Rebecca Colesworthy, Literary Cultures

Rebecca Colesworthy joins the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program as an Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in the area of Literary Cultures.  She received her B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from Brown University (2000) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Cornell University (2006, 2009). 

Dr. Colesworthy’s research interests include Anglo-American and comparative modernism, gender and sexuality studies, and literary and critical theory.  Her current project explores the relationship between modernist ethics and poetics by putting theories of the gift and exchange into dialogue with texts by four women writers from the interwar period: Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Stevie Smith. In addition to completing articles on Jean Rhys and psychoanalytic theory, she looks forward to beginning her next project, which considers the ways in which various 20th-century writers reimagine the traditionally exceptional position of the feminine subject with respect to moral laws.

Nina Hien, Art Worlds

Nina Hien received a B.A. in English from SUNY – Stony Brook (1986), an M.A. in Journalism from The University of Missouri - Columbia (1992), an M.A. in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research (1998), and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University (2007).

Dr. Hien’s research interests include topics related to visual cultures, media and technology studies, nationalism, transnationalism and globalization, urban studies and popular culture in Southeast Asia, Vietnam and the United States. She is drawn towards finding creative links between these conceptual zones and geographical areas through ethnographic, historical and theoretical inquiry. In her doctoral dissertation titled “Reanimating Vietnam: Icons, Photography and Image Making in Ho Chi Minh City” (2007), which received the Lauriston Sharp Prize, she examined the connections between visual technology and Vietnamese identity construction by the state and individuals. Forthcoming publications include: “Ho Chi Minh City’s Beauty Regime: Visual Technologies of the Self, Subject and Body in the New Millennium” (Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Duke University) and “Reconfiguring the Dunes” (Visual Anthropology, Routledge). She is currently developing a new research project that explores the relationship between the body, vision and tactility in new media practices.

Amber Musser, Gender Politics

Amber Musser joins the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program as the assistant professor/Faculty Fellow in Gender Politics. Dr. Musser received an A.B. in Biology and History of Science from Harvard (2002), a M.St. in Women’s Studies from Oxford (2003), and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard (2009). 

Dr. Musser's work focuses on psychoanalysis, queer affect, and theories of subjectivity. Her dissertation, "On the Subject of Masochism," is a history of the various readings and re-readings that produced masochism's discursive shift from psychiatry to critical and queer theory. Portions of her dissertation have been published: “Masochism, a Queer Subjectivity” in Rhizomes and "Reading, Writing ,and the Whip" forthcoming in Literature and Medicine. All of Dr. Musser's work is a dialogue between history and philosophy of science, critical theory, queer and feminist theory, and critical history. In addition to bringing science and gender and sexuality studies together in conversation, she believes that treating these areas together reveals a new space in which to situate and destabilize our prevailing notions of subjectivity and agency. This perspective allows her to focus on understanding race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and class as critical dimensions of personal experience, which also extends to the realm of science. In keeping with this theme, she has published an article, “From Our Body to Yourselves,” which discusses the shift in concepts of Woman and community within the Women’s Health Movement in the 1970s. She has also been working on an article, “The Obscure Object of Desire,” that interrogates negotiations of intimacy and sexuality in relationships with inanimate objects. In addition to turning her dissertation into a book, Dr. Musser is currently researching queer attachments to objects and embodiments of multiple subjectivities. While at Harvard, Dr. Musser received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence.

Mrinalini Rajagopalan, The City

B. Arch. 1996, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; M.S. 2003, Ph.D. 2007, University of California at Berkeley

Dr. Mrinalini Rajagopalan received her PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently working on a manuscript titled: Objects of Desire: Excavating Islamic Architecture in Imperial, National and Postcolonial India. This book is a historical study of the institutionalization of architectural preservation in India, with a specific focus on the nation’s capital city—Delhi.  She is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume: Colonial Frames/ Nationalist Histories: Architecture, Urbanism and Identity (Ashgate, 2010). In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of the Draper Program, Dr. Rajagopalan’s courses offer global and comparative views of urbanization as complex socio-political processes. Her courses cover a variety of topics such as: a diachronic historical comparison of the processes of modernization as they unfolded in Western cities such as Paris, London and Chicago as well as non-Western cities such as Hong Kong, Cairo and Calcutta; the urban geographies of neoliberalism and the role of the city as a conduit or obstacle to the reproduction of capital in this late period of globalization; a global survey of housing policies and rights as a means to interrogate urban development and its politics; and a seminar tracing the discursive conceptualizations of urban subjectivities from the flaneur, to queer and subaltern identities.

Maia Ramnath, Global Histories

B.F.A 1995, Butler University; M.A. New York University, 2002; M.A.  2004, University of California, Santa Cruz; Ph.D. 2008, University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr. Ramnath received her PhD in history in 2008 from the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she focused on World History and Modern SouthAsia. Her book manuscript on the Ghadar Party (an anti-colonial revolutionary movement among early 20th century immigrant workers in California) is now under review. The book focuses on the movement's complex interconnections with transnational radical networks before, during and after WWI, and the alliances and ideological translations possible between leftist, nationalist and Pan-Islamist mobilizations against imperialism. These themes continue to inform Dr. Ramnath’s work and courses taught. She is currently completing two articles that extend her previous research (on Indo-Irish solidarity circa 1920; and the role of anarchism in the Indian anti-colonial struggle) while embarking on the initial stages of exploration of the Urdu Progressive Writers' movement.

Daniel Thurs, Science Studies

Daniel Patrick Thurs received his PhD in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. From 2004 to 2006, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University. Over the next two years, he taught courses in American history and the history of science at Western Oregon University, Oregon State University, and the University of Portland.

Dr. Thurs’s work centers on the histories of words and their implications. His first book, Science Talk (Rutgers, 2007), traces the ambiguous and contested nature of “science” in America over the last two centuries. He has also published several articles on the attempts of researchers, journalists, public policy makers, and investors to shape the boundaries of “nanotechnology.

More recently, he contributed a chapter to Galileo Goes to Jail (Harvard, 2009) on relations between religion and quantum mechanics and has two essays in press on the histories of the concepts of “pseudoscience” and “scientific method.” His current project focuses on the history of beliefs about mass panic and fear of science as a means of exploring changing conceptions of “the public” and its perceived role in an increasingly scientific and technological world.