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

 Shterna Friedman, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

I am a political theorist examining the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of systemic social theory as developed by the German Idealists (especially Kant and Hegel), and further elaborated and criticized by such later thinkers as Marx and Foucault. I received my PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. I was a philosophy major at Barnard College, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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 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, 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.

 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 Literature

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 on my website.

 Thomas 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.