Research Partnership Opportunities

In this research project, I question current notions of indigenous historical consciousness in Latin America and offer new ways of thinking about the dynamic relationships among myth, indigenous history, and Western history.

As a Radcliffe Institute fellow, I will write Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics (under contract with Oxford University Press).

In 1848, a young West African princess, held prisoner for two years by an opposing African kingdom, was rescued from imminent assassination by a British sea captain. The young Yoruba girl learned fluent English and endeared herself to the ship’s captain during the voyage to England.

This project will involve library research and analysis of primary sources on Indian economy and foreign policy, as well as US and Soviet diplomacy and aid programs. Specific projects will depend on the interests and skills of the research partner.

This book project examines Chinese understandings of economics, nationalism, and culture in the Shanghai stock exchange bubble of 1921–1922. The discussion brings together the political conjuncture (the new republic), urban space (the coexistence of foreign enclaves and areas of Chinese jurisdiction), and the history of ideas (elite and vernacular).

My book, “Compassion in Common,” pursues the political inflections of the language of compassion that flourished in early modern France in the period after the brutal religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. In the final part of the book, I look at the Chinese porcelain figurines of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, present in private collections in France.

I am working on a novel focusing on the parallel lives of two important protagonists in modern Albanian history: communist dictator Enver Hoxha and Albania’s first female writer, Musine Kokalari, who was exiled and imprisoned by Hoxha’s regime.

I am interested in working with a research partner whose main field is in cognitive psychology and has interest in the semantics of modal expressions, with a background of recent work in semantics, logic, and/or philosophy.

Please note: This research partnernership opportunity runs from end of January through May 2013.

This project compares the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recent Great Recession on gender dynamics in the labor market and the household, and on gender-related norms and attitudes. This involves a mix of historical and contemporary research drawing on a wide variety of sources, both quantitative and qualitative. 

I need assistance with managing video and audio recordings from my fieldwork in Mali. My research partner will assist in developing the materials into an ebook or a set of web presentations that explain and tell the story of the balafon music of Neba Solo, the most renowned musician from the Kenedougou region of Southern Mali.

My research focuses on the physics of strong magnetic and gravitational fields found in the extreme environments of magnetars, other neutron stars, and black holes. While at Radcliffe, I am seeking a research partner to be involved in one of two aspects of the project: 

Elephants in Captivity, a novel in the planning stages, is conceived as a loose and fantastical collection of stories about the relations of humans and animals, with a particular emphasis on elephants.

The Heart of the Sky is a fiction-documentary hybrid film project about an immigrant family who recently arrived in Toronto. Sandor, a controlling man who constantly interferes in the family’s affairs, holds the family’s immigration documents. He is a community leader from back home, who has helped them come to Canada.

Drawing on the most recent research on the social history of WWII in France, as well as on the sociological literature dealing with resistance, I will prepare a book revisiting Jewish Résistance in France through an integrated approach.

This study theorizes and historically situates the emergence, during the 20th and 21st centuries, of the science of “maternal effects.” Collectively, maternal effects research argues that a mother’s experiences, behaviors, and physiology—inflected by her social and environmental context—can have life-altering effects on the developing fetus.

This project focuses on questions of Victorian literature and law.

The project is an academic monograph, split among the analysis of literary texts, the intellectual history of political thought, and theoretical discussion of political ideas. The book is a study of the history of the corporation as an idea and an institution, and especially as a type of political group. It covers the period 1500–1700 in England.