Scholars 2022-23
Distinguished Visiting Faculty
Timothy Mitchell
Members
Lorenzo Alunni
Hillary Angelo
Alyssa Battistoni
Heather Davis
Julia Dehm - Term 2
Christina Dunbar-Hester
Stefan Eich
Samera Esmeir
Andreas Folkers
Kian Goh
Saygun Gökariksel
Heba Gowayed
Visitors
Lila Abu-Lughod
David Bond
Anne-Claire Defossez
Adil Hasan Khan - Term 2
Jan Kiely - Term 2
Jonathan Morduch
Nicholas Occhiuto
Distinguished Visiting Faculty
Timothy Mitchell
Columbia University
Political Theory and Middle Eastern Studies
Timothy Mitchell's interests include the politics of energy and the history of economic ideas. He is currently studying the two-hundred-year history of mechanisms for extracting income from the future—a future we inhabit precariously today. At IAS he will be co-leading the School of Social Science theme seminar on Climate Crisis Politics.
Members
Lorenzo Alunni
EHESS-Paris
Anthropology
Lorenzo Alunni is inquiring into the corporeal experience of borders. His research examines how bodies shape and are shaped by borders, and the role healthcare plays in this process. While at IAS, he will work on a book about his ethnography on the island of Lampedusa and other crucial sites of European bordering practices.
Hillary Angelo
University of California, Santa Cruz
Sociology
Hillary Angelo is an urban and environmental sociologist whose work includes historical and contemporary research on urban greening, sustainability planning and policy, infrastructure, and climate change. At IAS, she will be working on a book on public lands and the energy transition.
Alyssa Battistoni
Barnard College
Political Science
Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist with research interests in climate and environmental politics, Marxism, feminism, and the history of political and economic thought. At IAS she is completing a book on the free gifts of nature and the problem of non-value in capitalism.
Heather Davis
The New School
Media & Environmental Humanities
Heather Davis is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. While at IAS, she will begin a new project that investigates how the construction of modern, Western time relied upon fossil fuels, and how that sense of temporality is now coming undone through the effects of climate change.
Julia Dehm
Term 2
La Trobe University, Australia
Law
Julia Dehm's research addresses international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. At IAS she will be working on a project, "Accounting for Carbon," exploring concept of accountability in relation to the climate crisis.
Christina Dunbar-Hester
University of Southern California
Science & Technology Studies
Christina Dunbar-Hester's project at IAS centers on supply chain, pollution, and climate contestations, examining Los Angeles Harbor's commercial shipping and petroleum infrastructures as a local manifestation of labyrinthine global systems.
Stefan Eich
Georgetown University
Political Science
Stefan Eich’s research is in political theory and the history of political thought, with a focus on the political theory of money, economic democracy, and questions of time and temporality. While at IAS, he will be primarily working on a book project on the political thought of John Maynard Keynes.
Samera Esmeir
University of California, Berkeley
Law & Politics
While at IAS, Samera Esmeir will be working on "The Struggle that Remains: Between World and International." Thinking with the histories and the present of Palestinian struggle, Esmeir tracks the modern entry of the word international into legal and political lexicons and theorizes its reconfiguration of horizons of struggle.
Andreas Folkers
Justus-Liebig University Gießen, Germany
Sociology
Andreas Folkers is a sociologist who works on bio- and technopolitics, political ecology and economy from a social theory and STS perspective. At IAS he will be working on a book project on the rise, fall, and afterlife of the cataclysmic ligature of modernity and fossil matters like coal, oil, and gas.
Kian Goh
University of California, Los Angeles
Urban Studies & Planning
Kian Goh investigates the spatial politics of urban climate change responses, with prior fieldwork sites in cities in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and Europe. While at IAS, she will research the implications of the global climate justice movement for more equitable and sustainable cities.
Saygun Gökariksel
Bosphorus University, Turkey
Anthropology
Saygun Gökarıksel's research focuses on the themes of revolution, violence, law, justice, and neoliberal and right-wing authoritarianism in the South and East. While at IAS, he will be working on a book that explores the legal and moral-political reckoning with the communist past in Poland and the European East.
Heba Gowayed
Boston University
Sociology
Heba Gowayed is an ethnographer who examines how race and gender intersect to shape people's mobility. She is author of Refuge (2022), which asks whether states recognize and invest in the potential of people seeking refuge. She is working on her second book The Cost of Borders which theorizes borders as a costly and often deadly transaction.
Maira Hayat
University of Notre Dame
Anthropology
Maira Hayat’s research articulates anthropology, environmental studies, public administration and law, to examine a postcolonial “politics of provision” of public goods in a climate-changing world. Her current book project shows how Pakistan's plans for postcolonial modernity are crafted with water and sustained by everyday bureaucratic labor.
