Tatiana Avesani

BA, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy
MA, New York University

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Tatiana’s research has mostly focused on Italian Renaissance Literature. Specifically, before coming to Johns Hopkins, their work explored the relationship between political structures and language. Specifically, it analyzed the ways in which politics shaped the development of the Italian language in the debates taking place in Italy in the 15th and 19th centuries.

Project: Through the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program Tatiana is bridging Italian Studies with Classics. Their projects aims at exploring the Italian Renaissance via Neo-Latin literature by posing questions of gender and identity through the lens of language. They hope that by working with Transgender Studies theory they will be able to shed new light and reading of cultural production in the Italian Early Modern period.

Hannah Haegeland

BA, History and English Literature, Concordia College

MA, South Asia, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Hannah Haegeland is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program, working between the Department of the History of Science and Technology and the Department of Political Science. She researches military science and technologies in twentieth-century Asia. From 2011-2022 she held research and teaching positions related to the history and security of southern Asia in Albuquerque, Washington, D.C., Seattle, New Delhi, and Kathmandu.

Project: Hannah’s project works to recover some of the silences in Global South nuclear histories. When scientific knowledge and technologies developed in one time, geography, market, language, community, political and strategic environment migrate to other spaces, the ways individuals, institutions, and states interact with them can change, along with the actual character of those technologies and science. The nature of that interaction has a lot to do with how key strategic, bureaucratic, and technical actors want to use the science and technology. Hannah’s research will complicate universalist, deterministic scholarship by studying how and why key stakeholders engage with nuclear science and technologies differently or the same in distinct contexts over time.

Goh Rui Zhe

BA in Philosophy, Yale-NUS College

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Rui Zhe is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies, working at the intersection between philosophy of mind and perception science. He is fascinated by the temporal nature of experience, and his research explores how the human mind segments the continuous flow of perceptual input into the discrete events that we experience.

Project: In daily life, there are moments in which we seem to hear silence, such as when we listen to the quiet night, or when an exhilarating orchestral performance ends abruptly. However, these experiences of silence are puzzling because they seem to be characterized by the absence of sound—what could we possibly be hearing, if not sound? In his current project, Rui Zhe uses empirical and philosophical tools to investigate the nature of silence perception. To date, he has discovered empirical evidence showing that the auditory system segments moments of silence into discrete perceptual events. Building on these experimental findings, Rui Zhe is now exploring the possibility that experiences of silence are the result of the auditory system segmenting empty periods of time into discrete units. In the words of the playwright Tom Stoppard, silence may be “the sound of time passing”.

Jennifer Marks

BA, Anthropology and Classical Civilization, Beloit College
MPH, International Health, Boston University School of Public Health
MA, Museum Studies certificate (Classical Archeology), Tufts University
MA, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, Brandeis University

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Jennifer is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, working between Classics and Near Eastern Studies.  She holds degrees in Anthropology and Classical Civilization from Beloit College, International Public Health from Boston University, Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University, and a Museum Studies certificate from Tufts University.  Her research interests include the archaeology and material culture of the Aegean Bronze Age, particularly Minoan/Mycenaean textile craft production and specialization, metallurgy, and early Minoan mortuary practices, in addition to the application of ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology to ancient crafting techniques.

Project: Jennifer’s project aims to access the lived experiences and creative work of women who labored in the textile industries of the Bronze Age Aegean and Ancient Near East, by newly foregrounding the ways in which their biographies – as migrants, mothers, and craftspersons – embodied connections between these two regions.  Drawing together two areas of the ancient world, her research, diachronic in scope, will culminate in a close study of workgroups of women from western Anatolia who migrated to Greece with their children as textile laborers for the Mycenaean palace at Pylos.

