Current Fellows

Jennifer A. London
Speaking Through the Voice of Another:
Forms of Political Action in Medieval Arabic and Persian Political Thought.

My research integrates studies in the history of political thought with scholarly work conducted in medieval Middle Eastern history. I attend to the relative absence of scholarly research on medieval Arabic and Persian political thought in American political theory programs by considering how five medieval Arabic and Persian authors created new theories of politics by interpreting fables, works of philosophy and wisdom literature from ancient Persian, Greek and Indian contexts. I ask how these five authors shared their own concerns about politics by translating and interpreting these different sorts of ancient texts. This research has been the focus of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. While writing the dissertation I focused primarily on the historical and linguistic contexts of the authors who translated and interpreted these texts, as a way to learn what sorts of political action and theoretical contributions they might have achieved through writing. In the Humanities Center at Tufts, I will develop these findings analytically to contribute to scholarly debates on the relation between language and politics, and systematic studies on the history of political thought conducted in Middle Eastern history and in political theory.

Neil Van Leeuwen
Neil graduated from Stanford’s PhD program in philosophy in June of 2007, where he wrote his dissertation entitled Self-Deception and the Metaphysics of Belief. Since then he has published articles in such journals as Erkenntnis and Philosophical Studies. His published work develops themes in his dissertation, addressing such questions as: what’s the best way to define self-deception? is it an evolutionary adaptation or a byproduct? can a policy of self-deception lead to happiness? Neil’s current work is on cognitive attitudes, such as belief, imagining, hypothesis, and acceptance in a context. While at the Center for Humanities, he is working on a book that offers a general theory of such attitudes, which (tentatively) will be entitled Dimensions of a Cognitive Attitude.
You can find Neil's papers on his philosophy department page.

Anna Wexler Katsnelson
"The Politics Of Art: A User's Guide to Visual Culture in Russia and America in the 1930s"

Anna received her Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. She is currently working on completing a book manuscript on the visual culture of the Soviet 1920s-1930s. She has published on the late work of the painter Kazimir Malevich (“Poetics Today,” 2006; and in the volume “Victory Over the Sun: the World's First Futurist Opera,” 2009) and the cinematography of Soviet expats in Israel (“Jewish Social Studies,” 2008). Her book project explores the conditions of art under totalitarianism and censorship, strategies of artistic resistance, the modes of transition from one aesthetic episteme to another, and the altering nomenclature and lexicographic impulses of Soviet imperial consciousness. Anna was a Postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Zacks Visiting Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In fall 2010 she will join the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor.

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