Fellow, Sociocultural Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Shahla Talebi is a scholar of religions, 2006 Newcombe Fellow, and Associate Professor at Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she lived in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

Amina Tawasil

Fellow, Anthropology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Amina Tawasil's current research focus is on the intersection of women and Islamic education. With the support of the International and Transcultural Studies program at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the summer of 2008 she traveled to Tehran, Iran to conduct a two-month pilot study on the education of seminarian women in Iran, which became the main focus of her dissertation research.

Alexei "Lex" Taylor

Diana Taylor

Fellow, Performance and Politics, New York University

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama; of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Duke U.P., 1997; and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003), which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004).

Aylin Tekiner

Fellow, Sculpture Studies, Hacettepe University Fine Arts

Aylin Tekiner (b. 1978, Nevsehir, Turkey) is a New York/Istanbul based artist and activist. She undertook her B.A. and M.A. at Hacettepe University Fine Arts, Sculpture Department in Ankara, Turkey. In 2008 she received her PhD at Ankara University, Institute of Educational Sciences, Cultural Fundamentals of Education Department. Her book "Ataturk Statues: Cult, Esthetics, and Politics" evolved from her PhD thesis and was published by Iletisim Yayinlari (Turkey) in 2010. Aylin has had solo shows and participated in the group exhibitions in Turkey and New York.

Tess Skadegård Thorsen

Miriam Ticktin

Professor, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research in the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process.

Zeynep Türkyılmaz

Fellow, History, Dartmouth College

Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her dissertation, "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire," is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009-2010 and Europe in the Middle East/ The Middle East in Europe Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin between 2010-2011.

Dennis Tyler

Fellow, English, Fordham University

Dennis Tyler is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. He has published work on African American literature, disability studies, and popular culture. He is the recipient of the 2015-16 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. His current book project, Disability of Color, examines how disablement as experience and as discourse has shaped the racial subjecthood of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Elena Tzelepis

Fellow, Philosophy, New School for Social Research

Elena Tzelepis has completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. She works on social and political philosophy. She has taught at Columbia University and held visiting positions at the American University in Cairo and the University of Aegean, Greece.

Luiz Fernando Vianna

Fellow, Web Radio, Instituto Moreira Salles

Luiz Fernando Vianna is a journalist. He has written for O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo and other venues. He is the author of books on popular music, and coordinates the Batuta Radio since 2013.

Darshan Vigneswaran

Fellow, Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam

Darshan Vigneswaran is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Centre for Urban Studies , University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, WITS University. In 2008, he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford where he continues to serve as the reviews editor on the working paper series.

Paromita Vohra

Fellow, Filmmaker, British Council-Saregama India Screenwriting Workshop 2008

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose work has focuses on urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and art. Her films have been widely screened in festivals, galleries and popular screening spaces, besides being included in university syllabi around the world.

Leti Volpp

Fellow, Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law

David Wasserman

Fellow, Ethics, Yeshiva University

David Wasserman is Director of Research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University. He oversees the research and scholarly activities of the Center with an emphasis on the philosophical aspects of bioethics, health care ethics, and disability studies. His current projects focus on prenatal selection and parental role-morality. He publishes widely on these and other topics. At Yeshiva University, Mr. Wasserman presents his research at faculty seminars and a variety of student events. He also presents his work at a wide range of national and international conferences.

Laura Wexler

Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, Yale University

Laura Wexler is co-Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory.

Sarah Wilcox

Fellow, Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Wilcox is Professor of Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College. She specializes in medical sociology, the sociology of science and knowledge, gender and sexuality, and the mass media. Her current research focuses on embodiment and biological knowledge, particularly how lay and expert knowledge intersect and when and how biological ideas become salient in embodied experience, personal identities, and popular culture.

Deborah Willis

Fellow, Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU

Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture.

Penny Wolfson

Fellow, Narrative Medicine Program, Columbia University

Penny Wolfson won a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing in 2001 for an essay in The Atlantic Monthly called “Moonrise,” which has since been anthologized in several collections, including Best American Essays. Her memoir, Moonrise: One Family, Genetic Identity and Muscular Dystrophy, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2003.

