Sara Botto, Psychology

When and how do we begin to care about what others think of us? Using a developmental approach, my research investigates the social-cognitive underpinnings of reputational concerns. The goal is to a) explore the cognitive prerequisites for reputational concerns to develop in early childhood, and b) understand the cognitive and social factors that explain variation in children’s concern for reputation. In addition to exploring the development of reputation in early childhood, I am also interested in the cues infants use to understand social partners.

Abigail Desmond, Human Evolutionary Biology

I am an archaeologist (DPhil, Oxford) studying the role of organic technology in human evolution. While the early archaeological record is biased towards stone tools (i.e., “The Stone Age”), ephemeral technologies such as containers, pouches, baby carriers, nets, etc. are evident very early in human history. While stone tools generally illuminate hunting and animal processing strategies, crafted forms more closely articulate with nurturance and resource collection strategies. My research focuses on developing inductive proxies for perishable technologies, shedding light on otherwise unaccounted for technological skills and social priorities in early human groups.  

Maria Dikcis, English

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, media, and race with research and teaching interests in 20th- and 21st-century American poetry, critical race and ethnic studies, digital media theory, data science, and critical prison studies. My current book project—a multimodal monograph with interactive, born-digital elements—traces a comparative literary history examining how African American, Asian American, and Latinx poets have utilized a range of print, audio, broadcast, and digital technologies to innovate new forms of racial representation and political critique throughout the post-1965 era. My scholarly articles and reviews are published or forthcoming in Chicago Review, ASAP/Journal, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900. I received my PhD in English from Northwestern University and was an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights before coming to Harvard.

Julia Fierman, Anthropology

I am a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the affective drivers of political participation. My research focuses on relationships of comradeship, or “fellowship” (compañerismo), in Peronism—an ideologically mercurial brand of populism that has largely defined Argentine politics and culture since 1945. I am also interested in discourses of racialization in Latin American democracies, particularly how political and social responses to migration elucidate the relationship between race and citizenship in narratives of national belonging. My work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, the Journal of Historical Sociology, and Social Sciences.  

Joyhanna Garza, Anthropology

Emily Handsman, Sociology

I am a College Fellow in Sociology at Harvard University. My research lies at the intersection of education, inequality, culture, and organizations. My current work analyzes how suburban school districts plan and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. My work has appeared in Qualitative Sociology and Sociology of Education.

Annikki Herranen-Tabibi, Anthropology

Sarah Hlubik, Anthropology

I work on the origins of human fire use and human-fire interactions in the Early Pleistocene archaeological record. My work integrates site and landscape-based perspectives to understand how human-fire interactions began and the innovation of fire use as a human tool. I work at Koobi Fora, in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya, where sites and off-site landscapes are preserved from the Plio-Pleistocene time periods. My current project employs multidisciplinary methods to identifying fire on archaeological sites and preserved soils from the 1.5 million year time period to understand both human fire use and the natural background levels of fire on the landscape.

Junting Huang, Comparative Literature

I am a College Fellow in Media in the Department of Comparative Literature. My research interests include contemporary Chinese/Sinophone art, cinema, and media culture as well as Chinese diasporic culture in the Caribbean, with additional expertise in new media studies and digital humanities. I am particularly interested in how sound reconfigures spatial-political relations and illuminates pressing global issues about borders, migration, diaspora, and indigeneity.

Isabel Jijon, Sociology

I am a cultural sociologist who studies how people create, develop, and challenge narratives of stigma and recognition. I am interested in how these narratives travel around the world, in the intersection of culture, inequality, and globalization. I have studied this intersection in the world of sport, journalism, and human rights. I am currently working on a book that explores the intended and unintended consequences of global campaigns against child labor. At Harvard, I will teach a junior tutorial on human rights, a seminar on children's rights and child participation, and a lecture on the sociology of sport.

Jessica Jones, Psychology

My research focuses on understanding individual differences in emotion regulation as well as the ways in which we process and recall social feedback, which I try to understand using multimethod approaches. In addition to these topics, I am interested in applying and expanding mentorship and instructional methods to advance undergraduate professional development. I received my B.A. in Psychology from The College of New Jersey and my Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gili Kliger, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

I study the history of modern Europe from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with particular interests in the history of the British empire, the formation of the liberal state, and the ways in which colonial and settler colonial histories have shaped Europe and the modern world. I received my PhD in History from Harvard in May 2022 and I'm currently completing my first book manuscript, tentatively titled Found in Translation: Empire and the Invention of the Social Sciences. I am also the recipient of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Graduate Fellowship, and Harvard’s Bowdoin Prize.

