Global Urban Humanities Fellows

Charisma Acey

City and Regional Planning
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Charisma Acey is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance and access to basic services. Charisma’s work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities.

Heba Al Najada

Architecture
2020 Global Urban Humanities Student Fellow

“Spaces of Hospitality:  Humanitarian Refugee Camps and Other Traditions of Sanctuary in Jordan”

In the wake of the Syrian civil war, from the particular context of Jordan, this project investigates two contrasting cultures of hosting people displaced by war and violence. To do this, I move between two related and yet very different sites in a history of hosting migrants. First, I look at institutional practices of humanitarianism, in which Syrians are hosted in camps set up by the UNHCR near the Syrian-Jordanian border since 2012. Then, shifting the lens to Islamic and Arab traditions, I examine practices of hosting and integration active in the shadows of humanitarian institutions in the context of a Palestinian informal camp in the center of Amman. I take particular interest in the relationship between refugees and the diverse range of built environments they inhabit, imagine and transform—whether ‘universal’ caravans, self-built houses, or even the destroyed houses they left behind.

Brittany Birberick

Anthropology
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Sight of the Factory: Eluding Success and Failure in Jeppestown, South Africa”

Brittany Birberick’s research focuses on factory spaces as key sites of urbanization, transformation, and development in Johannesburg at a moment in which local and global social and economic forces are influencing a re-imagining of the remaining colonial and apartheid structure of the city. She examines the multiple temporalities and flows of materials and migration that define this area in a moment of transformation.

Kevin Block

Rhetoric
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Drawn Apart: Abstraction and the Formation of Architectural Expertise in Postbellum New York”

Kevin Block’s dissertation aims to rewrite a pivotal moment in the disciplinary history of American architecture by positing professionalism as an effect rather than a cause of architecture’s academicization, a process ultimately undergirded by the increasing division of mental and manual labor in the city. 

Anna Brand

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

“The Imaginary of Renewal and Revitalization”

Anna Brand is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. Her research focuses on the intersection of race and space, specifically looking at historic black mecca neighborhoods and how they change through processes of gentrification and resistance. Her comparative research focuses on cities in the American North and South, including New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and New York. This work highlights the ongoing spatial impacts of racial processes and resistance to these processes over time and evaluates the role that urban planning and design plays.

Katherine Bruhn

South and Southeast Asian Studies
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Minangkabau Artists in Indonesia’s Art World: The History of a Creative Ecosystem”

Katherine Bruhn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research focuses on the history of Indonesian modern and contemporary art, examined through the lens of a specific ethnic group, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, as a means to articulate how local, transnational, and global networks have contributed to the production of creative ecosystems, from the early 20th century until now. Katherine’s research stems from a long engagement with artists in the Southeast Asian region, Indonesia specifically.

Danika Cooper

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Danika Cooper is a landscape designer, urbanist, and researcher. Her work focuses on giving expression to underrepresented materials and methods in the practice, theory, and representation of landscape architecture. Her current research explores the relationship between water management and weather patterns in the world’s deserts.

Greig Crysler

Architecture
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Professor C. Greig Crysler holds the Arcus Chair for Gender, Sexuality and the Built Environment. His research focuses on the theories and practices of architecture, urbanism and the built environment in the context of globalization, activism and the politics of cultural identity. His research is currently divided into two major areas. In the first, he has been concerned with rethinking the histories, epistemologies and practices of architectural theory. The other major strand of Crysler’s research explores how architecture participates in social forces, such as neoliberal globalization, nationalism and nationhood, collective violence and the spatial politics of urban life.  He is currently completing a comparative analysis of national memorials and museums organized around representations of collective violence and trauma. 

Nadia Ellis

English
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Nadia Ellis specializes in African diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures. Her research traces the trajectories of literary and expressive cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and she is most intellectually at home at various intersections: between the diasporic and the queer; imperial identification and colonial resistance; performance and theory; migrancy and domesticity. Nadia teaches classes on postcolonial literature and the city, black diasporic culture, queer theory, and US immigrant literature.

