Past Postdoctoral Associates

Dima Abi Saab received her Ph.D. from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Cultural Studies track. She is currently working on her book manuscript based on research conducted for her dissertation, Geographies of War: Scalar Containment, Municipal Politics, and the Making of Post-War Lebanon. Dima’s project engages with the politics of scale as a framework from which to examine the legislative, territorial, and social mechanisms involved in reclaiming territoriality and

Jake Silver is a cultural anthropologist who works with Palestinian astronomers, city planners, GIS experts, and activists to study the contemporary dimensions and volumes of Israel’s occupation. His work shakes our understandings of the sky as a stable environmental object and instead approaches how politics and political conflicts bring it into being, creating multiple skies that we each experience differently. In so doing, he hopes to offer new frameworks for grasping colonial settlement

Alize Arican an anthropologist of urban life, politics of time, futurity, migration, racialization, and care. Her current book project, Figuring It Out: The Politics of Future and Care, asserts care as a set of temporal practices that can reconfigure urban politics through an engaged ethnography of Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı  neighborhood. Her second project, Transience and Blackness, critically investigates the notion of “transit migration” by focusing on the urban futures that West African

Matthew Libassi is a researcher and educator interested in the relationships between people, nature, and power. His work focuses on natural resource use, conflict, and governance, as well as more broadly on uneven human experiences of environmental change. Matt’s current project analyzes the politics of gold mining in Indonesia. He examines how contemporary modes of resource extraction have been historically produced and how they are experienced, engaged with, and contested by neighboring

Alexander Bigman is a historian of modern and contemporary art. His research focuses in particular upon the emergence, circa 1980, of postmodernism as an internationally circulating set of intertwined discourses, creative practices, and political positions. He is currently at work on a book project derived from his dissertation, “Picturing Fascism in Post-Conceptual Art, 1974 - 1984,” which examines how the history and aesthetics of interwar European fascism became newly salient objects of

Michelle Smiley is a scholar of 19th-century photography and visual culture whose research investigates the intersection of aesthetics and scientific practice in the antebellum United States. Her current book project, Daguerreian Democracy: Art, Science, and Politics in Antebellum American Photography, examines how the daguerreotype became an object of technological, scientific, and commercial innovation for antebellum scientists, artisans, and political thinkers. By chronicling the

Jessica Mack is a historian of Latin America specializing in 20th-century Mexico, higher education history, and digital public history. Her current book project examines the campus construction for the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in mid-century Mexico City. Following her fellowship at the CCA during the 2019-2020 seminar The University and its Public Worlds, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason

Rachel Miller is a labor and cultural historian of the nineteenth-century with a particular focus on the development of the global entertainment industry. She is currently working on a book project adapted from her dissertation, "Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the U.S. Creative Economy, 1843 - 1912," which analyzes the transformation of commercial performance from a small-scale artisanal or folk practice into a staple product of global, export-oriented capitalism. Despite the

Jasmine Samara received a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2018 and has a J.D. from Columbia Law School.  After her year at CCA, Jasmine is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU.  She is a legal scholar and social anthropologist whose work explores debates on law, rights and identity politics in contemporary Europe. Her research and teaching focus on law and religion, the governance of minorities, gender, and the anthropology of human

Matthew Baxter received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013.  After his year at the CCA, Matt accepted a fellowship at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center, then joined the faculty at Ashoka University in July 2018 after two years as a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s South Asia Program (2016-2018).  Since December 2022, Matt has worked at Syracuse University as the Regional Programs Manager-Asia at the Moynihan Institute of

Andrew Moisey received his Ph.D. in 2014 from U.C. Berkeley in Film and Media Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.  A photographer and a historian of photography, Andrew’s research investigates how photography became an art that deals with philosophical problems. His current book project, The Photographic World Picture, shows how four artists--one early modern and three contemporary--took pictures that reflected prevalent philosophical

Anita Bakshi is an architect with a particular interest in the relationship between memory and the material world, conflict and divided cities, and commemorative structures and practices.  Following several years in architectural practice, Anita received her PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from Cambridge University, where she was a member of the Conflict in Cities and the Contested State research groups.  After her year as a CCA Postdoctoral Fellow, Anita stayed at Rutgers.  She

Darryl Wilkinson received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia. After his year at the CCA, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was also a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is now an Assistant Professor of Religion at Dartmouth.  He studies the indigenous religious traditions of the Americas, focusing on two main areas: 1) the ancient Andes and 2) the colonial Southwestern United States. His work critically explores

Avram Alpert(2014-2016) received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. After spending two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers, Avi has won fellowships from Fulbright Commission of Brazil, the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, and the Sauve Foundation at McGill University.  Avi is currently a lecturer in the Writing Program at Princeton University.  With Rit Premnath, he is co-editor of Shifter Magazine. With Meleko Mokgosi and