As the Society of Fellows enters its 10th year, five new postdoctoral scholars have arrived on campus.
Part of the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, the three-year fellowship program provides members with time and funding to advance their studies, exchange ideas, and help teach undergraduate courses with support from the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.
Sharing their expertise with faculty and students in the Departments of Anthropology, Studio Art, Religion, Philosophy, and Sociology, the 2024 cohort will join six other postdocs and nine faculty fellows in the Society.
“As the Society of Fellows has evolved over the past decade, we consistently find that engaging with members’ diverse interests in interdisciplinary discussions challenges all of us to expand the boundaries of our own research,” says Emily Walton, faculty director of the Society and an associate professor of sociology.
“Like the fellows who came before them, these young scholars will invigorate and enliven the conversations among faculty across the college, as well as bring new ideas and methods into our classrooms. Their incredibly diverse interests range from the study of caste pain among Dalits in India to new materialism in architectural design to the logic and the philosophy of mathematics.”
Meet the new fellows:
PhD, Rutgers University
Dissertation: And now I have male privilege! Trans Accounts of the Precarity of Privilege Maintenance
Beck’s interests lie in formal theory construction around social patterns of privilege, power, and inequality. For her dissertation, she conducted in-depth interviews with transgender people who have experienced being perceived on both sides of the gender binary. She explores such issues as who has access to male privilege, whether privilege is fixed or dynamic, and the sociomental and intersubjective process of assigning privilege, particularly when there are socially incompatible characteristics. Her recent article, “Mononormativity: The Social Elevation of the Singular,” argues that “mononormativity,” defined as the “normativity of one-ness and singularity” in contemporary U.S. society, reflects the basic ideals of how society is organized. Beck is working on a book further developing that theory. She enjoys teaching courses related to gender, sexuality, race, and mental health.
“I am passionate about changing society through education, and I believe that the success of my students is the motivation for my own success,” she says.
PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Architecture
Dissertation: A Woven Theory of Architecture: A Counter-Canonical Reading of Vitruvius
A designer, educator, and scholar of architectural history and theory, Dortdivanlioğlu locates his scholarship at the intersection of craft, architecture, and technology, focusing on how established frameworks have historically separated theoretical knowledge from material and embodied processes in architectural discourse. Having earned his PhD as a 2024 Fulbright scholar, he critiques the canonical foundations of the architectural discipline, addressing the exclusionary practices that have shaped the field. His current book project, Toward a Woven Theory of Architecture, builds on his doctoral dissertation by broadening the counter-canonical analysis of Vitruvius to examine how the marginalization of manual labor in Vitruvian theory reflects broader social hierarchies. It argues for a more inclusive model that reconciles intellectual work with the embodied, material processes of making.
“Building upon the historiographical focus of this book, my work also explores the relationship between architects and their tools, examining how designers can critically and thoughtfully engage with emerging technologies to enrich architectural practice,” he says.
PhD, University of Pittsburgh
Dissertation: Logic, Arithmetic, and Definitions
Mackereth works on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the history of analytic philosophy. He has written about neo-Fregean logicism, Gödel’s Dialectica translation, and theories of truth. His research flows from an effort to understand the great foundational debate in mathematics between logicists and constructivists at the turn of the 20th century.
“I enjoy thinking about logical and semantic paradoxes; about the notions of proof, truth, computation, and definition; and about the nature and role of foundations in mathematics,” says Mackereth.
PhD, Princeton University
Dissertation: Dying of Casteism: On Queer Socio-Poetics and the Embodied Violence of Caste in Contemporary India
A sociocultural anthropologist, Pandhi is working on a book that critically analyzes the intersections of caste, racialization, sexuality, gender, and health in contemporary South Asia. Developing an understanding of these phenomena that is ethnographic and embodied, and at the same time committed to anti-colonial possibilities of repair and redress, his research radically cross-pollinates critical caste studies, critical race studies, Black-feminist, Dalit, and queer and sexuality studies. It relies on decolonial medical anthropology to theorize in novel ways the visceral and sensorial maneuvers of everyday life through which structural casteism and adjacent forms of racialization literally get under the skin of individual and collective existence. Pandhi is also an award-winning anti-caste literary translator, and the editor-translator of a forthcoming anthology of Dalit-feminist stories that he collected from his interlocutors during fieldwork in India, Love in the Time of Caste (2024).
“I am committed to decolonizing race and caste, critically provincializing queer theory and radically challenging (inter)disciplinary normativities and engrained epistemological hierarchies,” he says.
PhD, Emory University
Dissertation: Islamic Period: Menstruation and Muslims in Pakistan
Rahman grew up in Pakistan, earning her undergraduate degree from the Lahore University of Management Sciences and her MA from the National University of Singapore. She explores the relationship between menstrual biology and religion, anchoring it on the vast corpus of Islamic menstruation laws, which are an integral facet of the Islamic tahārah system. Rahman believes in using ethnography to go beyond the usual stories of hardship, ignorance, and malpractice associated with women in the Global South. She employs long-engagement participant-observation to interrogate notions of “objectivity” in developmental and feminist imperatives of menstrual care. By juxtaposing her fieldwork findings with Islamic menstrual discourses which are meaningful to women in the local Pakistani context, she aspires to create nuanced thinking tools related to menstruation. Currently, she is working on a paper about the link between menstruation and monsters for an edited collection titled Muslim Horror.
“At my core, I am an anthropologist of Islam, fascinated by paradoxes of speech and silence as they apply to notions of menstrual purity in the lives of Muslim women in Pakistan,” she says. “I like to brainstorm about how menstruation can be addressed in culturally sensitive, comfortable, and meaningful ways.”
