The following fellows are in residence for the 2009-2010 academic year:

Dan Philpott, Visiting Fellow (Notre Dame)

Politics

Regina Schwartz, Visiting Fellow (Northwestern)

English

Professor Regina Schwartz teaches in the fields of Religion and Literature and Law at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism and Remembering and Repeating. Her new book, When God Left the World: Sacramentality at the Dawn of Secularism (Stanford University Press, 2008) explores the ways the sacramental vision infuses the poetry, drama, and the wider culture of the early modern period.

Matthew B. Crawford, Research Fellow / Ph.D. University of Chicago (2000)

Political Thought

A contributing editor of The New Atlantis, Matthew is currently writing a book for The Penguin Press that will explicate the experiences of making things and fixing things. These activities illuminate the mutual entanglement of mind and hand, and thereby shed light on certain permanent requirements of human flourishing that material culture must answer to. Entitled Shop Class as Soulcraft: Manual Competence and the Struggle for Agency in Modern Life, it questions the inevitability of our increasing manual disengagement from the world as mystified consumers. It also seeks to rehabilitate the honor of the manual trades, as a life worth choosing for young people who often feel hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents.

Matthew Mutter, Postdoctoral Fellow / Ph.D. Yale University (2009)

English

Matthew recently completed his dissertation in the English department at Yale University. His dissertation examines the tensions between religious and secular accounts of the world, and in particular accounts of aesthetic experience, in literary modernism. His book project will extend this study to consider the work of Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, and Salman Rushdie. He has published essays on Don DeLillo and ordinary language philosophy, Emerson and secularism, and has a forthcoming essay on Wallace Stevens and the problem of a secular poetics. He has broad interests in the interface among literature, philosophy, and religion.

David Franz, Postdoctoral Fellow / Ph.D. University of Virginia (2009)

Sociology

David studies the relationship of economic life to the broader culture, especially the often unnoticed interplay between business and conceptions of the good. His dissertation, titled “The Ethics of Incorporation,” examines the latent moral content of business management theory, exploring the influence of management theory on ideas of leadership, collective purpose, responsibility, and guilt. David has also written about the history of cubicles, intellectuals, and the role of religion in public life. His work has been featured in several print and online publications, including Arts & Letters Daily, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Wilson Quarterly.

Edward J. K. Gitre, Postdoctoral Fellow / Ph.D Rutgers University (2008)

History

Ed is a modern U.S. historian, with specialization in intellectual, cultural, and religious history. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University, as well as two masters degrees, one in theology and the other in European cultural history. As a postdoctoral fellow, he will be revising his Ph.D. dissertation for press publication. This project, titled “America Adjusted: Conformity, Boredom, and the Modern Self, c.1920–1980,” explores the problem of boredom as a social problem in postwar American culture. While the project focuses on the specific development of post-Darwinian social theory (“social adjustment”) and the relationship between social scientific knowledge and non-academic discourse, it seeks to illuminate the long-term effects of World War II and the Cold War militarization of American society. More Information >>

Geoffrey Claussen, Doctoral Fellow

Religious Studies

Geoff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was also ordained as a rabbi. His research focuses on the nineteenth-century Musar movement, a pietistic religious movement in Eastern Europe that attempted to place concerns with moral character at the center of Jewish life. His dissertation explores conceptions of virtue, happiness, reason, spiritual practice, love, and God in the thought of Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv, an early leader of the Musar movement.

Jeffrey Dill, Doctoral Fellow

Sociology

Jeffrey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on education and culture, specifically questions of pluralism and difference in educational systems, moral and citizenship education, and socialization processes in schools. His dissertation examines the emerging ‘global citizen’ ideal in secondary education and its implications as a character type for global culture.

Amy Gilbert, Associate Fellow

Philosophy

Karen Guth, Associate Fellow

Religious Studies

Karen's field of study is religious ethics. She specializes in Christian ethics, with particular interests in the role of religion in public life. Her dissertation, “Beyond Love or Justice: The Political Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Howard Yoder” draws on feminist thought to critique the love and justice framework at the forefront of 20th century American Protestant social ethics. Identifying theological creativity as a central theme in both traditions, it garners the insights of both to lay the foundations for a feminist public theology. Karen holds a M.T.S. in Religion and Society from Harvard Divinity School, a M.Th. in Religion and Literature from the University of Glasgow, and a B.A. in religion from Furman University.

Ryan McDermott, Associate Fellow

English

Ryan studies medieval English literature and focuses on the intersections of Christian theology and literature in late 14th-century poetry, especially the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet. His dissertation project seeks models for ethical deliberation in these poets' adaptations of biblical exegesis to poetic invention, and theorizes a more robust literary ethics than the ethics of alterity that dominates contemporary critical discourse.

Paul Nedelisky, Associate Fellow

Philosophy

Hilde Restad, Associate Fellow

Politics

Hilde is a graduate student at the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Identity and Foreign Policy: The Case of American Exceptionalism,” with the support of the Norwegian Defense Institute and the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Wigeland-Holst Award. She is a graduate of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (AHUWC) and of the University of Oslo, where she received a Cand. Mag. in Political Science. She is a previous Fulbright Fellow as well as a previous Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Christina Simko, Associate Fellow

Sociology

Benjamin H. Snyder, Associate Fellow

Sociology

Benjamin is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at the University of Virginia. His research interests include time, memory, and emotions. His dissertation project investigates Americans' experiences of everyday life as fast, staccato, busy, and overwhelming in light of cultural transformations in the meanings of time and space characteristic of modernity.

Greg Thompson, Associate Fellow

Religious Studies

Greg is a PhD student in the Theology, Ethics, and Culture program in the University of Virginia's Department of Religious Studies. His research interests include theology, social theory, political thought, and American religious history. Currently his work focuses on love as a political idea.