Radcliffe Institute Announces 2007–2008 Fellows and Their Projects

51 Artists, Scholars to Work on Projects Ranging from Film Production to Stem Cell Research

June 1, 2007
Jenny Corke
617-495-8608
jcorke@radcliffe.edu

Cambridge, Mass.—The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the names of 32 women and 19 men selected to be 2007–2008 Radcliffe fellows. The fellows—among them 18 humanists, 13 scientists, 12 creative artists and 8 social scientists—will work individually and across disciplines on projects chosen for both quality and long-term impact. Their projects range from the production of a film and photographic series on 21st century American workers to research into deriving heart cells from stem cells to improve cardiovascular development.

“We are delighted to welcome these distinguished scholars, scientists and artists to Radcliffe. We look forward to seeing new friendships and collaborations form and to witnessing the ways the fellows’ interactions and the freedom provided by the fellowship year influence their work,” said Barbara J. Grosz, interim dean (effective July 1) and dean of science at the Radcliffe Institute and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard.

“In my years as dean, I have been privileged to watch the fellows interact with one another and with faculty members in various departments across Harvard. From the vantage point of the Harvard presidency, I will continue to watch and admire their pathbreaking work and interdisciplinary approaches,” said Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and president-elect of Harvard.

Unique among the nation’s centers for advanced studies, the Radcliffe Institute hosts artists, musicians and fiction writers, as well as academic researchers and professionals. Selected from a pool of more than 775 applicants, the 2007–2008 fellows are a diverse group of distinguished and emerging scholars and artists from the United States and other countries. Mahzarin Banaji, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard, will work among the fellows and continue her research on the developmental and evolutionary origins of social cognition.

This year the Radcliffe Institute will host two thematic clusters—groups of fellows who work both individually and collectively in their fields. One cluster will study the interactive visualization of musical structure, and the second will study Ethiopian music culture. Examples of fellows in their respective fields appear immediately below; a full list of the 2007–2008 appears at the end of this page.

Creative Arts Fellows
Among the 12 creative arts fellows is Sharon Lockhart, an experimental filmmaker, who will complete a new film and photographic series titled Lunchbreak. The series will chronicle a set of workers’ lunch breaks in a variety of settings in America. Her intent is to document the lives of workers, the problems they face and the bonds they share in 21st century America.

Christopher Csikszentmihályi, the Muriel R. Cooper Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Science and director of the Computing Culture Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, is undertaking work that combines new technologies, politics, media and the arts. At Radcliffe, he will develop a set of telepresent, unmanned vehicles designed for political activism and data collection. As examples, he is building an unmanned, aerial vehicle to monitor anti-immigrant groups along the Mexico and United States border and an autonomous boat that will sail into Guantanamo Bay to monitor activity there.

Humanities Fellows
Among the 18 humanities fellows is Beshara Doumani, an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading expert on Middle Eastern family life in the 18th and 19th centuries. Based on years of archival research, his project will focus on the historical relationships among gender, property and kinship in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman period (1700–1900).

The Radcliffe Institute will also host a cluster of humanists who will study Ethiopian music culture. The cluster, led by Kay Shelemay, the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, will explore Ethiopian Christian creativity—rituals and musical practices—in the United States. Other fellows in the cluster are Mulatu Astatke, an independent composer and performer from Ethiopia, and Steven Kaplan, a professor of African studies and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Science Fellows
Among the 13 science fellows is Susan Lindquist, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. At Radcliffe, she will study the role of protein chaperones in regulating the phenotypic response of different cells and organisms under varying environmental conditions, research that is relevant to discovering causes for human diseases, such as Parkinson’s. Christine Mummery, a professor of developmental biology at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands and a leading stem cell expert, will examine the role environmental cues play in regulating stem cell differentiation into new heart cells. Her fellowship work will also be supported by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Two other scientists will work together pursuing research on animal locomotion. Anette (Peko) Hosoi, an associate professor of engineering at MIT, will study locomotion in a range of insects and other small organisms in order to increase understanding of their morphology and behavior; she plans to use this information to inspire and improve engineering design. Jane Wang, an associate professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at Cornell University, will investigate the role aerodynamics plays in the evolution of insect flight. She will work to identify and understand efficient locomotion strategies that insects, birds and fish have developed and will investigate the role energy-minimization plays in their diverse range of flying and swimming styles.

