The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced its fellows for 2015-2016. The more than 50 men and women include creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists, each pursuing “an ambitious individual project within the Institute’s multidisciplinary community.”
“It is an honor to provide these innovative thinkers with time, space, and intellectual stimulation to do their best work in ways that often defy expectations and disciplinary boundaries,” Radcliffe Institute dean Lizabeth Cohen, RI ’02, said in a statement. “As Radcliffe fellows, they are sure to develop unusual collaborations, take unexpected risks, and generate new ideas.”
Twelve of the new fellows are Harvard faculty members; their names and the titles of their projects appear below.
Edoardo M. Airoldi, an associate professor of statistics, who studies the intersection of statistical machine learning and computational social science.
- Big Ideas in Data Science: Focus on Social Science and the Humanities
Christine A. Desan, professor of law, whose teaching covers the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism.
- Designing Money in Early America: Experiments in Political Economy (1680–1775)
Ann-Christine Duhaime, the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, who specializes in neuro-trauma and development.
- Brain Rewards, Plasticity, and Consumption: The Neurobiology of Sustainable Behavior
Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and of history, Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction.
- “The Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination
Tamar Herzog, professor of history, who studies the relationship of Spain, Portugal, Portuguese and Spanish America, and the ways by which Iberian societies changed as a result of their involvement in a colonial project.
- Normativity and Its Discontents: The Shaping and Reshaping of Law in Europe from Classical to Modern Times
Mary Lewis, professor of history, whose research interests center around international and imperial history, with particular attention paid to the connections between international relations and social or economic life.
- The First French Decolonization: A New History of 19th-Century Empire
Devah Pager, professor of sociology and professor of public policy, who focuses on institutions affecting racial stratification, including education, labor markets, and the criminal justice system.
- Race, Discrimination, and the Search for Work
Intisar A. Rabb, professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, who studies criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law.
- Qāḍī Justice: Cases and Controversies in Early Islamic Law and Society
Laurence Ralph, assistant professor of African American studies and anthropology, who explores how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable.
- Witnessing Death: The Experience of Violence in Urban Chicago
Steven Kazuo Takasugi, an associate of the Harvard music department and director of the Harvard Summer Composition Institute, a composer whose interests include computer music.
- Piano Concerto: "R.S. in Cody"
Athina Rachel Tsangari, a visiting faculty member at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, a filmmaker, producer, and projections designer whose short and feature-length films include The Slow Business of Going (2001), Attenberg (2010) and 24 Frames per Century (2013).
- Duncharon (a “black science fiction comedy with grumpy astronauts, prematurely advanced children and bionic bunnies, set on a volcanic Greek island doubling for Charon, the largest satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto,” according to the website Flix)
Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government, who studies democratization, state-building, comparative politics, and historical political economy, with a particular interest in European political development.
- Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe
For a complete list of the fellows and the specific projects on which they will work, see Radcliffe’s website.
