Visiting Scholars
Fung Global Fellows Program
View the visitors for 2020-21
Center on Contemporary China Visitors
View the visitors for 2020-21
Georgina Born
Global Scholar, Department of Music
Georgina Born, OBE FBA is a professor of music and anthropology at the University of Oxford. Earlier, she worked as a musician with avant-garde rock, jazz and improvising groups. Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, sound, television and digital media. Her books are Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California, 1995), Western Music and Its Other: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (ed. with D. Hesmondhalgh, California, 2000), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage, 2005), Music, Sound and Space (ed., Cambridge, 20013), Interdisciplinarity (ed. with A. Barry, Routledge, 2013) and Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (ed. with E. Lewis and W. Straw, Duke, 2017). Two books are forthcoming with Duke: Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology and Music and Genre: New Directions (ed. with D. Brackett). Born directed the European Research Council funded research program "Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies." She has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Irvine, and McGill, Hong Kong, Oslo and Aarhus universities.
Carlos Fausto
Visiting Research Scholar, Brazil LAB
Carlos Fausto is a professor of anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and Global Scholar at Princeton University. He served as a visiting scholar at the universities of Chicago, Stanford and Cambridge, as well as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, both in France. He has been conducting fieldwork among indigenous peoples in Amazonia since 1988, most notably with the Tupi-speaking Parakanã and the Karib-speaking Kuikuro. His most recent books are Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia (2012), Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia (2020), and the co-edited volume Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations (2016). He is also a photographer and a documentary filmmaker, having co-directed the award-winning feature film The Hyperwomen (2011).
Shoshana Goldstein
Princeton-Mellon Fellow, M.S. Chadha Center for Global India
Shoshana Goldstein’s research explores histories of urban planning, governance and placemaking in Northern India, specifically questions surrounding the impacts of real estate development, public-private partnerships, environmental activism and internal migration on rural-urban transitions. Her current project charts the complex planning history and social construction of place among migrant communities in Delhi’s satellite city, Gurgaon.
Goldstein holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from Cornell and an M.A. in international affairs from The New School, with a focus on the comparative urban development experiences of India and China. She has taught courses on migration, infrastructure and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Prior to earning her doctorate, Goldstein worked for the India China Institute and as a consultant for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and UNICEF.
Shoshana’s fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India under the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.
Milad Hooshyar
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Research Community on Climate Change and Epidemic Disease in the Indian Ocean at PIIRS
Hooshyar holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Central Florida. His research interests include surface water hydrology, surface processes, geomorphology, dynamical systems and numerical simulation.
Muna Husain
Translator in Residence at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Council of the Humanities
Husain is a writer, literary scholar and Arabic-English literary translator. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and has taught at SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, Bronx Community College, and the University of Maryland. She is the author of three poetry collections, and most recently, the trilingual chapbook Femme Ghosts (2019). She has held fellowships with the Arab-American National Museum, Poetry International, BANFF Center, Norwich Center and Forum Transregionale Studien.
Husain's English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was reprinted by English PEN in 2017. Her selected translations of Iraqi poet Ra’ad Abdul Qader will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Spring 2021. She is currently translating Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Arabic, to be released by Takween Publishing. Her appointment is made possible by matching funds from the Humanities Council.
Sadaf Jaffer
Lecturer
Sadaf Jaffer is a scholar with research interests in Islamic, South Asian and gender studies. Her current book project, entitled “Secularism, Sexuality and Islam: Ismat Chughtai’s Indian Muslim Progressivism,” elucidates alternative Muslim subjectivities through the lens of a prominent Urdu writer and cultural critic. Jaffer is currently a postdoctoral research associate in South Asian Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on Islam, South Asia and South Asian American studies. Prior to this appointment, she served as a postdoctoral fellow in Global Studies at Stanford University. Jaffer has published a paper in the Journal of Women’s History entitled “Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies: Towards a Feminist Intellectual History” in addition to posts on the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Huffington Post and the Altmuslimah blogs. She earned her bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University and obtained her Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Harvard University with a secondary field in women, gender and sexuality studies.
