Postdoctoral Fellows

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.

Joel Pattison is a medieval historian who specializes in the relationship between Italy and the Maghrib during the Late Middle Ages. He is particularly interested in the intersection of religious law and commercial culture in the port cities of the central and western Mediterranean, and in immigration between northern Italy and the Maghrib during this period. He received his undergraduate degree in History at Yale University, and completed his Ph.D. in History and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019.

Christopher Stedman Parmenter is an ancient historian specializing in the intertwined histories of race, culture, and long-distance trade in Archaic and Classical Greece. He received his doctorate in Classics from New York University in 2020 and has published in Classical Antiquity, Classical Receptions Journal, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, and Bibliotheca Orientalis. His book project, entitled Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c.

Dr. Neelam Khoja is a transregional and transdisciplinary historian of Persianate Asia. Her research focuses on migration and historically marginalized communities, such as Afghans, slaves, and women, whose networks cross imperial boundaries and national borders from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. She is fluent in languages, literatures, cultures, and histories within and across borders.

Harry Eli Kashdan is a scholar of food culture and migration in the contemporary Mediterranean. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Michigan, and was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian at Harvard University and Postdoctoral Scholar in the Global Mediterranean at The Ohio State University before joining the University of Pennsylvania. His work on the literary qualities of cookbooks has been published in Food & Foodways, Mashriq & Mahjar, Quest, and Italian Culture.

Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera earned her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Cornell University in August 2020. She specializes in U.S. Latinx and African American Literature and culture with a focus on race, gender, and migration. Her current book project, The Coloniality of Citizenship and the Turn to the Undocumented in Feminist Thought, studies the work the undocumented immigrant, its presence and absence, has enabled in feminist history, theory, and literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. His research and teaching interests include Mughal history, the history of Pakistan and its regions, and the study of gender and sexuality. His current book project investigates the history of the individual in the Mughal world. Rajani is interested in seeing the pre-colonial past not as a remote world on the far side of the rupture of modernity, but rather as an invitation alive within our present to forge different futures. He is also writing a concept history of ethnicity in the global context of the late twentieth century.

Keren He specializes in modern Chinese literature, culture, and media. She is interested in how suicide and aging negotiated the politics of life in twentieth-century China. Her doctoral project was funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research articles have appeared or will be forthcoming in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and The Journal of Asian Studies.

Trained as a historian of modern Korea, Na Sil’s research intersects with studies of the cultural Cold War, childhood, and gender and sexuality. She is completing a book manuscript that examines how childhood functioned as a crucial site of transnational formations of a liberal order in 1950s–1960s South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research on gender and racial politics of infant feeding in postwar South Korea is forthcoming in Gender & History.

Dr. Elyan Hill received her Ph. D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a scholar of Africa and African diasporas, her research foregrounds visual cultures, black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, and their diasporas. Most recently, Elyan was an Africana Research Center Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State.