Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows:
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.
Rosemary Hicks
Everyday
Ethics and the Limits of Liberalism: Enacting Muslim Moderation
through American Gendered Jihad
Rosemary R. Hicks earned her PhD in the North American Religions
subfield of the Columbia University Department of Religion with a focus on Islam in
the United States and a dissertation titled, "Creating an Abrahamic
America and Moderating Islam: Cold War Political Economy and
Cosmopolitan Sufis in New York after 2001." Her project at CHAT
extends this research on how various groups enact Americanness and
"moderation" by forming shifting alliances around civic or political
issues related to religious and ethnic diversity and disagreements
over secularism, gender, and sexuality. A three-time recipient of
the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Lebanon), Hicks
was also a 2007-2008 American Fellow with the American Association
of University Women and a 2007-2009 Mellon Fellow with the Institute
for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.
In addition to works in edited volumes (After Pluralism: Columbia, 2010;
The Politics of Religion Making: Oxford, forthcoming), she has published
in The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture (2008), American Quarterly (2007),
Comparative Islamic Studies, and the Journal of Feminist Studies
in Religion (2004, New Scholar Award.
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.
Sasha Senderovich

The Red Promised Land: Cultural Mobility and the Soviet
Jewish Experience
I received my Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard.
My dissertation focused on the early Soviet period, when official
ideologies promoted, as part of the nationalities policy, the physical
and ideological settlement of perennially itinerant Jews within the
socialist collective. The texts and films (in Russian and Yiddish) that
I examined, while appearing to conform to a vision of the USSR as a
Promised Land for the Jews, use narratives and tropes of mobility to
suggest lingering displacement and the instability of an apparently
firm ideology. While at CHAT, I am revising my dissertation for publication.
I see four temporal focal points in my book: the 1920s and the 1930s,
when ethnographic and political discourses defined Jews as a settled Soviet
nation while fictional texts and films questioned this notion; late Stalinism,
when Jews were labeled “rootless cosmopolitans” and questions of mobility re-emerged;
the period after 1967 when the Jewish Question re-surfaced in the Soviet Union and
cast doubt on earlier claims of settledness and belonging; and the late 1980s and
the early 1990s, when a substantial number of films and televised plays on Jewish
subjects flooded Soviet screens and were treated as a prism onto the inter-ethnic
strife in the collapsing Soviet empire. This project will look synchronically at
each of these historical moments and diachronically at a number of key recurring
cultural sites—such as the courtyard, the border, and the train journey—around which
texts about Jewish mobility accumulate. A project about Jews is ultimately a project
about the Soviet Union and its minorities. Therefore, I see this study as an opportunity
to further explore multiple aspects of Soviet and Russian culture more generally throughout
the 20th and into the 21st century.
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