Postdoctoral Fellows

José Carlos is a Latin Americanist specializing in Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Culture from Rutgers University in 2022. His research focuses on the emergence, expansion, and political agenda of indigenous literature in Latin America over the course of the twentieth century. He also examines indigenous cultural production as framed by environmental activism and anti-extractivist struggle in the region.

Melissa Reynolds is a historian of early modern European medicine and science. She received her PhD in History from Rutgers in 2019 and was the Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University from 2019–22.

Alex Kreger is an anthropologist of religion, secularism, and sound. He earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, “The Stringed Qur’an: Post-Islamic Reform and Musical Revival among Alevis in Turkey and Europe,” examines transformations in Turkish Alevi ritual life in response to the pressures of Islamism and transnational migration. His ethnographic research in Turkey and Europe has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright Foundation.

Alessandra Amin is a historian of modern art in the Arab world, specializing in Palestinian painting and graphic arts during the second half of the twentieth century. Her work explores the aesthetic and philosophical currents mediating artists’ relationships to Palestine across chasms of space, time, and catastrophe, paying particular attention to the gendered dimensions of Palestinian futurities.

Timothy Malone is a formerly incarcerated scholar who spent eight years inside of various California carceral sites. Upon release, he earned his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in Cultural Studies. His monograph, The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contagion and Sacrifice in the Contemporary Prison argues that the primary punishments any inmate is subjected to within the carceral thresher exceed what they were sentenced to endure by the court.

Richard Fadok is an anthropologist interested in how design mediates human relationships with the environment. His ethnographic scholarship examines how designers in the United States are responding to climate change and other ecological crises through technical, aesthetic, and ethical practices oriented to nonhuman lifeforms. He received his PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Ioanida Costache is an ethnomusicologist and sound studies scholar specializing in Romani artist practices. Her work explores the legacies of Romani historical trauma, and the feminist and de-colonial critiques of the present, inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art. Her writing has been published in EuropeNow, RevistaARTA, Critical Romani Studies, and is forthcoming in European History Quarterly. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright Grants, the Gerald J.

Peter Sorensen earned his Ph.D. in History with specializations in Latin American and Global Comparative History from Rutgers University in 2022. His research focuses on sixteenth-century Mexico City and the intellectual and cultural history of the city’s Nahua residence. Sorensen’s work focuses on Nahuatl language documents, and specifically popular song lyrics, to engage the voices of the Nahuas during a time of great upheaval and conflict.

Rebecca Haboucha earned her PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge in 2021. She is a heritage and food studies scholar who has worked on issues of climate change, migration/diaspora, cultural sovereignty, and intergenerational transmission amongst Indigenous peoples and refugees, respectively. Rebecca completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at McGill University and her master’s in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Margaret Geoga is an Egyptologist specializing in the transmission and reception of ancient Egyptian literature. She earned her PhD in Egyptology in 2020 and a concurrent MA in Comparative Literature in 2018, both from Brown University. Her current book project focuses on The Teaching of Amenemhat, an enigmatic Middle Egyptian poem depicting the murder of a pharaoh. The monograph investigates how this unusual and highly popular text was passed down, edited, and reinterpreted over the course of approximately 1000 years by its many ancient readers in both Egypt and Nubia.