Julia Fawcett

Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Julia Fawcett’s interests include Restoration and eighteenth-century theater and performance, performance historiography, the intersections between literature and performance, autobiographical performance, urban space, celebrity, gender, and disability studies. She is working on a second book, tentatively titled Unmapping London: Performance and Urbanization after the Great Fire, which uses performance records as well as medical treatises, conduct books, dancing manuals, and legal records to explore how ideas of personal space changed in London in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, with the professionalization of architecture and urban planning, and amid an influx of immigration.

Daniel Fisher

Anthropology
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Daniel Fisher is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department whose research is broadly concerned with questions of mobility, media, and urbanization in Aboriginal Australia. His current research centers processes of Indigenous urbanization in the Northern Territory, drawing on ethnography, collaborative media production, and archival research to better understand new forms of Indigenous urban life and related forms of policing and spatial segregation this has entailed. This ongoing work foregrounds the place of mobile media and infrastructure in the Aboriginal negotiation of cities and analyzes the reconfiguration of Indigenous sovereign claim that such urbanization has entailed. Fisher also pursues ethnographic video, photography, and sound production as a focus of his teaching and also as research methods and representational practices in the context of his fieldwork. 

In addition to work in Northern Australia, he has conducted research in New York City and Peru, and in 2001 produced an ethnographic documentary under the auspices of the Program in Culture and Media titled “A Cat in a Sack.” 

Catherine Flynn

English
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Catherine Flynn works on British and Irish modernist literature. Her book project, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, reads Ulysses and Finnegans Wake alongside Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, considering Joyce and Benjamin’s radical rejections of the conventions of fiction and theory within a context of urban writing that ranges from nineteenth-century realist fiction to twentieth-century surrealist works.

Flynn joined the Department of English in 2012. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities Program from 2009 to 2012. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2009 and her B.A. in English and Philosophy from University College Cork in 2000. She practiced as an architect in Ireland and in Vienna, Austria; she has a B.Arch from University College Dublin.

Giuseppina Forte

Architecture
2020 Global Urban Humanities Student Fellow

“The Frontier Periphery: Radical Politics, Urban Models, and Technologies of Racialized Poverty in São Paulo”

The ‘frontier periphery’ of São Paulo is a fragmented territory at the city margins, where profiles of poverty intersect with overlapping systems of discrimination: race, gender, and physical vulnerability. This research explores the historical interconnectedness of the ‘frontier’ with multiple geographic and imagined centers under different political conjunctures (populism and development, military regime, democratization) and systems of power (state, church, drug trafficking). I first analyze center-periphery interactions in terms of land, architecture, and public spaces as contributions to periphery-driven politics and subjectivities. I then study the critical role of the periphery in generalizing urban models and architecture practices informed by the will to reform or empower an essentialized poor. I finally examine the racialized relationship of colonial origin between the Biennalization of the frontier periphery and the production of universal identities for architecture and planning consumption—including the ‘global’ poor, slums, and favelas.

Mark Goble

English
2020 Global Urban Humanities Faculty Fellow

“Slow Cities”

Mark Goble received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002. His research focuses on the connections between literature and other media technologies from the late 19th-century to the present. He is the author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (Columbia), and has published essays in journals such as ELH, MLQ, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Literature.  He teaches courses on U.S. poetry and visual culture, film and media theory, the New York School, and on such figures as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He is currently at work on a book entitled Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, which explores the systemic relation between the experience of slowness and the limits of high technology across a range of film, literature, and new media art.

David Henkin

History
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

David Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches about nineteenth-century America. He is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York and The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Since David Henkin joined the History faculty at Berkeley in 1997, he has taught and written about the sorts of subjects that rarely make it into traditional textbooks. He has offered entire courses on baseball, Broadway, consumption, time, leisure, newspapers, world cities, and urban literature, while publishing books and essays about street signs, paper money, junk mail, and intimate correspondence in the nineteenth century. But the task of integrating that kind of material into the traditional narrative of the American past has been the singular challenge of his professional life.

