Current Fellows Spring 2025
Faculty Fellows
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Benjamin Haber
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Read MoreBenjamin Haber is a scholar with wide-ranging interests including technology, media, affect and identity. His work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Women & Performance, WSQ, and other journals, magazines and edited collections. He is interested in creative forms of scholarship and praxis, and organized the interdisciplinary conference “Queer Circuits in Archival Times” in 2016. -
Douglas Martin
Associate Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Read MoreAuthor most recently of Wolf, "an anti true crime novel about abuse, patricide and Southern working class life," Douglas A. Martin is a writer and thinker whose books span fiction and nonfiction, traversing poetry and prose. They have been translated into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Past titles include: Once You Go Back (Lambda Award nomination in the Gay Memoir/Biography category) and Branwell (Ferro-Grumley Award finalist), as well as a book-length essay, Acker, a triptych of novellas, Your Body Figured, and a book of stories, They Change the Subject. Douglas's first novel, Outline of My Lover, was an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part for the multimedia ballet and live film Kammer/Kammer. This book has now been reissued in a twentieth anniversary edition. Coauthor of the haiku year and coeditor of Kathy Acker: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.
Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, moved to New York City at 25 and now divides time between Brooklyn, upstate New York, and Connecticut.
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Ulrich Plass
Professor of German Studies
Read MoreMy scholarly work encompasses two main areas: (1) Critical Theory and its philosophical origins and (2) the aesthetics of modern and contemporary literature. In both areas, I examine problems of representation and representability: I am interested in the historically specific possibilities and limitations of philosophy as a discursive medium and literature as a fictional and imaginary medium. I have published monographs on the work and life of Franz Kafka, on the implicit theory of language in Adorno's literary criticism, and on the genesis of the theory of the culture industry in the Frankfurt School's collaborative work of the 1930s and 1940s. My recent articles include pieces on Adorno's notion of the work of art as product of social labor; on Marcuse's utopianist critique of history; and on Slatan Dudow's filmic representation of unemployment and proletarian self-help. A co-edited volume (with Sophie Duvernoy and Karsten Olson) titled Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film was recently published in Bloomsbury's New Directions in German Studies series (ed. Imke Meyer).
I have been at Wesleyan since 2004. In 2017, I was promoted to Professor of German Studies with a core appointment in the College of Letters. In 2015 and 2016, I was a research fellow at the Berlin Center for Literary and Cultural Research. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Hamburg, my M.A. at the University of Michigan, and my Ph.D. at New York University. I teach a wide array of classes, including courses on Nietzsche, Kafka, Marx and Marxism, Weimar Modernism, contemporary German literature, the Frankfurt School, and German Romanticism.
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Elizabeth G. Traube
Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Read MoreElizabeth Traube conducted ethnographic research in Timor-Leste before and after the Indonesian occupation.Her original research on ritual and cosmology explored exchange practices that continue to inform post-independence life in unexpected ways. In her recent and current work on Timor-Leste she is concerned with narrative practices, especially how locally preserved stories about the colonial past have operated in shifting circumstances to frame visions of possible futures, and how Timorese have incorporated outsiders, including the ethnographer,into their cultural schemes. Central to this work is an interest in elucidating the powers and limits of indigenous agency in confrontations with forces of modernity.
Another aspect of her current scholarship involves cultural and media studies, especially television. She is interested in the relationship between industrial and aesthetic shifts, with a focus on how television storytelling is being transformed as the industry continues to respond to new technological, economic, and cultural conditions.
I received my B.A in Folklore & Mythology from Radcliffe in 1970 and my PhD in Anthropology from Harvard in 1977. I came to Wesleyan straight from graduate school and have helped to shape and reshape the Anthropology Department. I have also partiipated actively in Wesleyan's robust interdisciplinary community, especially as a participant at and Director of the Center for the Humanities. It was at the Center that I became involved in cultural studies, an interest that sustained me through the 24 years when Timor was inaccessible. I first returned to East Timor in 2000, during the UN transitional administration, and I have visited several times since independence was restored. I am an enthusiatic member of the transnational Timor-Leste-Studies community that has taken shape over the past decade. I have also remained involved with cultural studies and teach courses on television and on youth cultural practices.
Andrew W. Mellon Fellows
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Devin Choudhury
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Read MoreDevin Choudhury is an interdisciplinary literary scholar working across the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, science and technology studies (STS), and critical geography. His research focuses on the agrarian roots, rots, and routes of global capitalism, attending to the ways in which literary engagements with agriculture—and, more broadly, labor-mediated modes of human-nonhuman relation—can reveal, decompose, and reconstitute the material, conceptual, and rhetorical bases of our seemingly all-encompassing socioeconomic system.
