Current Fellows

Rebekah Ahrendt
The République of Music, 1672-1713

Rebekah Ahrendt is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. A music historian and violist da gamba specializing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, her work has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Musicological Society, and the University of Utrecht. Her dissertation, “A Second Refuge: French Opera and the Huguenot Migration,” studied the transformations of French operatic works in the lands of Huguenot exile. Based on extensive archival research, the dissertation examined issues of translation, performance, and production of works that aided in the maintenance of a French cultural identity while spectacularly demonstrating the fissures between “French” music and the French state. Her CHAT project, “The République of Music, 1672-1713,” explores the exchange of newly-constructed ideas of “national” musical styles along the networks of print, sociability, and communication extending from the multicultural, urbanized centers of the Dutch Republic. Branding styles as “national” not only related them to a point of geographic origin, but also encouraged their conception as being significant of behaviors, customs, and cultural practices associated with those “nations.” Simultaneously both reinforcing and negating concepts of local belonging, participants created new supra-national imagined taste communities that were, at least superficially, cosmopolitan in nature. At a time when questions of borders weighed more heavily than ever before on the European imagination, the formulation of musical styles as cultural expressions of national identity coincided with social and political confrontations that would ultimately contribute to the cultural construction of the modern nation-state.

Margareta Ingrid Christian
Atmo-Sphaera: Biological Models of Habitation in German Art and Literature (1900-1929)

Margareta Ingrid Christian received her Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University with a dissertation titled "Horror Vacui: A Cultural History of Air around 1900." Her project at CHAT extends this research and shows, first, how in aesthetic, scientific, and occult evocations of air the media-theoretical notion of medium and the biological concept of milieu and Umwelt (environment) intersect. Second, it shows how this air-as-environment refers not only to a cosmic milieu but also to micro-milieus, namely, concrete realms of habitation such as rooms and houses. German art and literature in the first half of the 20^th century relied on biological theories of "environment" to describe habitation. Biological models of habitation served, in turn, as templates for social forms of collectivity. The project centers on the interface of art history, literature, and the history of science. It traces a prehistory of disciplinary crossovers in the work of early twentieth century thinkers for whom air both constituted their object of study and determined their method of inquiry. Their work relies on the assumption of a common shared medium – one that enables crossovers between such heterogeneous domains as art and physics, literature and biology. Around 1900, this medium is conceived as an aerial environment that can mediate between the most disparate objects and that entwines notions of a concrete biological milieu, a social environment, and an interdisciplinary medium. The project explores not only why biological forms of habitation become prevalent in art-historical and literary texts; it asks what these texts reveal about the knowledge transfer between art, literature, and biology at the time.

Yoon H. Choi
A Kantian Theory of Self-Knowledge

Yoon H. Choi received her PhD from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation, Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness, traced the development of Kant's doctrine of inner sense and the emergence of the notion of apperception in the pre-Critical years. It culminated in a study of the relation between inner sense, apperception, and freedom (both spontaneity and autonomy) in the Critical period. Her doctoral research was supported by the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In her time at CHAT, she intends to explore whether the kind of self-consciousness Kant thinks we possess is robust enough to support self-knowledge, and if so, what kinds of self-knowledge we can lay claim to. We can know what we are (presently) thinking; perhaps we can know what we believe; but can we ever know what we intend or will or have intended or have willed? Yoon is also interested in the nature of memory; the relations between memory, consciousness, and selfhood; and the explanatory and justificatory roles of memory-claims.

Natalie M. Léger
A Tragedy of Success!: Haiti and the Promise of Revolution

Natalie M. Léger received her PhD in English from Cornell University and her B.A in English and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. Her primary area of research is Caribbean and postcolonial literature and theory with an emphasis on the historical narrative and poetics. Her scholarship and teaching interests also include the literature of the Black Diaspora, Haitian literature and culture, Black women writers and feminist theory as well as questions of alternative modernities. As a fellow at Tufts, she is completing a book manuscript that is an extension of her doctoral research tentatively titled, “‘A Tragedy of Success!’: Haiti and the Promise of Revolution.” Focused on the centrality of Haiti to the Caribbean literary imaginary, this project closely assesses how Caribbean writers and thinkers reconcile the incongruity of Haiti’s post revolutionary hardships with that of its revolutionary glory within modernity, a discourse explicitly concerned with progress. In addition to a book reviewed published in the Journal of Haitian Studies, she currently has an article forthcoming in the edited collection, LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES: Critiques of Contemporary Cinema, Literatures, Politics and Revolution.