Henrike Lange

History of Art and Italian Studies
2020 Global Urban Humanities Faculty Fellow

“Padua–Rome–Jerusalem: A Northern Italian Itinerary from the Jubilee of 1300 in Rome to the Ancient Roman-Jewish War in Jerusalem”

Henrike Christiane Lange holds a joint appointment in UC Berkeley’s Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies. She specializes in Italian and European medieval and early modern art, architecture, history, visual culture, and literature in relation to the Mediterranean. She has a second area of expertise in nineteenth and twentieth century historiography, literature, and art in Europe and the United States. Her scholarship focuses on questions of perspective, narrative, medium, materiality, and spirituality in specific historical contexts. Lange is currently working on a monograph on Giotto’s Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) and the Roman Jubilee of 1300.

Xander Lenc

Geography
2020 Global Urban Humanities Student Fellow

“The Earthly City: Urbanity, Infrastructure and Labor in the California Penitentiary”

What is the relationship between California’s urban development and the management of the prisons along the city’s margins? My work points to moments where wardens, policymakers, and activists borrow concepts from urban debates about security, density, and human behavior to manage or reform prisons. Furthermore, my research assesses the importance of prisoner labor for the development of dams, power stations, and other forms of infrastructure on the fringe of the urban network.

Annie Malcolm

Anthropology
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Wutong, Shenzhen: Where Tradition Meets the Future – An Ethnography of a Chinese Art Village

Annie Malcolm’s dissertation investigates urbanization, experimentation and self-fashioning in contemporary China through ethnography of an art village in Shenzhen. Her research is based on fifteen months of fieldwork analyzing the relationship between the works and lives of artists and their broader urban village and art village contexts as these shifting and emergent categories play out in Shenzhen.

Thomas McEnaney

Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

“Hand-to-Hand Media: New Digital Infrastructures in Cuba”

Thomas McEnaney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese. His work emphasizes the connections between Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, the history of media and technology, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities and new media studies.

Amani Morrison

African American Studies
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Domestic Architecture and Spatial Performance in Great Migration Chicago, 1940-1959”

Amani Morrison’s research lies at the convergences of black cultural studies, twentieth-century African American literature, race and space studies, and performance studies. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between nation and home, analyzing key sites and practices of home-making produced by black migrants to Chicago’s South Side as they navigated various modes of exclusion from the nation.

Louise Mozingo

Landscape Architecture
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Louise Mozingo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. She is a member of the Graduate Group in Urban Design of the College of Environmental Design and Director of the American Studies program of the College of Letters and Sciences. Fundamental to her dedication to landscape architecture and landscape architecture education is a commitment to the collective public landscape. Mozingo’s latest book, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes(MIT Press), won 2011 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category, the 2014 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians for the best book in landscape history, and an American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Communications in 2014.

Isobel Palmer

Slavic
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Vital Signs: Rhythm, Trope and Voice in Russian Modernism, 1905-1930″

Isobel Palmer’s work examines the urban landscape through the prism of poetic form to offer a new account of St. Petersburg/Leningrad’s entry into technologized urbanism. 

Will Payne

Geography
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Algorithmic Gentrification: Assembling Place in Urban Information Systems since 1980”

Will Payne is investigating the historical development of urban information systems since the 1980s in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area from the first “crowd-sourced” restaurant guide incorporating computationally aggregated ratings, the Zagat Survey, to contemporary mobile applications that link amenity data to real estate value. His research examines how users employ these platforms to understand, record, and shape their experiences, while developers focus on commodifying location data and urban consumption spaces, in accelerating cycles of gentrification and displacement. 

Rina Priyani

Architecture
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Bandung Visionaries: Builders, Brokers, and Women in the Postcolonial City”

Rina Priyani’s research focuses on the urban history of Bandung when it hosted the first Asian-African Conference in 1955 and became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement. She looks at various figures took part in the life of the city as architects, builders, citizens, politicians, and visionaries of the postcolonial world. She thinks of the urban transformation through the roles of gender and ethnicity under late Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and post-Independence Indonesia.

Trude Renwick

Architecture
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Consuming the City—Examining the Everyday Space of Bangkok’s Retail Center”

Trude Renwick’s dissertation examines the everyday life of Bangkok’s commercial center, the Siam Square and Ratchaprasong Area, focusing on both the architectural and urban forms that constitute it and the human activities that define it. Her investigation of the unique mixture of history and politics, spiritual beliefs, and the built environment that constitutes Bangkok’s commercial landscape will contribute empirically to the literature on Southeast Asian cities. Her dissertation is based off of over two years of fieldwork in Bangkok.

