Fellows

Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities 2015 -16 Dan-el Padilla Peralta studies the history of the Roman Republic and Empire, with a particular focus on trends in religious practice. He received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 2014 and holds previous degrees from Princeton and Oxford. While at Stanford, he held the university’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, intended to reward and encourage work across the disciplines.

Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities 2015 - 16 Rebecca Woods received her PhD from MIT’s History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society Graduate Program in 2013. Woods’s research explores the intersections of science, environment and the economy in the context of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century.

Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities 2015 - 16 Grant Wythoff is a Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and a Lecturer in English at Columbia University interested in the history and theory of media technologies, twentieth century American literature, digital methods, and science fiction.

Eliza Zingesser is a specialist of medieval French and Occitan literature. She was formerly a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2012-2013) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa (2013-2014). She is particularly interested in issues of cultural and linguistic contact, gender and sexuality, and animal studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French. Stolen Song documents for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song. Her Heyman Center project, Borderlands: Intercultural Encounters in the Medieval Pastourelle, shows how pastoral literature became a privileged site for medieval French explorations of cultural and linguistic difference. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Modern Philology, MLN, and New Medieval Literatures. She recently won the Society for French Studies’ Malcolm Bowie Prize for the best article by an early career researcher for her article, “Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania.”