The Michigan Society of Fellows has selected seven new members to serve three-year appointments as postdoctoral fellows and assistant professors at the University of Michigan, beginning this fall.
The fellows were chosen from more than 800 applicants for the importance and quality of their scholarship and for their interest in interdisciplinary work. During their tenure at U-M they will teach selected courses in their affiliated departments and continue their scholarly research.
The Society of Fellows provides financial and intellectual support to individuals selected for their professional promise and interdisciplinary interests.
The new fellows, with their affiliated department at U-M, their degree-granting institution, and their research project are:
Dmitri Brown
American culture, LSA; University of California, Davis; “Tewa Pueblos and the Manhattan Project.”
Brown is earning a Ph.D. in history with a designated emphasis in Native American studies. His dissertation is titled “Tewa Pueblos at the Dawn of Atomic Modernity.”
Elizabeth Durham
Anthropology, LSA; Princeton University; “Minding Time: Healthy Living Amid the Clinic, the Church, and the Home(land) in the Republic of Cameroon”
Durham’s doctoral research examines intersecting impacts of psychiatric treatment, religious belief, and political mobilization for patient health, and of personal health and broader conditions of collective life.
Natalie Hofmeister
Ecology and evolutionary biology, LSA; Cornell University; “Invasive Species”
Hofmeister is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, defending her Ph.D. in. Her work examines the evolutionary, natural, and narrative history of the European starling.
Rijul Kochhar
Anthropology, LSA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; “Science in Waiting: Antibiotic Resistance, Planetary Crisis, and Bacteriophage Futures”
Kochhar is an anthropologist and a historian of science whose research interests include transnational histories of infectious diseases, environmental anthropology, and critical theories of technology, disability and rationality.
Sungwon Park
Nursing; University of Illinois, Chicago; “Development and Pilot Testing of an Intervention to Increase Regular Physical Activity”
Park researches health behavior adherence to prevent chronic disease. She interned at the U.S Occupational Safety and Health Administration and earned her Ph.D. from UIC. She is developing an internet-based exercise and sedentary lifestyle intervention.
Kay Sohini
English language and literature, LSA; and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design; Stonybrook University; “Graphic Medicine, Intersections of Public Health and Climate Change, Medical Humanities”
Sohini is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow, a comics-maker, and a Ph.D. candidate in English, where she is wrapping up her graphic doctoral dissertation, “Drawing Unbelonging.”
Henry Stoll
Music, School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Harvard University; “The Music of Haitian Independence”
Stoll is a musicologist whose work focuses on the cultural history of Haiti and the 18th- and 19th-century French Atlantic.
Fellows appointed in previous years who will continue as members of the Society of Fellows are: Merel van ’t Hoff, astronomy; Ben Green, public policy; Ellen Quarles, molecular, cellular, and developmental biology; Michaela Rife, history of art; Roberto Marquez, ecology and evolutionary biology; Vyta Pivo, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Jessica Ruffin, film, television and media; Jeff Sheng, information.
The Michigan Society of Fellows was founded in 1970 with grants from the Ford Foundation and Horace H. and Mary Rackham Funds. Competition for the fellowships is open to eligible candidates in the physical and life sciences, engineering, the social sciences, education, the humanities and the arts.
