All Townsend Fellows
In her dissertation, "Tintoretto's San Marco Cycle," Letha Chien (History of Art) examines the complex interrelation of civic identity, pictorial imaging, and the nature of the miraculous in sixteenth-century Venetian painting.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, railway accidents occurred in Britain with grim regularity, and such crashes frequently resulted in the injury or death of railway workers, travelers, or bystanders. In her dissertation, "After-Effects of the Crash: Labor, Time, and the Care of Bodies Injured in Nineteenth Century British Railway Accidents," Amanda Armstrong (Rhetoric) examines the phenomenon of railway accidents in nineteenth century Britain.
In "Tropes of Colonial Urban Space in South Korean Cinema," part of a book project about South Korean Cold War cinema, Jinsoo An (East Asian Languages and Cultures) examines spatial representation of colonialism in cinematic cityscape.
Shannon Jackson is Goldman Professor in Rhetoric and Theater, Dance, and Performance, as well as the Director of the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson is currently working on a book on performance and new media in the work of The Builders Association, as well as a large edited collection of keywords in cross-disciplinary art practice with the Pew Center for Art and Heritage.
Irina Paperno conducts research mainly in the fields of Russian literature and intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her current research project is on Lev Tolstoy and the narrative of self.
Peter Sahlins is an historian of early modern France who has worked on a range of projects since his foundational work on the French-Spanish boundary and the construction of national identity in the borderland. His current research project, "The Symbolic LIves of Animals and the Making of Early French Modernity," begins at the Royal Menagerie of Louis XIV, founded in 1663, and traces the textual, anatomical, and visual representations of animal bodies across the domains of literature, art, and science.
Ryan Bochnak received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago. Bochnak’s dissertation, "Cross-linguistic Variation in the Semantics of Comparatives," investigates the interpretation of comparative constructions (e.g. Joe is taller than Bill) in two understudied and typologically diverse languages, Luganda and Washo.
Erica Weitzman received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University in the spring of 2012. Her current project focuses on the notion of the obscene as a problem of representation in German realism, particularly in terms of the crossing of the “reality effect” and the waning of anthropological framing devices.