Rustem Ertug Altinay
Performance Studies
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay received his Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in 2016. His research and teaching focus on feminist and queer theory and performance, queer historiography and archival practice, visual culture, critical race theory, and the sexual politics of citizenship, with an emphasis on Turkey. Ertuğ’s essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including the Trans- and Fashion special issues of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Radical History Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, the Journal of Women’s History, and Feminist Media Studies, as well as various anthologies. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, titled Dressing for Utopia: Fashion and the Performance of Citizenship in Turkey (1923-2016). The project analyzes how the definition of the desirable citizen has been contested throughout the Republican history of Turkey, and demonstrates the role of fashion in regulating the politics of belonging in the context of the nation-state.
Ertuğ’s research has been supported by the Turkish Cultural Foundation Doctoral Fellowship in Turkish Culture and Arts and the History Project Research Grant (Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University and University of Cambridge) as well as a number of fellowships from NYU, including the GSAS Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. He has also held residential fellowships at the New Islamic Public Sphere Program at the University of Copenhagen, the Orient-Institute Istanbul, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the Center for Ethics and Poverty Research at the University of Salzburg, the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, and NYU’s research centers in Florence and Washington, DC.
Ertuğ is also a playwright and theater professional with extensive international experience.
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows 2016-2017
Valeria Castelli
Italian Studies
Valeria G. Castelli is a 2016-2017 College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University. Valeria received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. Her dissertation is entitled “Rhetoric, Politics, and Ethics in Contemporary Italian Documentary Film.” Valeria also holds a Laurea (B.A.) in Lettere Moderne (Modern Literature) with a specialization in Philology from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and an M.A. in Italian Studies from the University College of London. Her research interests include documentary film studies, modern and contemporary Italian literature, Italian cinema, media studies, artistic activism and social change. Valeria was a 2015-2016 Public Humanities Fellow at the New York Council for the Humanities and the NYU Center for the Humanities, where she designed and developed a Public Humanities Project in collaboration with the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition (http://rememberthetrianglefire.org/). Valeria is Chief Assistant Editor of the online peer-reviewed journal gender/sexuality/italy (http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/).
Suzy Cater
French
Suzy Cater received her PhD from NYU’s Department of French in 2016. Her current book project analyzes the experimental novels, poetry collections and plays of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, many of which are rarely examined despite Glissant's renown as one of the major black Francophone thinkers and postcolonial theorists of the twentieth century. Other recent research explores the use of cultural festivals and theatrical performance for grassroots activism in the French Antilles, ambivalent depictions of women and gender in Martinican literature, avant-garde collaborations between French post-war poets and African diaspora authors in 1950s Paris, and the early poetry of the activist and philosopher René Ménil. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Romanic Review, Nouvelles Études Francophones, and Dix-huitième Siècle.
Laura Hughes
French
Laura Hughes received her Ph.D. from the Department of French at NYU. She also holds a Master's from the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the Université de Paris 8 (Vincennes/Saint-Denis). Her research explores writing processes and literary artifacts in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, focusing particularly on representations of sexuality. Her book manuscript, titled Living on Paper: Cixous's and Derrida's Archived Friendship, examines the friendship of French writers and philosophers Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida through the lens of their overlapping archives.
David Klassen
Michelle Lanchart
French
Michelle Lanchart is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Department of French. She studies fantastic and supernatural genres, and how they relate to our everyday experience. In her dissertation, “The Re-emergence of the Fantastic in French Novels after 1990,” she explored how the supernatural originates from a human source, rather than from an otherworldly entity, in contemporary French works. Her research interests center on questions of literary representations of reality, both individually and collectively. She is currently working on a project that expands one aspect of this fantastic revival to Kantian metaphysics.
Veronica Murphy
Chemistry
Veronica Murphy completed her PhD from the Department of Chemistry at NYU. Her dissertation, "Optical Activity of Achiral Molecules" aimed to reshape how optical activity is understood and, eventually, taught. Her research focuses on optical rotation in oriented molecules belonging to particular achiral point groups, a set of molecules normally understood not to display this property. By focusing on these molecules and making connections between quantum mechanical calculations and classical physics interpretations, her work also lead to understanding of optical rotation signs and magnitudes based on molecular structure.
Alison Okuda
History
Alison Okuda is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Fellow. In May 2016, she graduated from New York University with a Ph.D. in History. She specializes in relations between people from the Anglophone Caribbean and West Africa during the mid-twentieth century. Her book project, currently titled "Caribbean and African Exchanges: The Post-Colonial Transformation of Ghanaian Music, Identity, and Social Structure," demonstrates that musical spaces and recordings enabled African communities in the UK and Ghana to build relationships with the diaspora that helped to sustain postcolonial development. Such experiences and musical exchanges made the politics of pan-Africanism, the concept of unity between people of African descent, relevant to those who did not have access to elite circles. She has published on the use of historical archives in teaching and is currently writing two articles: one on the changing language used to discuss Ghanaian and diasporic women's respectability, and the other one on the evolution of Ghanaian radio’s cultural programming.
Kimberly Ziegler
Italian Studies
Kimberly Ziegler received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies in 2016. She studies the history and culture of modern Italy, with a particular focus on Naples, history of education, and oral history. Her current book project is about Progetto Chance, an alternative educational program that was active in Naples, Italy from 1998 to 2010. The project explores Chance’s role in contemporary Neapolitan history and Italian traditions of schooling, as well as its legacy in memory. She is also interested in the representation of space in literature and has written on Futurist words-in-freedom poetry. She is the recipient of research fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Northeast Modern Languages Association.