar researched debates over the Islamization of the social sciences in Iran against the backdrop of transformations in higher education since the 1979 revolution. These debates include philosophical questions about the possibility and desirability of qualifying some sciences as "Islamic," and inquiries into the epistemological, methodological, and ethical parameters of a social science thus specified.

Damien Droney received his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, where his research focused on the politics of science, technology, and medicine in postcolonial Africa. While at IFK, he revised his dissertation as a book manuscript to be titled Weedy Science: The Meaning of Science in Postcolonial Ghana. The book is an ethnographic study of Ghana’s herbal medicine sector, with a focus on political projects of class, race, and nation that shape the vocation of science in West Africa.

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—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of understanding.

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

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.

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

Marco Garrido is a recipient of the Faculty Research Grant for 2020-21. His work focuses on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. and highlights the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics. His project titled, "Democracy as Disorder: The Experience of Democracy in Manila and Elsewhere across the Global South," examines the link between the rise of the middle class in a set of developing countries and democratic backsliding through an ethnographic and comparative historical lens. 

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

Benjamin W. Goossen is a historian of modern Europe and the world. His research and teaching interests concern the intersections of environmental history, global and international history, and science and technology studies. Goossen’s current book project, The Year of the Earth: A Planetary History, examines the global expansion and contested nature of earth science during the Cold War and collapse of European empires. 

Supported by a grant from the France Chicago Center, Grau visited Chicago in Fall 2017 to give several lectures, including "Roman Imperial Numismatics as a Text" and "Philology: A Contemporary Method of Reading."

An alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Donatien Grau holds a doctorate from the Université Paris-Sorbonne and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Dr. Grau is the author of several books, including Tout contre Sainte-Beuve ( 2013), and Néron en Occident (2015), both reviewed in The New York Review of Books. A member of the editorial board of La Règle du Jeu and a contributing editor of Flash Art International, he has written on contemporary art, in France and internationally, for publications such as Art Press and AnOther Magazine.

Eric Moses Gurevitch is a historian of science focusing on medieval and early modern South Asia. His research aims to tell a more global history of science in which unexpected voices, practices and events come to stand alongside more standard narratives.

Angie Heo was a recipient of the Faculty Seed Grant for 2018-19. Her project covered sites and practices of knowledge production about North Korea among Protestant Evangelicals in South Korea. From this, she exploreed how knowledge about "secret regimes" and limited-access states give rise to various moral projects and political interventions.

Eun Young Hwang is a Ph.D candidate in the field of religious ethics at the Divinity School, working on questions about religious vision, therapeutics, evaluative practice and virtue in ordinary life as well as the methodological question of cross-cultural comparison. Relating with diverse theoretical reflections on human agency in an interdisciplinary way, his aim is to develop a method of reconstructing ancient ways of knowing, practice, and self-cultivation that can address historical understanding of ancient religious-ethical thoughts as well as our contemporary constructive interpretation.

During 2016-17 academic year as a Dissertation Researh Fellow, his research examined how Augustine, a Catholic Christian thinker in the 5th century Roman Empire and Zhi Yi, a Tiantai Buddhist thinker in the 6th century Sui China, can be set in comparison in terms of ordinary virtue, revealing similarities in envisioning ordinary virtue as a person’s effective power of constructing a holistic horizon of ordinary world-experiences.

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

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.

Demetra Kasimis's research and teaching include democratic theory and the history of political thought especially in classical Athens; membership politics and migration; post-war continental political theory; and feminist theory. She is a graduate of Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy and concentrated in Hellenic Studies before receiving her PhD in political science from Northwestern University.

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.

Adam Kola joined the Institute as a visiting scholar in the 2016-17 academic year to conduct research for his project, "In Praise of Academic Cafés: Why the Informal Matters in the Humanities and Science," which focused on the role of unofficial associations in scientific and academic success, as well as the problem of knowledge transfer. He conducted a workshop in the 2017-18 Comparing Practices of Knowledge workshop series, and returned to Chicago in the 2018-19 academic year to continue his research on the role of the social sphere in academic practice and methodology. 

Matthew Landauer received the Faculty Seed Grant for 2016-17. His project, "Expert Advice and Democratic Politics" researched the historical dimensions of the problem faced by democracies that refer to expert authorities to make good decisions about policy issues.

