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.