Visiting Speakers

Milcah Amolo Achola is currently the Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology at Nairobi University. She specializes in British imperial history, African colonial history, and African economic history. Sshe has published several articles in African Urban Quarterly, including "Poverty, Health and Race in a Colonial Setting: The Case of Maternal and Child Welfare Services," and Preventive Health and Colonial African Urban." She completed her B.A. at the University of Nairobi and received her Ph.D. from Dalhouse University. 

Tal Arbel is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Science at Harvard University.Specialized in the twentieth century history of the social and behavioral sciences, her doctoral dissertation examines the rise to prominence of interdisciplinary institutes for applied social research in postwar American academia, and the subsequent migration of this scientific culture to the postcolonial areas.

Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has served as President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association and was the founding President of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). He was one of the founders, and is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and is the series editor (with Adrienne Harris) of the Relational Perspectives Book Series, Routledge.  He is the author of A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis (The Analytic Press, 1996), and most recently of A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis, with Karen Starr, (Routledge, 2013)

Gareth Austin is the current Head of the International History Department at the Graduate Institute Geneva. His research and teaching interests are in African, comparative and global economic history. His primary research has focused on West Africa, especially Ghana and the pre-colonial kingdom of Asante. A former editor of the Journal of African History, he is currently president of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). He is also on the advisory boards of the Journal of Global History, the new journal Economic History of Developing Regions, and the Brill book series in Global Economic History. 

Erato Basea is a 2012-2014 Stavros Niarchos Postdoctoral Fellow, currently focusing on a book entitled The International Greek Director.

Elif Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker and writer-in-residence at Koç University in Istanbul. Her first book, The Possessed, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, not to mention a runner-up for The Pen/Diamondstein-Speilvogel Award (for upholding the dignity of the essay form). It was also longlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award. Given the sucess following the publishing of The Possessed, it has been translated into several languages.

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona and has taught at Colby College since 1994. Her book Transforming Cape Town received the Leeds Honor Book Award from the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. During the 2012-13 academic year, she completed an ACLS Fellowship at the Heyman Center.

Jeremy Blatter is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. He works at the intersection of the history of science and technology and media studies. His scholarly publications can be found on the pages of Science in Context (March 2015) and Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (Rutgers University Press, September 2015). He is currently working on The Psychotechnics of Everyday Life: Hugo Münsterberg and the Politics of Applied Psychology, 1887-1927 (working title), a book exploring how experimental psychology was transformed from an abstract laboratory science into a robust technology of human behavior with seemingly limitless applications. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Jeremy was a Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard where he was also a research associate with metaLAB and the Sensory Ethnography Lab. He has received research grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science, the Charles Warren Center for North American History, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.