About
Postdoctoral Associates
2017–2018 Postodoctoral Associates. Photo by Michael Marsland.
About
Postdoctoral Associates
From 2015-2018, the Yale University Digital Humanities Laboratory partnered with academic departments on campus to support 2–3 postdoctoral associates each year. During their appointments, postdocs both participated in the intellectual life of the lab and also pursued independent digital humanities research that was relevant to their discipline.
Along with receiving dedicated workspace in the Digital Humanities Lab, postdoctoral associates also had 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
Nadya Bair, American Studies. 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.
Damon Crockett, Computer Science. 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. Damon is developing a set of flexible software tools for the direct visualization of image data.
Gabor M. Toth, History; Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Formerly a fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, Gabor Toth joined the DHLab in October 2017. His background spans both Digital Humanities and History. Gabor is working on a digital platform that will enable the exploration of a large-scale collection of interviews of Holocaust survivors.
2016–2017
Jonathan Schroeder, 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.
Robin Seguy, Comparative Literature. 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.
2015–2016
Carol Chiodo, Italian. 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.
Gideon Fink Shapiro, American Studies. 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.