Visiting Scholars
Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China
View the visitors for 2019-20
Fung Global Fellows Program
View the visitors for 2020-21
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.
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)
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).
Priti Narayan
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 M.S. Chadha Center for Global India under PIIRS.
Narayan uses ethnographic and archival methods to investigate how residents of Chennai, India make claims to city land in a landscape marked by violent, large-scale slum evictions. Her research project, Terrains of Negotiation: Strategic Residents and the State in a
Developing City, explores how the urban poor navigate ‘terrains of negotiation’ among politicians, local bureaucrats, and activists to preserve their citizenship in the city. Her work highlights how historical structures of patronage-based state society relations interact with
neoliberal urbanism. Narayan is a member of Pennurimai Iyakkam, a slumdweller rights organization, and has been working on housing rights in Chennai for over seven years now. She has a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University; an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University; a PG Dip. in Television Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism; and a B.Sc. in Electronic Media from the University of Madras. She has book chapters and web publications published on slum evictions and resettlement, environmental gentrification, and urban participation.
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.
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 Ph.D. dissertation, “Japanese Civilisation and Ideas of Progress in Britain, c.1880-1945,” was completed at the University of Cambridge 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 considers 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, an M.A. in global studies from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in history from the 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.