Affiliated Postdoctoral Fellows & Visiting Scholars
The Center welcomes the following post-doctoral and visiting scholars from other programs as affiliates of the CSGS. Students should view the schedule for more information on their courses crosslisted with GNSE and those they may teach in the Core. Postdoctoral fellows are also eligible to advise B.A. and M.A. theses.
Post-doctoral scholars are listed alphabetically by school/division - Divinity, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Divinity School
Humanities
Maggie Borowitz
she/her/hers
Humanities Teaching Fellow
Ph.D., Art History, University of Chicago
mkbwitz@uchicago.edu
Maggie Borowitz studies modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her research focuses upon the relationship between art and politics in the late twentieth century, with special emphasis upon feminist practices in Mexico. She teaches courses that explore twentieth- and twenty-first-century art practices across the Americas and theories of feminism, gender, and sexuality. Her current book project explores the vibrant feminist art scene of 1970s and 80s Mexico City, principally through the work of the artist Magali Lara. Engaging with affect theory and feminist studies, the project investigates the political potency of expressions of female subjectivity. Her research has been supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship. She holds a PhD and an MA in art history from the University of Chicago, as well as a BA in anthropology, also from the University of Chicago.
Noah Hansen 
he/him/his
Teaching Fellow
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Chicago
noahh@uchicago.edu
Noah Hansen received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2022. His research and teaching focus on Caribbean and African American literature and political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on critical theorizations of labor, gender, and political economy in the global colonial periphery. His dissertation traces the emergence of Black working-class internationalism in the interwar period, analyzing how socioeconomic processes of class formation and new forms of transnational literary representation converge to make the generic figure of the “Negro Worker” a defining fulcrum of Black Internationalist political aesthetics. Thinking across economic, political, and cultural spheres, his work takes up the question of how class becomes genre in Black Atlantic literature. Hansen is also currently engaged in archival research and writing on the literature of the Marcus Garvey movement.
Jordan Johansen 
she/her/hers
Teaching Fellow in the Humanities
Ph.D., Classics (Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World), University of Chicago
jjohansen@uchicago.edu
Jordan Johansen (she/her/hers) received her PhD in Classics (Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World) from the University of Chicago in 2022. She is a scholar and teacher of ancient Mediterranean history, culture, and literature with a focus on Greco-Roman Egypt, gender and sexuality, environmental history, borders and cross-cultural interactions, papyrology, and classical reception. Her current book project Flooding Borders: Imagined Spaces between Egypt and Nubia in the Greco-Roman Period draws on a diverse range of evidence to re/de/construct the multiplicity of real and conceptual borders accumulated in the physical and imaginary spaces of the Nubian-Egyptian borderlands. In 2022-2023, she is teaching Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations (Fall 2022), Intermediate Greek: Tragedy (Winter 2023), and Monstrous Women in Antiquity (Winter 2023). She received her BA in History, Anthropology, and Music with a minor in Human Rights from Southern Methodist University and studied classical languages at the University of Vermont and the University of Dallas.
Aurore Spiers 
she/her/hers
Humanities Teaching Fellow
Ph.D., Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
aspiers@uchicago.edu
Aurore Spiers (she/her) is a historian of film and media, primarily from Europe and the United States. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from The University of Chicago in 2022. Mainly focused on women’s contributions to cinema, her work interrogates historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional feminism. It asks why women (and other marginalized groups) have so often been forgotten, and what strategies—critical, creative, speculative, etc.—may be employed against historical erasure. Her first book project, based on research from her doctoral thesis, studies women’s labor in French film archives from the 1920s through the 1970s. Her writing, on topics ranging from the reception of The Birth of a Nation (1915) in France to the rediscovery of Alice Guy Blaché within the context of the Women’s Liberation Movement, has appeared in 1895: Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze and Feminist Media Histories. She is also a contributing editor and country coordinator (France) to the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Elizabeth Tavella
she/they
Humanities Teaching Fellow, Romance Languages and Literatures
Ph.D., Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago
etavella@uchicago.edu
Elizabeth Tavella’s research interests focus on comparative studies of literature and critical animal studies, and more broadly on the environmental humanities within intersectional frameworks that draw on queer ecologies, decolonial approaches, and critical theory. Elizabeth is currently finalizing two articles that engage with the emerging field of transecology: the first on reproductive justice and bodily autonomy across species examined through a variety of sources ranging from medical treatises and legislation to literary texts; the second on nonhuman animals, from octopuses to platypuses, who defy classification and challenge the very foundation of category-based epistemology. A new project emerging alongside this research investigates speculative fiction, centered on Indigenous, Black, queer, and trans futurities which aims to explore the intersection between multispecies studies, social justice, and political ecology.