Lynne Huffer
Emory University
Philosophy
While at IAS, Lynne Huffer will work on her book-length project, "The Ethics of the Anthropocene." Her book builds on traditions of interdisciplinary experimentation in philosophy, poetry, and the visual arts to reconfigure ethics as a question whose stakes are the existence of species.
Natasha Iskander
New York University
Sociology
While at IAS, Natasha Iskander is using material analysis of low-carbon concrete to look at climate change and the future of work. She explores how labor, immigration, and racial politics shape the adoption of strategies to slow global warming.
Philippe Le Billon
University of British Columbia, Canada
Political Ecology
Philippe Le Billon works on the environment, development and security nexus, with a focus on the politics of extractive industries. While at IAS he will research the reframing of resource extraction for climate mitigation purposes.
Jennifer Lee
Columbia University
Sociology
Since the onset of COVID-19, 1 in 5 Asian Americans experienced a hate incident—reflecting an underrecognized legacy of anti-Asian bigotry and violence. In Reckoning with Asian America, Jennifer Lee links the past to the present to unveil how science, medicine, and law produced race, group threat, moral deservingness, and citizenship.
Minhua Ling
Independent Scholar
Anthropology
Minhua Ling’s research focuses on the ramifications of migration and urbanization. While at IAS, she will examine through the lens of food the lived experiences of socioecological transformation in rural China and address health and environmental inequalities facing village children amid massive migration and state-led urbanization.
Nayanika Mathur
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Anthropology
Nayanika Mathur teaches Anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Oxford. Her research at IAS is centered on how the climate crisis requires a rethinking of the method/s of anthropology as a discipline. This project emerges from--and is rooted in--her longstanding research in the Indian Himalaya.
Catalina Muñoz
Term 1
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
History
Catalina Muñoz is interested in integrating the knowledge and skills of historians into the critical thinking and practice of transitional justice in Colombia. While at IAS, she will study historians’ interventions in transitional justice processes around the globe comparing forms of engagement and theoretical assumptions behind them.
K-Sue Park
Georgetown University
Law
K-Sue Park's scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement. While at IAS, she will be working on a book on the history of the land system and how it produced a racialized society in America.
Sara Pursley
New York University
History
Sara Pursley's research focuses on how experiences of time, space, and selfhood were reconfigured in 20th-century Iraq, including through political insurgencies and in projects of economic development. At IAS she will be working on a book rethinking Iraq's formation in the 1920s through the interplay of insurgency and law.
J. T. Roane
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Africana Studies and Geography
J. T. Roane completed a forthcoming book that shows how Black communities built a significant if under-appreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. At IAS he will work on a new project about the political ecology of fire and social incineration from 1980-1995 in Philadelphia.
Matthew Salganik
Princeton University
Sociology
Matthew Salganik is interested in computational social science and social networks. While at IAS, he will be doing research about the limits of machine learning for making predictions about social systems, both individual outcomes (i.e., what is going to happen to a specific person) and collective outcomes (i.e., onset of war).
Visitors
Lila Abu-Lughod
Columbia University
Anthropology and Gender Studies
Lila Abu-Lughod is interested in anthropology and gender politics in/of the Arab and Muslim world. She has focused on questions of representation and ethics; the cultural politics of poetry, media, and museums; and the international circulation of rights discourses. She will be working on "Acknowledgments: Making an Anthropologist."
David Bond
Bennington College
Anthropology and the Environment
David Bond investigates how the American Empire of Oil ends, with an aim to make a contribution in that direction. His current book project joins a struggle to close an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands, a fight that productively holds together colonial histories of profitable neglect and catastrophic futures of planetary instability.
Anne-Claire Defossez
Institute for Advanced Study
Sociology
Anne-Claire Defossez will devote this year to writing a book on migrations at the border between Italy and France, and on the forms of repression and solidarity it gave birth to, in collaboration with Didier Fassin.
Adil Hasan Khan
Term 2
Melbourne Law School
Law
Adil Hasan Khan will be completing a monograph titled, "Learning International Laws of the South." It describes an encounter between a pluralist Islamic Indo-Persian tradition of international laws and an emergent colonial modern tradition of international law. The narrative is emplaced in South Asia and focuses on rival practices of legal education.
Jan Kiely
Term 2
Centre for China Studies
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Modern Chinese History
Jan Kiely is researching local, quotidian religious, family, health, performative, and justice practices and expressions as a means to examining the marginalization of particular rural communities over the course of the twentieth century.
Jonathan Morduch
New York University
Economics
Jonathan Morduch is interested in relationships between inequality, poverty, and finance. While at the Institute, Morduch is developing a framework for incorporating instability into understandings of poverty, and he is working on the design of experiments to assess the external validity of randomized controlled trials.
Nicholas Occhiuto
Emlyon Business School
Sociology
Nicholas Occhiuto is an economic sociologist whose research interests include corporate political activity, work and occupations, and public policy. While at IAS, he will be working on a project that explores the work of lobbyists in Washington DC and the production of political inequality in the United States.