Autumn Womack

Fellow, English, University of Pittsburgh

Autumn Womack received her PhD from Columbia University where her research focused on 19th and early twentieth century African American literary culture. At Columbia she developed a rich interest in archival practices, visual studies, black print culture, and social science.

Sophia Wong

Fellow, Philosophy, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

Sophia Isako Wong is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University in New York, NY, USA. She has published on duties of justice to persons with intellectual disabilities, comparisons between sexism and discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities, and how the availability of PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) affects the reproductive autonomy of prospective parents. Her current research analyzes the work of children and adolescents who provide care to their siblings, parents and other family members.

Merieme Yafout

Fellow, Political Science, Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco

Merieme Yafout is a professor and researcher in social sciences. She is the author of several articles on “Islamic feminism in Morocco”, “female ijtihad”, “the status of women in Moroccan political parties”, “Islamist movements in Morocco,” “elections in Morocco,” and “field research in Morocco.”

Hairong Yan

Fellow, Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Yan Hairong is an anthropologist in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests are labour migration, rural-urban relations, and rural cooperatives in China, as well as Hong Konger/Mainlander relations and China/Africa links.

Hentyle Yapp

Fellow, Art & Public Policy, New York University

Hentyle Yapp is an assistant professor at New York University in the Department of Art & Public Policy. He is affiliated faculty with the Department of Performance Studies, Disability Council, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute. His research engages China, performance, disability, and queer theory.

Melanie Yazzie

Fellow, Navajo and American Indian History , University of New Mexico

Melanie Yazzie (Diné) is an Assistant Professor at University of New Mexico. She has published widely in scholarly platforms, and engages in extensive public intellectual and activist work on Native women’s rights, LGBTQ2 rights, environmental justice, policing and incarceration, and Indigenous housing justice, urban issues, and international solidarity.

Helen Yitah

Fellow, English, University of Ghana

Helen Yitah is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Ghana. She is also founding Director of the University of Ghana-Carnegie Writing Centre, established through her initiative. She holds a BA and MPhil from the University of Ghana and a PhD from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She has taught various courses on literature and writing at both universities.

Gökçe Yurdakul

Fellow, Diversity and Social Conflict, Humboldt University, Berlin

Gökçe Yurdakul is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt University, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

She studied Sociology at the Bogazici University and Gender & Women’s Studies at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She has her PhD. from the University of Toronto, Department of Sociology where she received the Connaught Fellowship.

Sarover Zaidi

Fellow, Anthropology, Jindal School of Art & Architecture, Delhi.

Sarover Zaidi works at the intersections of critical theory, anthropology, art, architecture and material culture studies. She has extensively worked on religious architecture, and urbanism in the city of Bombay and currently co-runs a site on writing the city called Chiragh Dilli (https://chiraghdilli.wordpress.com).

Rafia Zakaria

Fellow, Writer, Columbia University

Rafia Zakaria is an author, editor and attorney. She has been a weekly columnist for DAWN, Pakistan’s largest and oldest English language daily since 2009. Her column is syndicated in newspapers all over the world through the Inter Press Service and is regularly republished in the Deccan Chronicle, The Wire India, Kathmandu Post, Sri Lanka Guardian, Korea Herald, New Straits Times and The Internazionale among others. She writes the “Alienated” column for The Baffler and has previously been a regular columnist for Al Jazeera America. She also writes regularly for Guardian Books and is a CNN Opinion contributor. Her recent New York Times Op-Ed “The Myth of Women’s Empowerment” was shared over 30K times on Facebook.

Dubravka Žarkov

Fellow, Social Studies, The Hague

Dubravka Žarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Her fields of expertise are gender and its intersections with sexuality, ethnicity and religion; violent conflict, war and militarism, including gender based sexual violence and communalism, and visual and textual representations of war, violence, and soldiering. She also works on masculinity and sexual violence in wars against men. Among her publications are: Conflict, Peace, Security and Development: Theories and Methodologies (with Helen Hintjens, 2015); Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (with Marlies Glasius, 2014); Gender, Violent Conflict, and Development (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007); and The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, (with Cynthia Cockburn, 2002). One of her most recent articles is on faith and feminism.

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Visiting Fellows