Postdoctoral Fellows
2023-25
-
Sebastián Antezana Quiroga
2023–25 International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesSebastián Antezana Quiroga is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He received a Ph.D. in romance studies from Cornell University in 2019 and worked as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Dickinson College and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. His book project, “Migrant Afterlives: Spectral Narratives of Greater Mexico and Greater Bolivia,” focuses on migrant communities in contemporary literature and film from the Mexican and Bolivian cultural spectrums, on the ways in which these communities are strategically associated with specters and other afterlife figures, and on how this association reflects the disjointing, spectral logic of different variants of the national model (like the transnational, the multinational, and the postnational) that operate in unison. He has published several academic articles and book chapters and is the author of three books of fiction. In Fall 2025 he will join Xavier University as Assistant Professor of Spanish.
-
Ambra Marzocchi
2023–25 International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesAmbra Marzocchi is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. Trained as a classical philologist in Italy and as a historian of the book in the United States, she specializes in the study of the history of scholarship and humanist education in early colonial Spanish America. Her current research seeks to advance the understanding of the cultural-historical dynamics surrounding the early modern transmission of Greco-Roman, pagan, and Christian literatures, through humanistic — and specifically Jesuit — pedagogy, from Europe to colonial Mexico. For her doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, she edited and studied the first textbook of Latin poetry printed in the Americas. At Brown, she is expanding her analysis to a wider array of Latin textbooks used in colonial Mexico, many of which are preserved in the University’s bibliographic collections. Her teaching philosophy is inspired by tenets of Renaissance educational treatises, which she put into practice at the University of Kentucky’s Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance associated with Johns Hopkins University.
2024–26
-
Athia Choudhury
2024-26 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of American Studies; Science, Technology, and Society, and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesAthia N. Choudhury is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her current project, “Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness,” turns to the obscured relationship between modern conceptions of health in the U.S. and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures across North America, Asia, and the Pacific. Engaging U.S. imperialism as a sensorial project through the poetics of food and eating, the manuscript interrogates how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered during the American century. Choudhury holds a Ph.D. in American studies and ethnicity from the University of Southern California where she was a recipient of the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Fellowship and was previously Postdoctoral Associate in Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University (2022–2024). Her research and scholarship can be found in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Routledge International Handbook on Fat Studies (2021), “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness,” and the German anthology Fat Studies: Ein Glossar (Transcript Verlag, 2022).
-
Namrata Kanchan
2024-26 International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesNamrata B. Kanchan is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin in 2023. Her dissertation, “From Gilded Pens to Mortal Ears,” examines the genesis of early modern Dakani literature in western India’s Deccan sultanate courts through the study of the region’s manuscript and material culture. Her research interests include early modern literary, social, and manuscript histories; transoceanic networks; translation culture; and paleographical and codicological studies.
-
Tarisa Little
2024-26 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of History, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesTarisa Little is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She is a Settler and works with members of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation. Her research focuses on Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing. Her current projects focus on Wendat/Wandat witches and Wendat/Wandat engagement (forced and voluntary) with Western-style schooling. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and was a visiting professor for two years at Colgate University in the Native American Studies Program.
-
Kristen Reynolds
2024-26 International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Africana Studies, Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Cogut Institute for the HumanitiesKristen Reynolds is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Africana Studies, the Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2024. Her research utilizes Black speculative literature and culture to interrogate how digital and computational technologies reproduce antiblackness through their coherence around Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of “Man, overrepresented as the human.” Her work thereby seeks to demonstrate how Black speculative literature and culture posits new frameworks for developing technologies that promote Black futures. She is interested in teaching courses focused on Black digital humanities and science and technology studies, speculative literature and culture, and courses that allow students to develop and experiment with speculative methods.