2023-2024 College Fellows

Amy Chandran, Government

I am a political theorist interested in questions of authority, obedience, epistemology, religion and power, especially as these themes shaped political developments in the early modern period. My current book project focuses on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, his theory of the generation of the Commonwealth, and the influence of the French context in which Leviathan was composed.

Solsire Cusicanqui Marsano, Anthropology  

The past matters; my past matters. As a Peruvian archaeologist, I center my work on historical narratives' impact on local identity, heritage economies, and enduring cultural policies. I lead interdisciplinary projects in the northern Andes, collaborating with the community, local government, and academia. My mission is to revalue ancestral wisdom, explore local memory, and shape heritage policies for societal benefit. I actively engage in heritage education, urban archaeology, and cultural space development. Currently, I'm focused on studying memory, mobility, and the transformation of territory, examining the sacred hill "Apu" Rumitiana and the evolution from Inca to colonial occupation in the historical and worldwide heritage city of Cajamarca, Peru.

Abigail Desmond, Human Evolutionary Biology       

I am a Palaeolithic archaeologist and a College Fellow in the Human Evolutionary Biology (HEB) Department at Harvard University, where I teach courses related to the evolution of human technology. I received my DPhil and MPhil in Palaeolithic Archaeology from The University of Oxford, and my research focuses on how technology and biology inform one another on human evolutionary timescales.

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 work has appeared 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.

Anne Dymek, Germanic Languages and Literatures

My research revolves around exploring the multifaceted avenues of semiotics in diverse forms of media. I have a deep fascination with the roles of imagination and perception in both cinematic and linguistic art. At the core of all my theoretical work lies an unwavering inquiry into how these cognitive processes influence our understanding of the world.  

Shterna Friedman, Social Studies      

My primary concern right now centers on the future of reading and language. I am dedicated to ensuring that creative language and the literary imagination not only survive but thrive within the ever-evolving landscape of media and technology. As both a media philosopher and a cognitive semiotician, I am particularly captivated by the potential of brain technology to redefine our current experiences and forge novel ways of interacting with art, the world, and the mind.

Sarah Hlubik, Anthropology

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 sociologist who studies culture, globalization, and morally contested or taboo markets. I ask questions like: how do people find meaning in taboo markets? How do these meanings enable and constrain efforts to protect market actors? I am currently working on a project on children who resist global campaigns against child labor, who defend the moral, not just economic, value of their work. I have also published on meaning-making in sport labor markets, on global scripts in local media, and on theories of cultural translation.

Gili Kliger, Social Studies

Ashley Leung, Psychology      

I am interested in how infants and young children learn about the social function of language. That is, how do children learn to use language to communicate with others? At Harvard, I am working with Prof. Ashley Thomas to investigate how social engagement influences infants' language-based social preferences. Before Harvard, I received my PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago and my BA from Middlebury College.

Tatyana 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.

Ryan Lundell-Creagh, Psychology      

I am a personality psychologist who studies the interactions between people and contexts. I am interested in how and why individuals express similar or different personalities in various situations and the ways in which they use these expressions to define their self-concept. I also study the interactions between personality and emotion experiences, and individual differences in emotion recognition and regulation. I received my Ph.D in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.  

Kristin Sabbi, Human Evolutionary Biology  

I am a primatologist and evolutionary anthropologist interested in behavioral ecology and endocrinology. My research is focused on unraveling the developmental and evolutionary roots of social strategies, especially in primates. I ask questions like: what causes individuals to behave differently from one another or across contexts? How do early life experiences interact with internal biological factors to create differing social strategies later on? How do they adjust across the lifespan? And how does sociality, in turn, shape biological processes of aging? I take an interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions by combining observational and experimental studies of behavior with non-invasive biomarker sampling to investigate how living conditions and experiences are translated into behavioral patterns. 

Yagmur Sag-Parvardeh, Linguistics    

I am a linguist with a specialization in semantics, the subfield of linguistics that studies meaning, reference, and truth. With a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Rutgers University, I specialize in compositional semantics, particularly focusing on nouns, nominal phrases, and quantification in natural language. My research involves a diverse range of languages, including English, Turkish, Armenian, Farsi, and Laz, and combines cross-linguistic variation with theoretical analyses and experimental methods. 

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 the global diffusion of ideas and the influence of ideas on people’s behavior. In current work, I assess how conflicting ideas about gender and sexuality are circulated across the world and influence people's lives. My articles on cultural diffusion, violence, gender and sexuality, and international migration appears in Demography, Social Forces, American Sociological Review, and other journals. At Harvard, I teach courses on global inequality as well as quantitative and qualitative methods. I previously completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, a Doctorate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, and a Master’s in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. You can read more about my website.

Thomas Wooten, Sociology