Valentina Rozas-Krause

Architecture
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“Archaeologies of Urban Memory: Berlin, Santiago, and California”

Valentina Rozas-Krause’s dissertation focuses on the representation of memories of twentieth century traumas in public urban space in Santiago, Berlin and California. Rozas-Krause is an architect originally from Chile whose projects share an interest in unveiling the relationship between space, aesthetics, and power. 

Scott Saul

English
2017 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Professor Scott Saul’s interests run to the great cultural watershed that was modernism in the arts — whether it took the form of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Charlie Chaplin’s films, or Duke Ellington’s music — and to the starburst of creative activity that has followed up to the present. His work is especially focused on the connections between 20th-century artistic movements and 20th-century social movements — or, on the individual level, how particular artists are catalyzed by the history they are living through. Saul teaches courses in 20th-century American literature and cultural history, ranging from “The Culture of the Cold War” and “The Seventies” to “Fictions of Los Angeles,” “American Avant-Gardes” and “Race and Performance in the 20th-century U.S.”.  Saul is the host of the books-and-arts podcast “Chapter & Verse.”

Andrew Shanken

Architecture
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

Andy Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, visionary architecture and world’s fairs, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; keywords in architecture and American culture; and consumer culture and architecture. Andy is interested in historiography, particularly of architectural history, and the intersection of popular culture and architecture.

Desmond Sheehan

Music
2020 Global Urban Humanities Student Fellow

“Sacred Harmonies, Urban Space: Music and Religion in Berlin, 1770-1840”

I work on German Protestant music in historical urban environments. My research traces the aesthetic, media, and institutional transformations that musical harmony underwent around Berlin from 1760-1840. The sum total of that history pronounces an emergent secularity unique to the German city.

Shivani Sud

Art History
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Student Fellow

“A New Urban Landscape: Nineteenth-century Jaipur and its Visual Cultures”

Shivani Sud is a PhD student in the History of Art Department, specializing in the visual cultures of South Asia. Her dissertation focuses on the transcultural histories of “miniature” painting in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jaipur, a key center of art experimentations in colonial India.

Neyran Turan

Architecture
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

“Measure for the Anthropocene”

Neyran Turan is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and a partner at NEMESTUDIO. Turan’s work draws on the relationship between geography and design to highlight their interaction for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Her current work speculates on the role of architectural representation in relation to climate change and on new conceptions of the ordinary and the familiar in architecture.

Bryan Wagner

English
2020 Global Urban Humanities Faculty Fellow

“Slavery and Conspiracy in the Age of Revolution”

Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (2009), The Tar Baby: A Global History (2017), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (2019).

Laurie Wilkie

Anthropology
2018 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Fellow

Laurie Wilkie is an anthropological archaeologist whose research has focused on understanding 19th- and 20th-century life in the United States and Caribbean, combining documentary and material sources of evidence to understand the recent past. Her current research (with Dr. Dan Hicks, Oxford University) explores the history of the modern preservation movements in New York City and London. This research aims to rewrite traditional narratives of historical preservation, acknowledging the significance of the past to the practice of modern urbanism in the 20th century, using methods from historical archaeology and anthropological material culture studies to contribute to current debates over the material remains of the modern city.

Nathaniel Wolfson

Spanish & Portuguese
2020 Global Urban Humanities Faculty Fellow

“Poetry, Cybernetics and the Design of Brazil’s Avant-garde”

Nathaniel Wolfson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. His work focuses on Latin American and particularly Brazilian literature, critical theory and the history of media and technology. He is currently working on a book manuscript on post-war Brazilian aesthetics and connections between avant-garde poetry and cybernetic thought. 

Jonathan Zwicker

East Asian Languages and Cultures
2019 Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Faculty Fellow

“Tokyo Between the Quakes: A Cultural Atlas of the City, 1855-1923”

Jonathan Zwicker is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research is a digital project intended to provide a new set of tools and an analytical framework for thinking about the history of Tokyo across the last half of the 19th and into the 20th century. The idea of a cultural atlas of the city grows out of his longstanding interest in literature, theater, and cultural history of Japan’s 19th century.