Devin’s current projects include Forms of Development, a monograph that maps a tradition of critiques of and alternatives to agrarian development in twentieth century South Asian narrative literature; Subsistence Beyond Man, a monograph that turns to anticolonial literary visions of subsistence in order to critically reevaluate the concept in light of our current ecological conjuncture; and a journal article attending to the liminality of the human corpse as a site from which to think forms of historical continuity and rupture, as well as more-than-human community, that arise in the midst and wake of statist violence in the (post)colony.
Devin received his BA in English from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Department of Rhetoric, where he also completed a designated emphasis in STS.
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Cameron Hu
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Read MoreCameron Hu is an anthropologist whose work explores questions of technoscience, capitalism, colonialism, and environment in contexts of U.S. empire. His projects include Knowing Destroying, a theory of imperialism by way of ethnographic fieldwork in a Texas oil zone; Powerpoint Metaphysics, a book-length essay on aesthetics and geopolitics in the “systems” epoch; a sequence of theoretical articles on the liberal form of life and its deeply-ramified grammar of historicity, activity, and necessity; and, with several collaborators, an exploration of secular epistemomania and epistemophobia. As a member of the LiCo group, he produces fictions, films, and installations examining the choreography of mental and environmental life, most recently for Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). Cameron received a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation received the 2022 Daniel F. Nugent Prize in Historical Anthropology. He comes to the Center for the Humanities from Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. In Spring 2025 he will teach “Burnout,” on ecological, psychic, and political exhaustion.
Research Fellows
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Hassan Almohammed
Read MoreHassan Almohammed is a Visiting Associate Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, where his academic pursuits span the fields of French, Francophone, and Intercultural Studies, Middle East Studies, Media, and Environmental Studies. He is not only an academic but also a journalist and digital artist. His multilingual abilities extend to English, Arabic, and French.
Previously, Hassan taught a seminar on the Arab Spring at Marburg University, affiliated with the Center of Conflict Studies in Germany. His academic experience also includes serving as a Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara and Brandeis University, along with being a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University (Columbia Global Centre| Amman). Additionally, he held the position of Professor of French at Sivas University in Turkey.
As a journalist and translator, Hassan has significantly contributed to documentary filmmaking in Paris, collaborating with notable entities such as Capa Presse and Arte. He has authored numerous non-fiction articles in both French and Arabic languages.
His academic record includes multiple peer-reviewed articles, a book on Poetry and Ecology, an Anthologie de poésie écologique (2019), and a My Digital Art Book (2022), Hassan has delivered talks at various international symposiums, spanning different countries including France, Tunisia, Algeria, the UK, USA, Romania, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Cameroon, and Cote d'Ivoire.
Recently, Hassan completed a critical text in Arabic that delves into the intriguing relationship between Meteorology and Writing, focusing on narrating climate within the Arab Novel. The novels examined in this work include "The Blue Gerboa" by the Algerian Mohammad Baba Ami, "Endings" by the Saudi Abdel Rahman Munif, "The Sail and the Storm" by the Syrian Hannah Minah, and "The Gold Dust (Al Tibr)" by the Libyan Ibrahim Al Koni. He has also authored a novel titled "Papers of Love and Death: From Don Quichotte to Abu Khaizaran," which explores the impact of war in Syria.
Currently, Hassan is actively engaged in writing another novel that explores the theme of Sudanese immigration to Saudi Arabia, titled "The Immigrant's Coffin." Additionally, he is working on a Monograph project: Poetic Meteorology and Eco-Writing, Analysis of Double Climate in Francophone Literature.
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Ricardo Pérez
Read MoreRicardo Pérez is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the intersections of economic development and environmental conservation, primarily in coastal landscapes. He is also interested in the study of transnational mobility as it pertains to the fields of tourism and migration. As a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for the Humanities during the spring 2025 semester, he will work on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Authentically Global: Cuban Culture and Economy in the Age of Mass Tourism. It is an ethnographic monograph based on fieldwork in Havana, Cuba and Jardines del Rey (Gardens of the King), a tourist area in the north-central coast of the island, where some of the most important tourism development projects are underway.
Student Fellows
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Xingyan Guo
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Andy Lisheng
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Rosa Pepper-Macias
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Eli Siegel-Bernstein