Center for the Humanities

Faculty Fellows

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  STEVEN HORST

  Professor, Department of Philosophy

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  Publications include three books:  Laws, Mind, and Free Will (MIT Press, 2011), Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (2007), and Symbols, Computation and Intentionality: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind (1996, reissued in 2011).  Downloadable copies of most academic papers are available through the menu link Downloadable Publications.

  Current research interests include Cognitive Pluralism (the thesis that the mind utilizes many special-purpose models for understanding different aspects of the world) and cognitive science of religion.

  http://shorst.faculty.wesleyan.edu/about-steven-horst/

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  MARCELA OTEIZA

  Assistant Professor of Theater

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  Research Interests:
  Performance Art and its collision between Visual Art and Theater.

  Scholarly Keywords:
  Marcela Oteiza is the Scenic Designer in Residence and a Multidisciplinary Visual Artist. Her work has taken variety of forms including, design for the theater, installation performances and Mixed Media. Some of her Collaborative and Multidisciplinary Projects have been: Wandering Rocks (video performance for James Joyce One Hundred Year Anniversary Celebration, Dublin, 2004); Heart Piece by Heiner Muller (Grant awarded performance at California Institute of the Arts, 2001); Binding: women portraiture Cambridge 2008

  Personal Homepage:
  www.marcelaoteiza.com

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  COURTNEY WEISS SMITH

  Assistant Professor of English

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  Research Interests:
  Courtney Weiss Smith is the editor, with Kate Parker, of "Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered" (Bucknell University Press, 2014). Her current book, "Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England," is the winner of the 2015 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize; it is forthcoming in Spring 2016 from the University of Virginia Press. Her work has also appeared in SEL and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

  Publications:
  https://wesleyan.academia.edu/CourtneyWeissSmith

Andrew W. Mellon Fellows

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  LARRY MCGRATH

  Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

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  Larry S. McGrath's research and teaching address the history of modern Europe and the Atlantic world. He received his PhD in Intellectual History from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His publications explore the cultural resonances of religion, philosophy, nationalism, and the human sciences from the late eighteenth century to the present. Larry is currently transforming his doctoral dissertation into a book, Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France. When he’s not backpacking or playing ultimate frisbee, Larry also spends his time working on two projects: the first examines intellectual ambassadors in international relations around World War I; the second uncovers the history of brain education in France, Germany, and America. 

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  JEANETTE SAMYN

  Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

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  Jeanette Samyn received her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her teaching and research investigate the worldviews projected by nineteenth-century literature and science. Currently, she is turning her doctoral dissertation into a book, In Praise of the Parasite: Asymmetrical Relations in the British Empire, which explains how complex asymmetrical relations were embedded into turn-of-the-century notions of "community" and "environment" through the figure of the parasite. She is also interested in contemporary film and politics, and has written on these subjects for publications such as n+1, The New Inquiry, Dossier, and The American Reader.

Visiting Fellows

• Gavriel Rosenfeld

  Fairfield University

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  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Professor of History and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University. He received his B.A. in History and Judaic Studies from Brown University in 1989 and his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1996.  His area of specialization is the history and memory of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  He has written a wide range of books, including Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and the co-edited work, Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).   He is also the author of the forthcoming edited collection, What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).   He is a frequent contributor to the Forward newspaper and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review.   He is currently at work on a history of the Fourth Reich.

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  Matthew Specter

  Central Connecticut State University

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  Matthew Specter is Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and Associate Editor at History and Theory. He received his BA from Brown in modern European intellectual history and social theory, and his MA and PhD degrees in History from Duke. His research is focused on modern European intellectual history, especially 20th century German political thought, as well as the history of human rights. His first book, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge 2010) interpreted Habermas's political and legal thought as a theoretical response to its postwar German contexts. His current project, Atlantic Realisms, 1890-1960: Political Thought and Foreign Policy takes a comparative and transnational approach to American and German traditions of thought about international relations. He has also published in Modern Intellectual History, History and Theory, and the Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2014). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) and the Institute for the Human Sciences (Vienna).

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  Sarah Richardson

  Harvard University

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  Sarah S. Richardson is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. She is jointly appointed in the Department of the History of Science and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. A historian and philosopher of science, her research focuses on race and gender in the biosciences and on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. She is the author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago, 2013) and co-editor of Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Rutgers, 2008) and Postgenomics (Duke, 2015).

Student Fellows

• David Whitney

• Juan Gallardo

• Jill Buleani