Postdoctoral Fellows

Allan Zheng is a scholar researching the Cambodian performing arts in Cambodia and the diaspora, focusing on the boundaries between the traditional and contemporary as well as expressions of social and cultural identity. While at Penn, he is affiliated with Penn’s Asian American Studies Program and working on journal articles and his book manuscript. Allan’s work has been supported by the Center for Khmer Studies, Society for Asian Music, and UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society.

Delbar is a social historian of science and religion in the Indo-Persianate world and the Middle East, focusing on how the entanglement of science and religion, particularly Shi‘i Islam and Zoroastrianism, shaped the discourse of nationalism in modern Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. During her fellowship year, she is affiliated with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Department of History & Sociology of Science.

Chris Halsted is a historian of early medieval Europe, focusing on borders, boundaries, and the creation of ethnic identity in the ninth and tenth centuries. His research explores subjects including connectivity and trade in eastern Europe and Eurasia, witchcraft, and the intersecting construction of gender and ethnicity. His work has been published in venues including Viator, Early Medieval Europe, and Medium Ævum, and is forthcoming in Speculum and The Haskins Society Journal.

Jennifer Sierra’s research explores human-machine relationships among Shipibo-Konibo people (who refer to themselves as “Shipibo”), an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, Indigenous studies, critical digital media studies, and science and technology studies (STS), her work offers a nuanced cultural analysis of digital technology use and media infrastructure access in the Amazon region. Jennifer earned her Ph.D.

Spencer Small is a scholar of Soviet and Post-Soviet literature, culture, and digital media. He earned his PhD from Yale University in Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research investigates the relationships between narrative, art, and politics. Spencer is affiliated with Penn’s Department of Russian and East European Studies and is working on his book manuscript, The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing.

Ana Lolua holds an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe (Warsaw, Natolin) and a second MA in Nationalism Studies from Central European University (Budapest). She is currently completing her doctoral degree within a cotutelle program jointly run by Ilia State University (Tbilisi) and Georg-August University of Göttingen (Göttingen).

Usmon’s research and teaching broadly focus on entanglements between Islam and secular modernity. He is currently working on a book manuscript, In the Shadow of Tradition: Soviet Secularism and Islamic Revival in Kyrgyzstan, which sheds light on the rise of secularism in Soviet Central Asia and ethnographically examines how Soviet secular categories continue to shape the lives of Central Asian Muslims. His article developing this project appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History in April 2024.

Paniz Musawi Natanzi is an interdisciplinary scholar of feminist and anti-colonial theory, visual culture, global politics, and war. Much of her empirical and theoretical work focuses on labor, knowledge, and migration in Afghanistan and its global political entanglements, with emphasis on Iran, Pakistan and Germany.

Maryam Athari is a historian of twentieth-century global art, specializing in Middle Eastern and Iranian art. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern University, along with certificates in Middle Eastern Studies and Critical Theory. Her research explores mid-twentieth-

Lama Elsharif is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Purdue University. Her research focuses on the intersections of environmental, economic, and maritime history in the Ottoman regencies of North Africa throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her writing has appeared in The Markaz Review, and her forthcoming book chapter on reconceptualizing Tunisian corsairing will be published in a 2024 edited volume by the University of Amsterdam Press.