Social Sciences
Michelle Johns 
she/her/hers
Senior Research Scientist, Academic Research Centers, NORC
Ph.D., Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
johns-michelle@norc.org
Michelle M. Johns is a Senior Research Scientist in the Academic Research Centers of NORC at University of Chicago. Dr. Johns' work focuses on how stigma and resilience shape the lives of LGBTQ+ communities, and her research employs qualitative and quantitative methodologies to assess critical questions about LGBTQ+ identities and experiences of minority stress, violence victimization, mental health, and sexual health over the life course. Dr. Johns has worked in multiple institutional settings and across sectors, including the CDC Division of Adolescent and School Health, the Center for Sexuality and Health Disparities at the University of Michigan, and Howard Brown Health Center--a non-profit health organization serving Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community. Dr. Johns holds an MPH and PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan.
keywords: LGBTQ Health, Stigma, Resilience, Health Equity
Jeffrey Lockhart 
he/they
James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Michigan
jlockhart@uchicago.edu
Lockhart is a James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and the Knowledge Lab. He is also an Associate at Harvard University's GenderSci Lab. Lockhart received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, and an MPhil in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the scientific and technical construction of sex and sexual difference.
keywords: sex; gender; sexuality; science and technology studies; sociology of knowledge; computational social science
Tasneem M Mandviwala 
she/they
Postdoctoral Scholar
Ph.D., Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
tasneem@uchicago.edu
Tasneem M. Mandviwala is a cultural and developmental psychologist, intersectional feminist, artist, and activist educator focusing on the identity development and experiential knowledges of marginalized communities in the US. She holds a PhD in comparative human development (University of Chicago) and an MA in English literature (University of Houston). Her work includes a forthcoming book titled South Asian American Stories of Self: The Dis-United States of Muslim Womanhood (Springer 2022), The Invisibility of Power: A Cultural Ecology of Development in the Contemporary U.S.(2021; coauthored with M. B. Spencer and J. Hall), and various community outreach pieces on AltMuslimah.com and Amaliah.com. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Resiliency Initiative (University of Chicago) examining the relationships between male youth of color and law enforcement officers. She also serves as the Advisory Council Coordinator for Silk Road Rising’s think and create tank, Polycultural Institute in Chicago, IL.
Paula Martin 
she/they
Teaching Fellow in Comparative Human Development and the College
Ph.D., Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
paulam@uchicago.edu
Paula is a qualitative social scientist working in the fields of medical anthropology and sociology, gender studies, youth studies, and feminist science and technology studies. She holds a PhD from the Department of Comparative Human Development and a MA from the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her dissertation, "Practicing Gender", examined the interlocking logics of time, gender, and evidence that shape the provision of gender affirming care to young people in the United States. Based in clinical ethnographic observation, her work follows providers and young people as they use the tools of medical and scientific practice to craft livable worlds and envision more liberatory ones. The dissertation considers the specific use of early interventions into gender, such as puberty-suppressing medications and gender-affirming hormones, while also examining clinical research efforts attempting to articulate the impact of those interventions.
Zoya Sameen 
she/her/hers
Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences
Ph.D., History, University of Chicago
zsameen@uchicago.edu
Zoya is a historian of gender, law, and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. Her current book project The Scatter of Empire: Prostitution, Law, and Trouble in Colonial India examines how legislative interventions into prostitution such as regulatory laws, cantonment codes, municipal rules, and border regimes were circumvented and challenged by the Indian and European women they targeted. Pushing against established histories of colonialism, gender, and sexuality in India that have focused on governmental mandates with respect to legislation and codification, her project foregrounds notions of trouble and disruption to present a new reading of colonial interventions into sexuality as they unfolded on the scattered ground of empire. Zoya's research interests also include understanding gender history at the intersection of law, technology, and environment, as well as digitally mapping women's mobility across borders and regions.
Connor Strobel 
he/him/his
Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows
Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Irvine
strobel@uchicago.edu
Professor Connor "Noor" Strobel is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the College, here, at the University of Chicago. A sociologist by training, his research is generally interested in contested identities --- how our identities become sources of personal and group conflict. He is an internationally recognized expert on the social dynamics of eating disorders and has written widely on other topics including the politics of deviance, debates within Islam feminism, and the rules of speech on social media platforms. Professor Strobel’s first co-authored book titled The Politics of “Perverts”: The Political Attitudes and Actions of Non-traditional Sexual Minorities is forthcoming with NYU Press. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Gender Issues, The International Journal of Environmental Science and Public Health, and Sociology Compass. Professor Strobel’s research and student advocacy has been covered by the media outlets such as the LA Times, New York Times, PBS Newshour, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Eating Disorder Association of Ireland.
keywords: Gender; Eating Disorders; Politics and Sexuality; Digital Methods; Islamic Feminism
Thuto Thipe
she/her/hers
Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History
Ph.D., History and African American Studies, Yale University
tthipe@uchicago.edu
Thuto Thipe’s research focuses on social and legal history of 19th and 20th century South Africa. She is interested in how changing conceptualisations of, rights to, and uses of land both shape and reflect different imaginings and meanings of race, gender, citizenship, and class. Her manuscript in progress, Black Freehold: Landownership in Alexandra Township, tells the story of the history of land ownership in Alexandra Township, near Johannesburg, from its founding in 1912 to 1979.The disruption that black people’s freehold land ownership in Alexandra caused to white supremacist order drove the South African state to invest enormous financial resources and political capital in dismantling black freehold rights, physically demolishing large parts of the Township, and forcibly moving tens of thousands of people from Alexandra in efforts to destroy the social, political and economic realities that residents produced under freehold.