Social Sciences Fellows
Among the eight social science fellows is Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, who will analyze antislavery petitioning in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s. Catherine Lutz, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, is nationally distinguished for her exploration of previously unquestioned institutions of American life. At Radcliffe, she will work on a book that investigates the values and contradictions of the United States’s contemporary car culture—from the values people expect from their cars, such as mobility, to the problems with cars, such as pollution and their high prices.

Now in its seventh year, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly competitive program that has provided yearlong residencies to more than 350 award-winning writers, artists, scientists and other scholars. Examples of past fellows are acclaimed installation artist Shimon Attie, who uses contemporary media to animate sites with moving images from the sites’ past and present; Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks, historian Caroline Elkins and poet Natasha Trethewey; physician and scientist Ganmaa Davaasambuu, a breakthrough researcher on the link between cancer and dairy products; Darlene Clark Hine, a leading historian of the African American experience; and anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a leading commentator on the global traffic in human organs.

The 2008–2009 fellowship applications for creative artists, humanists and social scientists are due October 1, 2007; applications for natural scientists and mathematicians are due December 3, 2007 (postmarked for materials sent by mail).

Applicants are evaluated at two levels of review. In the first level, two leaders in each applicant’s field evaluate and rank the applicant. The top applicants are then submitted to a fellowship committee, which selects the fellowship class.

For more information about the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program, please call 617-495-8212 or visit www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships. Media representatives seeking more information about the Radcliffe Institute or a fellow should contact Jenny Corke at 617-495-8608 or jcorke@radcliffe.edu.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is a scholarly community where individuals pursue advanced work across a wide range of academic disciplines, professions and creative arts. Within this broad purpose, the Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender and society.

The 2007–2008 Radcliffe Institute Fellows and their projects are:

Elizabeth Alexander
Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow
Yale University
African American Studies
A New Genealogy of African American Experimental Poetry

Elizabeth Armstrong
Suzanne Young Murray Fellow
Indiana University
Sociology
College Culture and Social Inequality

Mulatu Astatke*
Independent Composer
Music Composition
Ethiopian Christian Creativity in Transnational Perspective

Mahzarin Banaji
Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute
Harvard University
Psychology
Brains, Babies, and Baboons: Understanding the Developmental and Evolutionary Origins of Social Cognition

Rebecca Baron
David and Roberta Logie Fellow and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
Massachusetts College of Art
Film/Video Making
What Nature Tells Us

Giorgio Bertellini
Sargent-Faull Fellow
University of Michigan
Film Studies
Divo/Duce: Italian Masculinity Crossing Over to 1920s America

Lisa Bielawa
Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow
Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Music Composition
Double Violin Concerto and Smaller Works

Jin-Yi Cai
Augustus Anson Whitney Scholar
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Computer Science
The Theory of Holographic Algorithms

Tianxi Cai
Joy Foundation Fellow
Harvard School of Public Health
Statistics and Biostatistics
Development and Evaluation of Diagnostic and Prognostic Rules with Biological and Genomic Markers

Daniel Carpenter
Harvard University
Political Science
The Anti-Slavery Petition in Political and Organizational Context

Kathleen Cash
Hrdy Fellow
Independent Scholar
Education
Telling Them Their Own Stories: Integrating Ethnographic Research and Pedagogy in a Model of HIV/AIDS Prevention for Vulnerable Women in Thailand, Bangladesh, Uganda, Haiti, and Los Angeles

Elaine Chew**
Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow
University of Southern California
Mathematics, Computation, and Music
Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization

Michael Crescimanno
Benjamin White Whitney Scholar
Youngstown State University
Physics
Multiphoton Quantum Optics of Dilute Alkali Vapors

Christopher Csikszentmihályi
David and Roberta Logie Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New Media
Familiars

Christine Dakin
Evelyn Green Davis Fellow
Independent Artist
Dance Performance
The Body Speaks—Capturing Martha Graham’s Dance Art

Beshara Doumani
Rita E. Hauser Fellow
University of California at Berkeley
History
Adjudicating Family: Gender, Property, and the Praxis of Islamic Law

Alexandre Francois**
University of Southern California
Computer Science
Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization

David Frankfurter
Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow
University of New Hampshire
History of Religion
Worlds of Christianization in Late Antique Egypt

