Scholars 2017-18

Charly Coleman is writing a history of economic theology in eighteenth-century France, with an eye to the influence of sacramental theory on financial practice. The project aims to uncover a distinctly Catholic ethic of capitalism that, pace Weber, privileged the marvelous over the mundane, and the immediacy of enjoyment over delayed gratification.

Peter Coviello has written extensively about intimacy, nation, and the racial history of sexuality in nineteenth-century America. His current project considers the fate of early Mormonism, its theological as well as colonial ambitions, and the eventual disciplining of its carnal imagination. His work looks to reconceive "secularism" as a biopolitics.

Alice Crary is rethinking the idea, central to social epistemology, that an appreciation of how structural bias shapes individual experience is necessary for social understanding. With accents on cognitive disability and animals, she shows we need moral imagination to do justice not only to rational social phenomena but to non-rational aspects of animate life.

Paul DiMaggio plans to write a book that develops a framework for the social-scientific study of culture that takes into account recent work on social cognition and cognitive neuroscience, and applies it to a series of puzzles: How does meaning work? What are values? How (and when) do elements of a culture cohere? How does culture change?

Jacob Dlamini is interested in the social and political history of protected areas in Africa, with a particular focus on the relationship between conservation and African/black nationalism. His research is driven by a seemingly simple question: What did black nationalists think about conservation?

Jean-Louis Fabiani's research will develop in three directions. First, he will try to give a precise account of the current circulation of ideas in the social sciences. Second, he intends to produce an overview of “the reclaiming of the classics.” Third, he will use fieldwork that he engaged in Central Europe on post-socialism and compare it with post-colonial situations, in order to analyze disciplinary changes.

Nicolas Guilhot's research focuses on the concepts of decision and rationality in modern political thought, and in particular on the connections between early 20th century decisionism in legal theory and postwar notions of rational choice.

Johan Heilbron's project is about the internationalization of the social sciences. After assessing different modes in which social scientists have historically been entangled in cross-border exchanges, current issues will be taken up with the aim of presenting a fresh view of the promises and pitfalls of globalizing social science.

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia is working on a generational biography of the cohort of Japanese human scientists active from the 1930s through the late 1960s--the "transwar period." This project explores how scholars, at their moment of greatest authority over notions of national identity, (re)framed knowledge of Others in the context of imperialism, war, occupation, and independence.

Kristoffer Kropp’s research focuses on the production of social scientific knowledge, the relation between social science and political institutions and European integration. Currently, he is working on the changing relations between social science knowledge production in Europe and EU research policy in a field theoretical perspective.

The social sciences started out as human sciences, but shed this constraint as evolutionary anthropologists turned their attention to animal groups. This confronts us with a paradox: Why has the collapse of the dichotomies of nature/society and nature/culture not led to a rapprochement between humanities, social research, and natural sciences?

John Modern is interested in the religious history and religious affects of cybernetics. His research agenda involves 1) charting different moments in the pre-history of the cybernetic boom at mid-century, and 2) investigating the proposition that the brain is a machine of the highest order under which all other forces in the human world play subservient roles.

Álvaro Morcillo is interested in whether the expertise and material resources of science patrons, i.e. foundations, shape sociology, political science, and international relations. He studies whether donors, by granting the means necessary for scholars to pursue certain research questions, wield a “philanthropic domination” over what we think about society.

Who should have territorial rights? In this project, Paulina Ochoa Espejo turns to Derecho Indiano (Spanish Colonial Law) to find historical examples to argue that territorial rights do not belong to individuals, pre-political peoples or legitimate states; instead it is grounded communities--pueblos--that do and should have these entitlements.

Silvia Pasquetti’s book project examines the distribution of militarism, surveillance, and securitized humanitarianism over “suspect populations.” Based on fieldwork within and across an Israeli city and a West Bank refugee camp, it studies how targeted people’s emotions relate to—subvert, follow, or amplify—the practices of control imposed on them.

Amín Pérez's work offers a reappraisal of the sociology of empire through the pathbreaking thought and method developed within Pierre Bourdieu’s work during the Algerian War of Independence. Drawing on extensive primary research, it reveals the intellectual revolution that took place in his fieldwork, and how it gave birth to a new understanding of domination.

Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl’s current research explores the role of US business interests in the coming about of the European Union, from the 1950s to the end of the Cold War. At the Institute she will focus on the history of transatlantic transfers and the Americanization of Western Europe in the field of economics.

Mehdi Shadmehr is interested in regime change in authoritarian regimes. His research focuses on:
- Information frictions and coordination problems in the interactions between dissidents and the state.
- The role of leaders both in conveying information to the people and to inspire them to take actions.
- The causes and consequences of revolutionary ideologies.

"Conjuring Freedom" highlights the decisive role played by black and white revolutionaries in the American Civil War. Departing from accounts centered on national elites, it shows how transnational plebeian political cultures, particularly African American conjure and German-American communism turned a war for the Union into a revolution against slavery.

Agata Zysiak's research is dedicated to a role of social sciences in building the socialist university in postwar Poland. The project of the egalitarian and democratic institution was mainly conceptualized, discussed, and put into action by sociologists themselves; eventually, they also become researchers who could and did diagnose its successes and failures.

Johanna Bockman investigates a variety of globalizations, in particular socialist and non-aligned forms. She is currently examining such trade and financial institutions as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Yugoslav Bank for International Economic Cooperation, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development.

Yvonne Chiu is studying the soft authoritarianism in East Asia which, unlike the Middle East and Russia, bears the hallmarks of modernity and achieves significant economic growth. These phenomena interact uniquely with authoritarianism's accompanying self-censorship, withdrawal from public life in favor of self-interested material accumulation, and anomie.

Anne-Claire Defossez’s current work addresses the question of women’s political participation and representation by exploring the trajectory and experience of women formally involved in politics at local and national levels in France. In particular, she is analyzing how family background and personal history, as well as class, residence, and ethnicity have influenced their engagement, career, and practices in politics.

Sara Farris is investigating the application of corporatized logics to the management of public care, as well as the presence of big corporations in the sector. She explores the daily regulations and rationales of these new corporatized arrangements and the ways they impact upon the recipients of care and the labor conditions of migrant care providers.

Julia Hell will complete final revisions of her forthcoming book, The Conquest of Ruins: European Empires and the Fall of Rome. Tracing an arc from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich, the book reconstructs the long afterlife of the Roman Empire, arguing that acts of post-Roman mimesis revolved around scopic scenarios visualizing the end of the Roman Empire in ruins.

After rapid oil-driven growth, certain changes were observed in the social and economic life of Caspian Basin countries. With the economic slowdown in those countries, the present difficulties are reduced not only to preserving sustainable and high growth rate, but are also related to the “middle-income trap” -- the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. Gubad İbadoghlu’s studies aim to advance understanding of the middle-income trap and how to escape from this problem in resource rich post-soviet countries. He is going to both contribute to the literature of empirical study in, and identify the determinants of, growth slowdowns in a systematic way.

Tomaž Mastnak studies the crisis of liberalism as epistemological problem. Drawing on reflections on the crisis of liberalism from the late nineteenth century onward, I will explore the contribution of social sciences and humanities to the liberals' declining ability to reflect on today's crisis of liberalism.

Ayşe Parla returns this year as a Visitor to pursue two projects. The first explores the relationship between morality and the politics of emotion in the political landscape of contemporary Turkey. The second is an inquiry into methodological and literal surfaces/depths through a historical and ethnographic exploration of the necropolitics of wells/holes.

Popular commenters see tribes as exclusive and pugnacious, academic writers as having specific structural forms or evolutionary roles. In the first comprehensive study of tribes in half a century, the paradigm suggested will emphasize the distinctive cultural properties of tribes, their adaptability, and their continuing analytic and political relevance.

Carel Smith’s project challenges the dominant approach in legal theory to frame legal reasoning as a rule-based activity. By mobilizing metaphor theory and speech act theory, he critically examines the role of rules and standards in legal adjudication, and exposes the pivotal role of exemplars in legal reasoning, such as subsumption and weighing and balancing.

Everett Zhang is completing a project on how survivors coped differently with two major earthquakes in China—their trauma, ways of grieving, psychological intervention, the relationship between the state and the society, and the sense of and struggle for social justice. He is also starting a project on kangfu (recovery) in Chinese psychiatry.