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

Biying Ling received an MA in History and is pursuing a PhD in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is interested in the interaction between 19th century sciences and philosophy, particularly in how 19th century thought and experimental sciences contributed to our current understanding of measurement.

Zhiying Ma is a recipient of the Faculty Seed Grant for 2019-20. Her project, titled “Translating the Global, Assembling the Social:The (Re-)Emergence of Community Mental Health in China,”  examines community mental health (CMH) as globally influenced formations of knowledge in contemporary China. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and a scholar of disability studies. Her work in general examines how cultural, politico-economic, and technological factors shape the design and implementation of social policies, and how national policies and global development initiatives in turn impact health in/equity, vulnerability, and rights, with a focus on contemporary China.

Meekyung studied pre-modern Islamic art, to which she also brought an interest in late medieval and early modern European scientific images. Her dissertation, "Geometric Medicine: aniconism and Arab painting," expanded the history of Islamic art by interrogating the role of diagrams and aniconic schema in medieval manuscript culture. Her research encompassed patrimonial claims to classical learning, theorizations of the ideal human body, and the appropriate means of obtaining and transmitting knowledge. Furthermore, the rapid spread of diagrammatic forms in the Arabic-speaking world had far-ranging implications for medieval arts of the book. Ornament and design served an epistemological function as artists translated the heuristics of logic, rhetoric, and mathematic proofs into visual demonstrations by means of geometry. 

Dario Maestripieri's research interests include the evolution of human behavior and the relationship between science and literature.

Alex Mazzaferro was a 2019-20 Postdoctoral Researcher. He is a scholar of early American literature working at the intersection of the history of science and the history of political thought. His current book project offers a new account of the English colonization of the Americas informed by the early modern prohibition on "innovation," once a pejorative synonym for rebellion. The book argues that the assertion of Euro-Christian sovereignty in the New World served to rehabilitate the idea of human-led change by generating an empirical approach to political knowledge modeled on natural science. Alex earned his Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 2017 and recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Philosophical Society. 

John McCormick was a recipient of the Faculty Seed Grand for 2018-19. His project, titled “The People’s Prince: Machiavelli, Leadership, and Liberty,” explored a citizenry’s endeavor to identify and elevate to positions of authority, the pest leaders; and conversely, attempts by potential leaders to discern and shape the preferences of citizen. McCormick argued that the author who most perspicaciously interrogated this relationship between leadership and citizenship is Niccolo Machiavelli.

Stuart M. McManus is an historian of global empire with a particular focus on Latin America and Iberian Asia. He received his PhD in history from Harvard in 2016. His first book project, “Empire of Eloquence: Humanism and Iberian Global Expansion,” argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a key technology of empire and evangelization in the early modern Americas and Asia that can be only understood fully by taking a global perspective. At the Institute, he taught courses on Mexico and the Iberian world. In the summer of 2018, Stuart joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor of Pre-Modern Global History. 

Sanja Miklin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development, where she studies suicide and discourse(s) about suicide drawing on theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and psychology. Miklin’s dissertation, titled “Suicidology and the Contemporary Production of Knowledge about Suicide,” uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the ways in which different stakeholders and knowledge practices interact as they attempt to define suicide both as an epistemic object and as a specific kind of problem.

Aslan Cohen Mizrahi received his MA in the Academic Study of Religions from the University of Chicago, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Hebrew Bible. He is interested in literary representations of sovereign power and its implications for human autonomy, particularly in the Priestly History, Ezekiel, and Job.

Benjamin Morgan is a recipient of the Faculty Seed Grant for 2019-20. His project, titled “Climate Change Culture: A Prehistory,”  examines the ways in which imaginative literature and literary writing have created distinctive forms of knowledge about anthropogenic impacts on the natural world. His research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century.

Parysa Mostajir is a Ph.D. candidate studying Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. She has degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology, Sociology, and Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Kings College London, and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy. In her dissertation, Mostajir explores the relationship between art and science as distinct practices, the relationship between the intellectual and the aesthetic as strands of experience, and more broadly, the relationship between knowledge and other ways of engaging with the world. By demonstrating a variety of human problems that are insuperable by intellectual means, her dissertation establishes the centrality of artistic activities in living ethically and democratically, and simultaneously challenges science and rationality’s excessive authority in determining societal directions and shared understandings of reality.

