2012-2013 FELLOWS
Mike Black
Department of English
My research focuses on the cultural history of computing, particularly on the way software interfaces shape our ability to identify and to consider the implications of ubiquitous computing. To this end, I am interested in exploring the assumptions underlying usability testing that are drawn from cognitive science and considering the power structures those assumptions produce between software's developers and users. Recently, my work has also involved contextualized close readings of source code and the production of textmining tools.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Department of History
Histories of labour and commodities constitute the broader span of my work. I specifically focus on networks of circulation and exchange between South Asia and the rest of the world in the Indian Ocean under British colonial rule. The central theme of my research connects use-based cultures around intoxicants like opium and cannabis, to the changes in the patterns of consumption that accompany them as labour and the commodity itself traverses transnational distances. The effect of intoxication on the body of both the individual and the collective within complicated registers of identities is what I seek to unpack using different interdisciplinary approaches bridging history and geography with cognitive sciences.
Christine Hedlin
Department of English
I am interested in the relationship between neuroscience and religion as depicted in contemporary American fiction. I seek particularly to explore the tension between theories of neuroscientific materialism and people’s (often theologically-grounded) experiences of having nonmaterial souls or selves. Some of my related interests include neuroscientific versus theological perspectives on determinism, human fallibility, and moral guilt. I uphold fiction as a fruitful ground for comparing these scientific and theological theories because of fiction writers’ liberty to consider the theories in circulation—that is, at work among the social beings of their eras.
Brandon Jones
My research focuses on intersections between cognitive science, neuroscience, and quantum physics in order to explore intimate relations among mind, matter, and subjectivity in 20th and 21st century transatlantic fiction. In particular, I am interested in how quantum physics’ principles of entanglement and complementarity challenge and buttress the dynamics of complex systems theory and phenomenological philosophies of mind that inform contemporary humanities approaches to neural physiology and cognitive ecology. Most recently, I have been invoking Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism to examine representations of the relationship between cognition and the nonhuman in the novels of Richard Powers.
Donald McLawhorn
East Asian Languages and Cultures
“Modern Chinese cultural studies” makes up a broad field for those in the humanities and the social sciences. I study modern Chinese cultures with the current aim of trying to understand how illness and disease (in the context of western, biomedicine) are conceptualized in East Asia. This includes representations in literature as well as professional constructions in Chinese and Japanese neurology and psychiatry since the early 20th century.
Zhiying Qian
East Asian Languages and Cultures
My research investigates if second language learners process non-native linguistic input in real-time qualitatively or quantitatively different from native speakers. More specifically, my projects examine how Chinese L2 learners at different proficiency levels and with different working memory capacities use sentential cues to arrive at correct sentence interpretation after encountering difficulties at some point of an ambiguous sentence. The experimental methodologies I have used are self-paced reading, in which reading time of each word is recorded, eye-tracking paradigm, which records eye-movements during silent reading, and electroencephalography, from which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can be measured to provide neurophysiological evidence to L2 processing mechanism.
2012-2013 FELLOWS