Joe Lane
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies(PIIRS) and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (ACEE)
Anatoly Levshin
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Research Community on Reimagining World Order, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS)
Anatoly (Tolya) Levshin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His in-progress dissertation is tentatively titled "The Statecraft of Restraint: the Quest for Collective Security in the Shadow of Total War." He studies grand strategy, international security cooperation and international order using historical and quantitative methodologies. His research explores the changing logics of interstate conflict and cooperation under evolving violence interdependence. He is particularly interested in two general theoretical problems: first, exploring how historical evolution in patterns of interdependence, especially violence interdependence, has altered, and continues to alter, the strategic logics of competition and cooperation under anarchy; and, second, understanding how the flow of institutional creativity alters the architecture of international competition and cooperation. Anatoly’s work has been supported by, among others, the Josephine de Karman Trust, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Government of Alberta as well as by Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Center for International Security Studies jointly with the Bradley Foundation.
Anatoly earned his M.A. in political science from Princeton, his M.Phil in international relations from Oxford University and his B.A in political studies from Queen's University.
Tomaz Mastnak
Research Scholar
Mastnak received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. His primary area of research is the emergence and articulation of conflictual relations between East and West, Christendom and the Muslim world, and between Europe and the non-European world.
Mastnak is the author of a wide range of books and articles in the history of political thought and political theory.
He has been a research fellow at the European University Institute, Oxford University, American University of Cairo, Harvard University and New York University.
Miqueias Mugge
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brazil LAB at PIIRS
Mugge received his PhD in Social History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016). Before joining PIIRS and the Brazil LAB, Mugge was a postdoctoral fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School (2016-2018) and a lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese department (2017-2018) at Princeton. A former Fulbright fellow, Mugge has authored and co-authored five books, exploring subjects as the Brazilian militia, slavery and German immigration in nineteenth century southern Brazil. He is currently finalizing two books manuscripts: Lords of War: Militias, Slavery, and State-Making in the Brazilian Borderlands and Memento Vivere (co-authored with João Biehl).
Marcelo Medeiros
Visiting Research Scholar, Brazil LAB at PIIRS
Marcelo Medeiros has published 59 papers in academic journals, 31 book chapters and three books. He has also edited a book and received multiple prizes for his research. Medeiros uses his formal training in sociology, economics and statistics to produce research that is interdisciplinary, rigorous, policy relevant and conceptually innovative. His work has covered a broad range of subjects, including inequality, poverty and mobility, public health, education, time use, disability, and social protection. While most of his research is based on quantitative analysis of surveys and administrative data, he has also collected his own data (carrying out three large-scale surveys in Brazil and also collecting archival data from historical periods). He has also advised the governments of several countries, the United Nations Development Program, and publishes op-eds on policy issues.
Medeiros is also an instructor. Last year, he taught two courses offered by the Program in Latin American Studies: a 300-level seminar titled "Public Health in Latin America" (Fall 2019) and a 400-level seminar called "Poverty, Inequality and Social Mobility in Latin America" (Spring 2020). Medeiros used public data from Brazil and elsewhere and structuring his seminars around student-led projects.
Matthew Reeck
Translator in Residence at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Council of the Humanities
Matt Reeck graduated with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. He has published six translations from French and Urdu. His translation of Shrilal Shukla’s Selections from Fifty Years of Ignorance, his first translation from Hindi, will be published in 2021 by Penguin-India. He has won grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the PEN/Heim Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. Dr. Reeck's appointment is made possible by matching funds from the Humanities Council.
Jessica Seddon
Visiting Research Fellow, Princeton Environmental Institute and M.S. Chadha Center for Global India (PIIRS)
Jessica has worked as a researcher, strategist, and leader on institutional design initiatives for more than two decades in the United States, Latin America, and South Asia. Her work focuses on the interaction between technology change and institutional environments to identify and seize new opportunities for solving complex social challenges. She is particularly interested in ways in which innovations in how we detect and process information shape the risks and opportunities for responding to environmental change. Jessica was most recently Director of Integrated Urban Strategy at World Resources Institute (WRI), where she continues to serve as Global Lead for WRI’s air quality work. Prior to joining WRI, she founded and led Okapi, an institutional design and strategy consultancy incubated by IIT Madras. Jessica earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and her B.A. from Harvard University.