William Nickell is a cultural historian specializing in mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Russia, with particular interest in the 1840s, turn-of-the century, and 1930s-40s. His project, “The Production of  Knowledge in the USSR,” examines the production of public knowledge within the Soviet Union. William aims to analyze the organization of science and information under Marxist regimes and explore connections between these and Soviet academic successes.

Julie Orlemanski is the author of "Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causality in the Literature of Late Medieval England," and her research interests span fictionality, the Song of Songs, disability studies and the history of the body, semantic and historical approaches to narratology, and the secularization thesis or so-called disenchantment of the world. Her project, "Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages” provides a critical history of how fiction has been theorized through narratives of periodization and historical difference and develop conceptual tools for the study of pre-modern fictionality.

Ada Palmer's research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is her way of exploring how history and thought shape each other over time. 

Pamela Paresky is the Director of the Aspen Center for Human Development, and serves a diverse clientele through her consulting practice, Multigenerational Consulting Services, LLC. She is also a Senior Scholar at the Network Contagion Research Institute.

Thomas Pashby is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He specializes in philosophy of physics with a particular interest in the interaction of physics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science.

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. 

Filippo Petricca is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in Romance Languages and Literatures. He holds and MA and BA from the University of Roma "LaSapienza". He is a literary historian of medieval and early-modern Europe. Petricca's current project explores the relationships between economics, theology, and the literary imagination in medieval Paris and Florence. 

Bogdan Popescu recieved his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 2018, studying comparative politics, historical political economy, and geo-statistical methods in the Department of Political Science. His research revolves around imperial legacies, corruption, and perceptions about corruption and public opinion. 

As a Dissertation Research Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year, Bogdan investigated the Ottoman legacy on popular trust and perceptions about the incidence of corruption in Central and Eastern Europe. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Dondena Centre at Boconni University, Italy.

Thomas Patrick Pringle is a media theorist drawing on documentary studies, environmental sociology, and environmental and computer history. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

Benoit Roux leads the Roux Group, a cohort of postdoctoral and doctoral students at the University of Chicago; they use theoretical and computational methods to advance their understanding of the structure, dynamics and function of biological macromolecular systems at the atomic level.

Zachary Samalin was a recipient of the Faculty Seed Grant for 2018-19. His project was titled “Theories of the Nineteenth Century.” Samalin sought to produce a genealogical account of the formation of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory. Additionally, Samalin’s project gave an account of how and why the historical terrain of the nineteenth century has figured so centrally in the project of critical theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Elizabeth Sartell was a 2018-19 Graduate Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the Divinity School where she studied Islamic Studies. She received her M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2013. Her research aims to reveal the intertwining nature of various knowledge traditions in the medieval Islamic world through an analysis of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s cosmogonic theory. She has a particular focus on medieval Arabic philosophy, Islamic mysticism, and Jewish mysticism. Sartell aims to integrate mystical and philosophical traditions in scholarly research in order to provide new insight into the relationship between mysticism and science in the medieval period.

Steven is an MD/PhD Candidate in the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (CHSS) and Department of History. His research interests include: medicine and public health in modern Latin America; history, theory, and practice of psychiatry; history and theory of medical ethics and the medical humanities; medical education; medical epistemology

Yan Slobodkin is a historian of modern Europe, with a focus on French colonial and transnational history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and his B.A. in history and French from Oberlin College. 

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.

Joe Stadolnik studies the literature and culture of late-medieval England (1300-1530). At the University of Chicago, he has taught in the Reading Cultures sequence of the Humanities core, and has offered seminars on medieval English literature and manuscript studies.

Kyle Wynter-Stoner is currently pursuing his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research explores reading cultures and authorship practices in the Arabic-speaking medieval Islamic world through the lens of a corpus of manuscripts that once belonged to a large public library in 15th century Cairo. 

Paride Stortini is a PhD candidate in History of Religions at the Divinity School, University of Chicago.

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. 

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.

Isaiah Lorado Wilner is a historian of knowledge who specializes in cultural and intellectual history, cultural theory, media and material culture, the history of human science, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of a work of media history, The Man Time Forgot (HarperCollins, 2006), the editor of Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale, 2018), and a recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians.

Sylvia Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. She studies the architecture and material culture of medieval Indian Ocean with a particular focus on China’s coastal areas.

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.

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.