Faculty Fellows 2018-2019

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• Francesca Giannetti

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and subject liaison to the departments of Classics, French, and Italian, and the program in Comparative Literature. In her research, she pursues topics at the intersection of information studies, digital humanities, and music. Working with a musicologist, a music librarian, and a digital humanities project developer, Giannetti is developing a digital research environment called Music Scholarship Online (MuSO), a contributing node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) whose aims are to improve the dissemination of digital scholarly outputs in music as well as develop a peer review framework for the evaluation of digital work in musicology and music history. Her research interests include digital libraries, audio preservation, opera and libretto studies, and digital humanities pedagogy. She has published articles in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Music Reference Services Quarterly, Notes, and College & Undergraduate Libraries. 

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• Preetha Mani

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on how representations of the Indian woman are used to shape ideas of regional and national identity, and experiences of belonging, in the aftermath of Indian Independence. She is currently completing a book manuscript, which chronicles the emergence of the short story as a preeminent genre in twentieth century Hindi and Tamil literature. The book proposes a view of Indian literature as a field of comparative literature that is comprised of mutually imbricated local, regional, national, and global processes of literary canonization and shows the short story to be a major genre of postcolonial literature and central to the formation of the new woman. She has an enduring interest in the relationship between gender and genre and the popular and the literary, which informs her ongoing work on the comparative study of Indian and world literatures, translation studies, and women’s writing in South Asia.

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• Hana Shepherd

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011. She specializes in the study of culture, networks, and organizations. She uses diverse methods, including network analysis, lab and field-based experiments, interviews, and archival research to study social processes, especially social influence. She has designed instruments to build several datasets, both quantitative and qualitative, to study organizations and culture, particularly in terms of the development of shared norms within groups. A current line of work uses comparative, qualitative data from schools and city government agencies to understand variation in how organizations implement law. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Psychology Quarterly, Poetics, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Sociological Forum.

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• Laura Weigert

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. She specializes in Northern European art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Professor Weigert has taught at the University of Nantes and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and was Associate Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College before joining the Rutgers faculty in September, 2006. Her scholarship addresses the interaction between diverse media in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a means to probe questions of representation, spectatorship, and meaning making during this period. She has published on manuscript illumination, prints, panel painting, textiles, and the ephemeral arts of performance. Her book on tapestries, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Cornell, 2004) reconstructs the architectural and ceremonial context in which tapestries were seen and the process of storytelling to which they contributed. French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater (Cambridge, 2015) engages theatricality as an interpretive lens to understand a broad range of fifteenth-century artifacts and performance practices and reveals the roots of misperceptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the disciplines of art history and theater history. She is currently investigating the fifteenth-century origins of modern media distinctions and the role that painting played in their definition. She was an invited faculty member at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in November, 2015 and is an Associated Researcher at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art for the academic year 2015-2016.

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• Atif Akin

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is an artist and designer and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. He lives and works in New York. His work examines science, nature, mobility, and politics. Through a series of activities made up of research, documentation and design, Akın’s work considers transdisciplinary issues, through a technoscientific lens, in aesthetic and political contexts.

During his studies at the Middle East Technical University, Akın was actively involved in artistic and political circles in Ankara. He practiced design, photography and video, and in graduate school, developed an interest in interaction design, cyberculture, digital humanities, semantics and semiotics. Akın became active as an artist during his years in İstanbul, and exhibited widely in Turkey and Europe, taking part in collective and international projects in a field that was seeing its first years of development and emergence. From İstanbul, Akın created connections with institutions in Germany, took classes in Berlin, and stayed close to the pioneers who practiced interaction design and digital data driven forms and interfaces in artistic and political contexts.

In 2009, his work was listed in the ‘Younger Than Jesus’ art directory project of the New Museum, published by Phaidon. That same year, Akın co-curated a seminal media art exhibition, ‘Uncharted: User Frames in Media Arts,’ and edited an accompanying book. Throughout his practice in İstanbul, he regularly collaborated with Ars Electronica in Austria, ZKM in Karlsruhe and Pixelache in Helsinki. Akın was the recipient of the 2015 apexart Franchise Program award in New York, and was the organizer of the zine project and exhibition, Apricots from Damascus, on behalf of apexart, co-produced and hosted by SALT in İstanbul. In 2016, he took part in the public programming of Olafur Eliasson’s Greenlight Project, hosted by TBA 21 in Vienna. With the same institution, he embarked on an expedition to research nuclear test sites in French Polynesia. Currently, part of his long term research-driven art project on nuclear mobility and oceanography is on display at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Singapore and Le Fresnoy Museum in France.

Since the beginning of his practice, he has been interested in manifestations of boundaries–physical, metaphorical, linguistic–that exist around science, nature and politics. In an effort to create the most effective presentations, he refused to settle into an established medium of expression, and instead, moves fluidly between various media, including photography, video, and visualization of quantitative information and programmable media. Some of his works appear as museum, gallery or public space installations, and others in screen-based formats, including online works. Most of his works and links to his online projects can be reached through http://atifakin.info.