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

Slavica Jakelic, Fellow

Ph.D. Boston University, Religious Studies

Slavica Jakelic is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Director of its project on "Secularism in the Late Modern Age." She has a new book out with Ashgate, Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity. More Information >>

Brian Balogh, Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor of History

Brian Balogh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2008). More Information >>

Asher Biemann, Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Asher Biemann is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His research interests include Modern Jewish thought and intellectual history, German-Jewish studies, Zionism and Jewish nationalism, dialogical philosophy, theories of Jewish history and Jewish renaissance, Jewish art and aesthetics, and Israeli cinema. More Information >>

Talbot Brewer, Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Talbot Brewer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009). More Information >>

Pamela D. Cochran, Faculty Fellow

Lecturer in Religious Studies

Pamela D. Cochran is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Evangelical Feminism: A History (NYU Press, 2005).

Charles A. Kromkowski, Faculty Fellow

Lecturer in Politics

Charles A. Kromkowski in Lecturer in Politics at the University of Virginia. More Information >>

Krishan Kumar, Faculty Fellow

University Professor and Department Chair of Sociology

Krishan Kumar is University Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His research interests include empires and imperial peoples, nationalism and nation identity, Europe, global history, and problems of historical sociology. More Information >>

Ekaterina Makarova, Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor of Sociology

Ekaterina Makarova is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include Urban sociology and anthropology, space and culture, sociology of consumption, sociology and anthropology of socialist and postsocialist societies, sociology of religion, and social change. More Information >>

Allan Megill, Faculty Fellow

Professor of History

Allan Megill is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on modern Europe, modern European history of ideas, and historical theory/philosophy of history. More Information >>

Jeffrey K. Olick, Faculty Fellow

Professor of Sociology and History

Jeffrey K. Olick is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia. While he has published on a wide variety of topics, his interests focus particularly on collective memory, critical theory, transitional justice, and postwar Germany. More Information >>

Melvin Rogers, Faculty Fellow

Assistant Professor of Politics

Melvin Rogers is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests include classical and contemporary pragmatism, American and African American political thought, and democratic and republican theory. More Information >>

Chad Wellmon, Faculty Fellow

Assistant Professor of German

Chad Wellmon is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently working on a project tentatively titled, "Organizing the World: Projects of Universal Knowledge from the Enlightenment to Google." More Information >>

Stephen White, Faculty Fellow

James Hart Professor of Politics

Stephen White is James Hart Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He specializes in modern and contemporary political theory. More Information >>

Olivier Zunz, Faculty Fellow

Commonwealth Professor of History

Olivier Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is currently working on a history of American philanthropy in the twentieth century. More Information >>

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

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. More Information >>

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 >>

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.

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.