Postdoctoral Fellows

Nicolette I. Bruner is an interdisciplinary literary scholar whose research focuses on nonhuman personhood from the nineteenth century to the present. She received her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Her book examines how the human community incorporates "thing people"—a category that includes corporations, animals, plants, artificial intelligence, and more. She teaches widely in American literature, posthumanism, biopolitics, environmental studies, and legal studies.

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Alex Campolo studies the history of media, technology, and science, with an interest in epistemologies of data. At SIFK he is working on a book project on the history of data visualization, showing how a group of scientists worked against the formal, algorithmic rationality of the Cold War period, turning instead to human perception and visual techniques to manage new scales of digital information. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and teaches widely in the history of science, philosophy, and visual culture.

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Anastasia Klimchynskaya’s research brings together literary theory, sociology, and neuroscience to study how storytelling and narrative shape what (we believe) we know about the world. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the way science fiction emerged as a literary form in the nineteenth century to express a new social and technoscientific paradigm. Her book project extends this work into the twenty-first century, using the two periods as foils for each other to examine how our fictions shape the innovation, use, and understanding of technoscientific advancements – and, in turn, how these advancements shape the very form of the stories we tell.

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Alex Mazzaferro is a scholar of early American literature working at the intersection of the history of science and the history of political thought. His current book project offers a new account of the English colonization of the Americas informed by the early modern prohibition on "innovation," once a pejorative synonym for rebellion. The book argues that the assertion of Euro-Christian sovereignty in the New World served to rehabilitate the idea of human-led change by generating an empirical approach to political knowledge modeled on natural science. Alex earned his Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 2017 and recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Philosophical Society. 

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Yan Slobodkin is a historian of modern Europe, with a focus on French colonial and transnational history. His current book project is a history of famine in 19th- and 20th century North Africa, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, and its relationship to changing ideas of scientific control, political obligation, and humanitarian ethics. He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and his B.A. in history and French from Oberlin College. 

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Joe Stadolnik studies the language practices of medieval science as a repertoire of styles and genres for use across Middle English literary culture (ca. 1350-1500). His research at the Stevanovich Institute will trace how certain textual forms and rhetorical postures circulated among popular modes of vernacular writing (like poetry, preaching, and drama) and practical-scientific ones (for instance, the medical translator's prologue, the recipe collection, or the alchemist's confidence routine).

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Isaiah Lorado Wilner is a historian of knowledge who specializes in cultural and intellectual history, cultural theory, media and material culture, the history of human science, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of a work of media history, The Man Time Forgot (HarperCollins, 2006), the editor of Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale, 2018), and a recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians. Wilner’s research uncovers the global interactions of state and nonstate knowledge systems, and he is now completing a book, developed from his dissertation at Yale, about the influence of indigenous knowledge on modern social thought. At the Stevanovich Institute, Wilner offers courses in entangled history; subjectivity and symbolism; body knowledge; multispecies knowledge; and history, memory, and modernity.

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