Marshall Meyer

BA, Occidental College
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Marshall Meyer is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, working between the departments of Comparative Thought and Literature and Modern Languages and Literatures. He received his bachelor’s degree in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College, where he wrote a thesis on the reception of Greek tragedy by key German idealist philosophers. His research interests include psychoanalysis, particularly the Ljubljana Lacanian School and transcendental materialism; German idealism, particularly Hegel; Marxist theory; twentieth-century European philosophy and theory; contemporary literature, film/television, and popular music; and current topics in aesthetic theory, such as autonomy, form, and critique.

Project; Marshall situates his work as part of an ongoing effort, inaugurated more than thirty years ago by Slavoj Žižek and members of his circle, to read the German idealist canon through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis (and vice versa). At the same time, he remains keenly interested in the many new practices of reading that have proliferated in the humanities in the twenty-first century, and it is the aim of his research to bring these two concerns into dialogue. How would Lacan or Hegel, with their shared emphasis on the subject’s mediation, respond to a trending practice like postcritique, with its belief in an immediate relationship between reader and text? And are the thinkers just mentioned only good for critiquing existing practices of reading, or is there sufficient material in their work to advance a positive theory of aesthetics? These are among the questions that occupy him.

Pyar Seth

BA, Trinity University
Political Science, Social Theory, and Black Studies

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Pyar Seth is a PhD Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program working at the nexus of Anthropology and Political Science. Broadly, he studies the history of Black thought, sociopolitical life and death, policing and medicalization, subject formation, and the epistemic organization of health, disease, and risk. At the core of his research, one could also say that a foundational question is the following: Given the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness and anti-Black violence, for Black people, what does it mean to rest? Pyar is also a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar and research associate to Black Beyond Data and the Paul Robeson Research Center. 

Project: My dissertation is an intellectual history of medical diagnoses, categories, and descriptive terminologies with an ambiguous/disputed pathophysiology that emerge in the late twentieth century across the United States, Canada, Britain, and the West Indies (i.e. excited delirium, ganja psychosis, vegan syndrome). I seek to take a more complex, dialectic view of medical diagnoses by attending to the larger global and imperial modalities that work to manage, naturalize, and pathologize Black life. 

There is a robust literature on policing, carcerality, and surveillance across the globe but research has tended to miss that medicine, medical diagnoses, and medicalization have been relevant in everyday police work for quite some time. By the twentieth century, a central mechanism of international reform was to create specialized police training on illness and the spread of infectious disease. As Patrick Carroll (2002; 493) argued, “police have remained central to public health because health and safety continue to figure into the general idea of security.” And so, I examine medicalization within the institutional apparatus of the police, the degree to which it is adopted, and how it may change depending on the (geopolitical) context. I ask the following: How does the medicalization of police violence travel across the boundaries of the nation-state and how else may we explain the convergence and divergence of medicalized transatlantic pathologies of Black life and death?

John Lafe Shannon

BA, Sociology, Saint Xavier University
MA, Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago

Email: [email protected]

Biography: John is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program, working between Near Eastern Studies and Earth and Planetary Sciences. He holds degrees in Sociology from Saint Xavier University and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. His research interests are the archaeology of Arabia, geoarchaeology, and the archaeology of trade and exchange.

Project: John’s research focuses on chlorite vessels that were carved by the peoples of Arabia and Iran during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Despite their ubiquity in the archaeological records of civilizations surrounding the Persian/Arabian Gulf, it remains unknown where the stone for these vessels originated. By linking chlorite vessels to geological sources, John seeks to extrapolate the trade networks within which these vessels were produced and distributed.

Shengshuang Wang

BA, Nanjing University
Chinese Language and Literature

Email: [email protected]

Biography: Shengshuang holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Nanjing University, and she received her master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Renmin University of China. In 2019 she was accepted into the German section at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she is studying in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program to combine her interests in German studies and Sinology.

Project: Her research focuses on the influences of German literature and philosophy on Chinese modernity, especially on Chinese intellectual and political movements in the 20th century. Shengshuang also continues her investigations on the contemporary German writer W. G. Sebald, especially the theme of repetition in his works.