Julie Lawrence, Human Evolutionary Biology

Tanya Levari, Psychology

My research focuses on how people understand the sentences they hear and how moment-to-moment language comprehension changes across development. Currently, I am primarily using EEG to explore how adults and children understand words as they listen to stories. Specifically, my research asks what kind of predictions children can make about upcoming words and whether this differs in children with autism.

Vatsal Naresh, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

My research interests span democratic theory, political violence, realism, and constitutionalism in 19th and 20th century South Asian, Afro-modern, and European political thought. My book project, Democracy’s Violence, presents a new theory of majoritarian domination through an interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville, W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on majorities, identities, and collective violence. Prior publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). I completed my PhD in Political Science at Yale University in 2022.

Mayron Pereira Piccolo Ribeiro, Psychology

My research interest is in the intersection between reward processing and mental health. While in the past I worked with reward processing in eating disorders, depression, and obesity, I have recently focused on using the same methodologies to investigate whether communal music may serve as social reward and help protect individuals from negative affect caused by social exclusion.

Justin Pottle, Government

I am a political theorist interested in questions about democracy, power, and mass communication. My research lies at the intersections of democratic theory and social epistemology, exploring how racial, social, and economic inequality affect how and what citizens learn about politics. I am currently writing a book on the ways inequality exacerbates American democracy’s misinformation crisis and the possibility of political equality in a complex and fragmented public sphere.

Yagmur Sag-Parvardeh, Linguistics

I am a linguist specializing in semantics, the subfield of linguistics that studies meaning, reference, and truth. I am particularly interested in the compositional semantics of nouns, nominal phrases, and quantification in natural language. I have worked on various languages, including English, Turkish, Armenian, Farsi, and Laz. Currently, I am a part of a project on Passamaquoddy, an endangered Algonquian language. I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from Rutgers University in 2019.

Caley Smith, South Asian Studies

I am a researcher of early South Asian religious and literary history. My first book project The Invisible Mask queries the ritual impersonation as a guiding principle underlying the Vedas and the influence of impersonation on later recitation traditions. The new research I have undertaken as a College Fellow is a re-examination of the Vedic institution of varṇa, the predecessor of the system of social estates seen in texts of the Classical period. I argue that, like the notions of karma and rebirth, varṇa began its life as a ritually-enacted state and was only later reconceptualized as a social reality the existed off the ritual ground.

William Stewart, Germanic Languages and Literatures

My current research is directed at large-scale forms as they appear in two contexts: the text-cosmoses found in contemporary German-language literature, and the atlas as a cross-disciplinary genre in the twentieth century. At Harvard, I also co-host a reading group on environmental humanities with Harvard University Center for the Environment postdoctoral fellow Kimia Shahi.

Christian Struck, Germanic Languages and Literatures

I am a literary scholar primarily interested in the materiality and mediality of texts. In my dissertation, I focused on the ways texts appear on the page and the various forms of impact that the various textual marks have on us while reading. Furthermore, drawing from my studies in continental philosophy, media theory, and law, I am interested in the concepts of transparency and opacity, particularly as they relate to political representation and social media.

Jeffrey Swindle, Sociology

My research covers cultural diffusion, gender inequality, and international migration. In current work, I assess how ideas about gender and human rights are circulated across the world and influence people's lives. Before coming to Harvard, I completed a Doctorate in Sociology at the University of Michigan and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Timothy Valshtein, Psychology

Tom Wooten, Sociology

I am an ethnographer who studies educational attainment, gun violence, and the transition to adulthood. In my dissertation project, I draw on two years of full-time fieldwork in New Orleans, during which I followed eight young men through their senior year of high school and attempted freshman year of college. All but one of the participants left college before graduating. I saw what it looked and felt like for participants to navigate their high schools, colleges, jobs, relationships and neighborhoods as they worked to build their desired lives. By carefully and vividly narrating these stories, I capture insights about the interplay of social structure and personal agency that can only come from up-close access. Specifically, I show how structured challenges manifested for participants in vexing ways not neatly captured by existing theory, using these instances to identify previously unrecognized mechanisms of social reproduction.