Yale DHLab - Postdoctoral Associates

About

Postdoctoral Associates

2017–2018 Postodoctoral Associates. Photo by Michael Marsland.

About

Postdoctoral Associates

Since 2015, the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab has partnered with academic departments on campus to support 2–3 postdoctoral associates. During their appointments, each postdoc both participates in the intellectual life of the lab and also pursues independent digital humanities research that is relevant to their discipline.

Along with receiving dedicated workspace in the Digital Humanities Lab, postdoctoral associates also have the opportunity to collabroate with a faculty mentor from their home department, as well as technical staff, including a Digital Humanities Developer and User Experience Designer.

2017–2018

Damon Crockett

Yale appointment in Computer Science
Philosophy and Cognitive Science PhD

Damon Crockett’s present work concerns the role of visual evidence in the social sciences. In particular, he considers the ways in which image data can be used to ground substantive explanations in fields like media studies, cultural studies, and digital art history. During his appointment with the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, Damon plans to develop a set of flexible software tools for the direct visualization of image data. Additionally, he will conduct an in-depth user study aimed at making the tools as useful and learnable as possible.

Nadya Bair

Yale appointment in American Studies
Art History PhD

A historian of photography and the press, Nadya Bair holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California. Her book project, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, examines the role of photo agencies in shaping postwar visual culture. Based on years of research in over a dozen archives around the world, The Decisive Network looks beyond heroic photographers and their iconic images to demonstrate how a range of professionals brought the aesthetic and production mode of news images into multiple markets for photography. Bair has published articles in the journals History of Photography and American Art, and in the edited volumes Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News and Visualizing Fascism (forthcoming). At Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab, Bair will be mining data from thousands of pages of Magnum business correspondence in order to visualize and analyze the full scope of the agency’s networks. Working on a scale that exceeds the limits of chronological and linear narrative, this project will model new ways to study image saturation and the collaborative labor that yielded it.

Gabor Toth

Yale appointment in History
History PhD

Gabor Toth, formerly a fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, joined the DHLab in October 2017. His background spans both Digital Humanities and History. During his dual appointment in the DHLab and Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Gabor will work on a digital tool that will enable the exploration of a big collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Besides, Gabor will prepare a monograph on the computer-assisted analysis of Holocaust interviews.

Postdoctoral Associate Alumni

2016–2017 2015–2016

2016–2017

Jonathan Schroeder, Department of English. Jonathan Schroeder uses the methods of the digital humanist, conceptual historian, and literary scholar to compare how European frameworks of emotion were institutionalized in the Americas. His manuscript, Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, charts the first phase in the globalization of nostalgia, tracking how this medical concept was carried to the New World and used to design new health care systems for slaves and soldiers in America, Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti. By virtue of this process, he argues, nostalgia was transformed from a disease of travel suffered by European ethnics into the exemplary disease of racial captivity in the nineteenth century, one that can potentially help us make sense of present-day scenes of racial and ethnic melancholy. Jonathan's Yale appointment was in English.

Robin Seguy, Comparative Literature Department. Robin Seguy uses genetic criticism and close bibliographic techniques to trace the evolution of modern poetic texts. His work has focused on charging the genetic construction of the poetic corpora of John Ashbery, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Robin's Yale appointment was in English.

2015–2016

Carol Chiodo, Italian Department. Carol Chiodo is a writer, scholar, and educator whose work investigates how the material and structural changes in the reproduction, storage and transmission of texts impact the ways we read, write and learn. She received a Ph.D. degree in Italian Language and Literature with a dissertation on medieval vernacular poetry and the mechanical arts. Carol's Yale appointment was in the Institute of Sacred Music.

Gideon Fink Shapiro, Architecture Department. Gideon earned a Ph.D. in Architecture (history and theory) from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where his dissertation research traced the confluence of garden art and urban planning in the public parks of Paris. His writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architect, Domus, the Guggenheim Blog, Next City, and The Architect’s Newspaper, among other publications. He edited the English-language catalogue of the 2015 Urbanism and Architecture Bi-City Biennale (UABB) of Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and has served as an instructor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Gideon has assisted the curator Aaron Betsky and worked for the architectural design firm of Gabellini Sheppard Associates. He has collaborated with several artists and composers to realize site-specific public art projects. Gideon's Yale appointment was in American Studies.