Kate Gilhuly
Bunting Fellow
Wellesley College
Classical Studies
Landscapes of Desire in Classical Athenian Literature

Andrew Gordon
Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow
Harvard University
History
Stitching in Modern Times

Vivian Gornick
Vera M. Schuyler Institute Fellow
Independent Writer
Nonfiction
Emma Goldman

Hildegarde Heynen
Constance E. Smith Fellow
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Architectural History
Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and the Vicissitudes of Modern Architecture

Liisa Holm
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow
University of Helsinki
Molecular and Cellular Biology
Functional Hierarchy and Function Determining Residues of Protein Families

Anette (Peko) Hosoi***
American Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bioengineering
Swimming, Crawling, and Burrowing: Optimization of Low Re Locomotion

Steven Kaplan*
Hebrew University
Religion
Ethiopian Christian Creativity in Transnational Perspective

Frances Kissling
Catholics for a Free Choice
Nonfiction
How to Think about Abortion: Prochoice Reflections on Rights and Responsibility

Jané Kondev
Grass Fellow
Brandeis University
Physics
Physical Biology of the Cell

Susan Lindquist
Suzanne Young Murray Fellow
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
Molecular and Cellular Biology
Shaping the Relationship Between Genotype and Phenotype

Sharon Lockhart
Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
University of Southern California at Los Angeles
Film/Video Making
Lunchbreak

Catherine Lutz
Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor
Brown University
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Full Metal Jacket: The Car, US Cultures, and Their Contradictions

Jacqueline Malone
Queens College, City University of New York
Nonfiction
Jazz Music in Motion: African American Chorus Line Dancers in Harlem, 1925–1955

Cathie Martin
Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow
Boston University
Political Science
In Search of Self: The Organization of Business Interests for Collective Social Policies

Carla Mazzio
University of Chicago
Literature
Calculating Minds: Literature and Mathematics in the Renaissance

Mitchell Merback
DePauw University
Art History
The Radical German Renaissance: Art, Dissent, and Religious Regime in the Era of Reform, 1490–1555

Ryan Minor
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Musicology
Choral Fantasies: Festivity, Nationhood, and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Christine Mummery***
Harvard Stem Cell Institute Radcliffe Fellow
Hubrecht Laboratory
Molecular and Cellular Biology
Engineering the Right Scaffold: How Matrix Flexibility May Determine Cardiac Cell Fate

Craig Murphy
Wellesley College
International Relations
Setting the World’s Standards

Maria Orive
The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow
University of Kansas
Evolutionary and Organismic Biology
Together and Apart: Theoretical Models of Host-Symbiont Genome Evolution

Timothy Rood
St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
Classical Studies
Anabasis: Xenophon and the March of the Ten Thousand

Daniel Rothman
Jeanne Rosselet Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Earth and Planetary Sciences
Physics of Earth’s Carbon Cycle

Elena Ruehr
Walter Jackson Bate Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Music Composition
Cantata Averno

Robert Self
Burkhardt Fellow
Brown University
History
The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in the US from Watts to Reagan

Qin Shao
The College of New Jersey
History
Demolition: Housing Reform and Conflict in Urban China, 1980–2005

Kay Shelemay*
Harvard University
Musicology
Ethiopian Christian Creativity in Transnational Perspective

Martin Summers
Burkhardt Fellow
University of Oregon
History
Race, Madness, and the State: A History of African American Patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, 1855–1970

Megan Sweeney
Bunting Fellow
University of Michigan
Cultural Studies
Reckonings: Cultures of Reading in Women’s Prisons

Emma Teng
Burkhardt Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chinese Studies
The Chinese Eurasian: East-West Interracialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Magdalena Teter
Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow
Wesleyan University
History
An Anatomy of Religious Violence: Jews and Christians in Premodern Poland

Jane Wang
Cornell University
Biophysics
Evolution of Efficient Locomotion in Fluids: Paper Falling, Insect and Bird Flight, and Fish Swimming

Kate (Katherine) Wheeler
Frieda L. Miller Fellowship
Tufts University
Fiction
The Guru’s Wife

Wendy Wood
Helen Putnam Fellow
Duke University
Psychology
Psychology of Gender: Evolutionary and Social Structural Influences on Mate Preferences

*Ethiopian music cluster
**Interactive music visualization cluster
***Fall only