Halimat Somotan
Princeton-Mellon Fellow with the African Humanities Colloquium
Halimat Somotan received her Ph.D. in african history from Columbia University. She is a social historian with research and teaching interests in the histories of print culture, housing, urban governance, public health and citizenship in 20th-century Africa. Her current project, “Decolonization and the Making of a Capital City, 1941-76,” based on her dissertation, examines how landlords, tenants and female traders’ organizations contested planning policies in Lagos during and after Nigeria’s transition from colonial to independent rule. It excavates the intellectual perspectives and political campaigns mounted by ordinary Lagosians to alter the state’s rent control, ‘slum clearance’ and anti-street trading laws. This research demonstrates how popular debates over the city’s future shaped the politics and process of decolonization and how urban dwellers relied upon and shaped municipal administration to achieve belonging and improve their material conditions.
Before joining Princeton, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African-American Studies. During her postdoctoral fellowship, she will develop her book manuscript, write an article on the intellectual history of urban planning in colonial Lagos and teach an undergraduate seminar on the history of housing in African cities in Spring 2021.
Somotan’s fellowship is made possible by the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.
Danielle Stewart
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies(PIIRS) and the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities in connection with the Brazil LAB of PIIRS.
Stewart is an art historian whose research centers on Modern photography and the visual culture of mid-century Brazil. Her work investigates the capacity of mass distributed artistic, documentary, journalistic, and advertising photographs to shape urban spaces and construct urban imaginaries. At Princeton, Danielle will work on revising her dissertation, Framing the City: Photography and the Construction of São Paulo, 1930-1955, into a book manuscript that analyzes how photographs of mid-twentieth century São Paulo helped to forge the city’s identity as a modernized, industrial metropolis. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, educated in Utah, and a resident of Harlem, Danielle has also lived in Curitiba, Brazil. This wide range of American cityscapes fundamentally informs Danielle’s research. Danielle completed her MPhil and PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and her BA and MA degrees at Brigham Young University. She has presented her research at domestic and international venues including conferences hosted by the Universidade de São Paulo, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the College Art Association, and the Latin American Studies Association. Her work has appeared in publications by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Instituto Moreira Salles, the Fundación Cisneros, and H-ART (Universidad de los Andes). Danielle has also taught courses on Latin American art and photography at Hostos College, Brooklyn College, Lehman College, and The Cooper Union.
Chika Tonooka
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Research Community on Reimagining World Order, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS)
Chika Tonooka is an international historian of the 20th century, engaged in research on European (especially British), Japanese and American conceptions of world order. Her two main areas of interest are tensions between universalism and particularism in world politics and inter-temporal conflicts in the conduct of international affairs. Her primary method of analysis to date is intellectual history, interrogating concepts that provide an organizing logic to particular ideas and practices of world order. Her Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 2019 at the University of Cambridge, was entitled “Japanese Civilisation and Ideas of Progress in Britain, c.1880-1945,” and examined what happened to Britain’s Eurocentric imperial and internationalist conceptions of civilization and world order in the early 20th century when Britain was confronted with the “rise of the East,” and especially of Japan as the first non-Western great power. Her current research examines Western and Japanese approaches to world order and futurism in the late 20th century, focusing on inter-temporal tensions between domestic democratic commitments and long-term global imperatives.
Chika was born in Tokyo and grew up in London and Buckinghamshire, UK. She holds a B.A. in history from the University of Cambridge (2012), an M.A. in global studies from the University of Tokyo (2014), and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge (2019). Her Ph.D. dissertation was the joint winner of Cambridge University’s 2020 Prince Consort & Thirwall Prize and Seeley Medal for the best dissertation in History. In 2018, she became the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Vítor V. Vasconcelos
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies(PIIRS) and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (ACEE)
Vítor is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, at Princeton University. He finished his PhD in Sciences at the University of Minho, in Portugal, in 2017. His research agenda is on the role of institutions for managing social-ecological systems. It covers the topics of the management of public goods, the resilience of ecological systems, and evolutionary biology by using and developing tools and resources in the areas of mathematical ecology, complex systems, stochastic processes, game theory, scientific computing, network science, and numerical methods. Besides extending the theoretical work that is showcased in his previous research, he is now working on three central practical systems of global environmental importance: the global and local food systems, the sustainability of the Coral Triangle, and the ecological, social, and technical bottlenecks of rapid decarbonization of the energy system in India.