End of Year Wrap-up
June 14, 2023
Dear Colleagues,
As we look forward to summer break, I’m writing to share good news and to thank you for joining us this year as we explored questions of race, genetics, classification, storytelling, and health. It was a pleasure to reconnect with so many of you over the last ten months.
Through the Klopsteg series we heard from Kim TallBear, Anthony Hatch, Jori Lewis, our own Michelle Huang, and many other scholars about science at the interstices of empires, nations, and institutions. As part of the doctoral colloquium, graduate students toured Argonne National Laboratory, discussed the publishing landscape with Karen Darling of University of Chicago Press, celebrated the life and work of the late Bruno Latour with special guests Karen Knorr Cetina and Hélène Mialet, and launched a new interview series with help from Gerpha Gerlin, Jorge Ochoa, Xi Wang, and Yasmin Yoon. Transcripts of the first interviews are available here.
Special thanks to Austin Jenkins, who as graduate coordinator of the doctoral colloquium brought so much energy and vision to the role.
Our ranks continue to grow. As many of you know, Mellon postdoctoral fellow Santiago Molina will transition to a tenure-track position in NU’s Sociology Department in the fall, as he completes his two-year fellowship term. On Santiago’s heels are two new postdoctoral fellows. Arriving from Harvard’s History of Science program, Shireen Hamza is a scholar of medicine in the medieval and early modern Islamic world, whose work draws on Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts to examine the production of transregional medical knowledge in the Middle East and South Asia. Benjamin Lindquist is scholar of the development of synthetic speech, whose work draws on a disability studies approach and a background in studio art to understand mechanization, assistive technologies, and embodied knowledge. He comes with a PhD in History from Princeton.
Along with Shireen and Ben, we welcome two new Mellon cluster fellows in science studies this fall. Katherine Osby begins her doctoral studies in Sociology with interests in health outcomes for multiracial populations; Maria Cornejo will begin her studies in English, with interests in the literary dimensions of England’s early modern imperial and scientific practices. Thanks to SHC’s advisory board – Ken Alder, Lydia Barnett, Adia Benton, Steve Epstein, and Helen Tilley – for making these selections; to Janet Hundrieser for her nimble administrative work throughout the year; and to Sokhieng Au, who will reprise her role as Director of Undergraduate Studies next year.
Below is a partial list of achievements by our remarkably accomplished graduate and faculty affiliates. Please let me know what I’ve missed ... and have a wonderful summer!
Best,
Paul Ramírez
Graduate News
Chernoh Bah will be a Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Service at The Africanist Press next year.
Colin Bos was co-recipient of the Harold Perkin Prize for best dissertation in the History Dept. He defended his dissertation in May and will teach a seminar on “Decolonization and Science” at NU next year as a Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow.
John Branch is a Chabraja Center summer fellow with the Shorefront Legacy Center.
Gil Engelstein received his PhD in History. He will be a Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Service at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago next year.
Gerpha Gerlin was awarded a LeCron Foster and Friends of Anthropology at Northwestern (FAN) Summer Research Grant.
Juan Fernando León was awarded the Aaron Hochstein Fellowship from the History Department to support doctoral research. He received the Henry Binford teaching prize as part of a team of TAs who taught “Biomedicine and World History” with Helen Tilley.
Xi Wang received a Graduate Research Grant from TGS to conduct research on the credibility of psychotherapists in China's post-regulation era.
Guangshuo Yang defended his dissertation in August and was co-recipient of Harold Perkin Prize for best dissertation in the History Dept.
Faculty News
Ken Alder appeared in a PBS American Experience documentary on “The Lie Detectors,” closely modeled on his book of the same name.
Moya Bailey was awarded the Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award.
Lydia Barnett was awarded the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching (E. Leroy Hall) Award.
Lina Britto’s Marijuana Boom was translated into Spanish and listed as one of the best non-fiction books of 2022 by La Silla Vacía, Colombia’s most influential digital media portal, and Diario Criterio.
Sarah Carson, former SHC postdoctoral fellow and visiting faculty, has been awarded a 2023-24 ACLS fellowship for her project on South Asian weather prediction. In September 2024, she will take up a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of King’s College, Halifax.
Steve Epstein’s The Quest for Sexual Health (2022) was awarded the Sociology of Sexualities Book Award (honorable mention) from the American Sociology Association.
Daniel Immerwahr was awarded the McCormick Teaching Fellowship.
Santiago Molina has been collaborating with a team at the The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard to research the ways that scientists across disciplines conceptualize and operationalize human difference through concepts like ancestry and population. Their findings appeared recently in Frontiers in Genetics.
Kelly Wisecup’s Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (2021) was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize by the Bibliographic Society of America.