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.

Margaret Carlyle's research focuses on the production of scientific, medical, and technological knowledge in seventeenth- and eigheenth-century France and its colonies. She is particularly interested in the enterprising efforts of women and other "invisible assistants" in forging scientific careers, both outside of and within institutional settings. Margaret is currently completing two projects. The first is a cultural history of Enlightenment anatomy stemming from her doctoral thesis completed at McGill University (2013). The second is a history of obstetrical technology in early modern Europe. Margaret has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013–15) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota (2015–17). 

Damien Droney received his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, where his research focused on the politics of science, technology, and medicine in postcolonial Africa. While at SIFK, he is revising his dissertation as a book manuscript to be titled Weedy Science: The Meaning of Science in Postcolonial Ghana. The book is an ethnographic study of Ghana’s herbal medicine sector, with a focus on political projects of class, race, and nation that shape the vocation of science in West Africa.

Jennifer P. Daly's book project at SIFK explores the development of evolutionary thought beyond the boundaries of organic species change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her central argument is that the development of evolutionary theories in this period took place across fields of inquiry—including natural history, cosmology, the human sciences, and even theology—and that this interaction was catalyzed by a cultural movement known as Romanticism. More broadly, her research engages with the question of how scientists have adapted and transformed scientific method in response to the challenges of interpreting nature at or beyond the boundaries of observation and experiment. She received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and her A.B. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard College.

Eduardo A. Escobar is a historian and Assyriologist whose research focuses on cuneiform scholarly cultures of the ancient Middle East.  At SIFK, he teaches courses on Babylonian knowledge, historiography, and on scientific knowledge in the premodern world. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication; entitled “The Scribal Craft: Cuneiform Recipe Knowledge and the Language of Technology,” this work details the central role technology played in the construction of scribal knowledge. He recently received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and holds degrees from Columbia University, and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

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).

Isaiah Lorado Wilner is a historian of the United States who specializes in modern intellectual history, transnational history, the history and sociology of science, and settler colonial studies. His 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 people on modern thought. At the Stevanovich Institute, Wilner will offer courses in American intellectual history, the global history of knowledge, narrative studies, and the intersectionalities of race, land, and empire.