SPSS Fellows 2018-19

Valeria Añón holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from Buenos Aires University. She currently investigates mestizo chronicles in the sixteenth and seventh centuries in America and texts written by women in the same period, as well as the configuration of a colonial discourse, in a diachronic perspective. Her main goal is to contribute to widen up the Latin American canon by reading and interpreting its less known voices.

Full Bio CV

Carolina Branco de Castro Ferreira holds a Ph.D. in Social Science, Graduate School of Social Science, State University of Campinas - Brazil. Thesis title: Regulated Desires: Self-help Groups, Sexual-Emotional Ethics and Knowledge Production. Post-doctoral research developed at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, URV, Tarragona, Spain (2012-2013). Post-doctoral degree at the Research Foundation of São Paulo (FAPESP) associated with the Gender Studies Center - PAGU / Unicamp - Brazil (2014-2017). She has worked on gender, sexuality, therapeutic intineraries, health and disease processes, moralities, feminist theory and anthropology theory.

Full Bio CV

Lucas G. Christel holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina. In his doctoral dissertation, he analyzed the political incidence of social resistance against mining in Argentine provinces. His work studies how the political system and the economic context shape the political opportunity for the contenders. He is interested in collective action dynamics, environmental politics, and state-society relations.

Full Bio CV

Dana El Kurd received her Ph.D. in Government from The University of Texas at Austin in June 2017. She specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Theoretically, she works on the conflicts between states and their societies and the contentious politics they produce. She examines how authoritarian regimes try to implement policies and how external intervention may affect their success. Her current project looks at de-mobilization in the Palestinian territories, analyzing the effect of repression on polarization and social cohesion.

Full Bio CV

Claudia Gastrow is an anthropologist of Southern Africa specialising in issues of land, urbanism, housing, informality and governance, with a special focus on Angola. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2014 and currently lectures at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published on the politics of the urban redevelopment of Angola’s capital, Luanda, with particular focus on tensions over land, housing and architecture. Her current research project explores the role of informal institutions in producing citizens’ relationships to the state in Angola.

Full Bio CV

Valentina Glockner Fagetti is a Mexican anthropologist affiliated with the Child Research Observatory (odiin), at El Colegio de Sonora, Hermosillo, Mexico, through a Cátedra CONACYT on migration and child labor. Since 2006 she has specialized in the anthropology of childhood and the anthropology of the State. She currently directs and co-directs research projects funded by the National Geographic Society, the Sonoran-Arizona Interuniversity Alliance, and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Full Bio CV

Ana Grondona holds a Ph.D in Social Sciences obtained at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Her dissertation analysed the different ways in which unemployed populations were governed in Argentina from 1890 until 2006. As a postdoc she focused on the problematization of the “underclass” in Argentinean expert discourse from 1956 to 2006. Her current interests include theoretical questions around the production and circulation of expert knowledge and discourse in the peripheries and the intellectual history of “modernization” and “development” in Latin America.

Full Bio CV

Amen Jaffer is trained in urban ethnography with a Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research. Currently, he is working on two projects. One is a comparative ethnography of urban citizenship in low-income neighborhoods of Lahore which looks at poor residents' engagements with the infrastructures of their neighborhoods as acts of creating political communities. The other explores the sociability of diverse communities in the space of Sufi shrines in South Asia, arguing that the unique experience of time in this religious institution allows for the emergence of a particular sociability that cuts across caste, religion, and to an extent, class divides in South Asian society.

Full Bio CV

Emery M. Kalema holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests include power and politics, body and embodiment, violence, memory, trauma and suffering, as well as the postcolony. He is currently working on a book project, based on his doctoral dissertation on the suffering caused by the Mulele rebellion (1963-1968), the reproduction of suffering across time and its inscription in the imaginary of the survivors. He will be conducting a set of philosophical reflections around the theme Memory as Freedom and Right upon completion of his current book project.

Full Bio CV

Rogers Orock teaches courses in the ethnography of Africa as well as on secrecy, suspicion and conspiracy theories in the new world order. Framed in a comparative fashion, his current research examines the role of freemasonry as a Western institution of elite secrecy in Cameroon, Gabon and France. This work aims at elucidating the import of such non-official institutions of secrecy and their public representations for understanding the broader imaginations of elites, power and the state in both a Western and non-Western, African contexts that have remained intricately linked through the bonds of colonialism.

Full Bio CV

Racha Ramadan received her Ph.D. in Economics in April 2010, from Toulouse School of Economics, under the supervision of Professor Alban Thomas. In 2008, She worked as research assistant in International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C. Since 2010, she has worked as an economic consultant for different international organizations. Her research interests include applied micro-econometrics on poverty, food security, gender and human development in Egypt and other developing countries.

Full Bio CV

Samah Saleh received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Goldsmiths, London. Her doctoral research focused on the experience of Palestinian women’s incarceration in Israeli prisons. Her research interest focuses on gender and politics, she is interested in Palestinian women experiences in Israeli colonial prisons. At the moment she is working in two research projects one is in collaboration with Amsterdam University around the intersection between marriage and politics for Palestinian women former prisoners, the other around Palestinian women participation in decision making in three levels: household, community and the national level.

Full Bio CV

Samaila Suleiman received his Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2015. Samaila is a recipient of fellowships from Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Dissertation Fellow of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Fellow Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Fellowship (JWTC) University of Witswatersrand, and African Studies Association/American Council of Learned Societies (ASA/ACLS) Presidential Fellow 2018. His research lies at the intersection between historigraphy, nationalism, identity politics and conflicts.

Full Bio CV

Veronica Toste has a Ph.D. in Sociology (2014) from the Institute for Social and Political Studies (IESP/Uerj), and her dissertation focused on the identities and experiences of Brazilians who identify as pardos (brown) and the intersectionalities of this racialized identity with class and gender. Most of her work has focused on issues related to gender, race and affirmative action policies mostly in Brazil but also from a comparative and transnational perspective. She is currently a researcher at the Sexuality and Gender Studies Group (UFRJ) and at the Global Race Project (Agence National de la Recherche).

Full Bio CV

Simón Uribe conducts research in the intersection of infrastructure, the state, and the history of frontiers. He is also interested in documentary film-making and is currently working on an ethnographic film around transport infrastructure. His latest research critically examines the process of state-building in the Colombian region of Putumayo through the history and ethnography of a road. His current project focuses on the relationship between political order and guerrilla infrastructures in the context of Colombia’s armed conflict.

Full Bio CV