Drs. Katie Kleinkopf and Natalie Polzer named 2023–2024 Bingham Faculty Fellows
Dr. Katie Kleinkopf (L) and Dr. Natalie Polzer (R)
February 27, 2023
We are proud to announce that the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society (CCHS) has selected Drs. Katie Kleinkopf and Natalie Polzer, from the Department of Comparative Humanities, as two of the six Bingham Faculty Fellows for 2023–2024! The fellows will conduct and present original research, play a significant role in shaping CCHS programming, and receive a course release and stipends to support their travel and research.
The 2023–2024 theme will be Bodies and Embodiment. As CCHS notes,
The past few years have highlighted how certain bodies matter; how our embodied awareness shapes how we understand ourselves, our environment, democracy, economy, health care, culture, joy, etc.; and how historical and cultural forces transform, elevate, or even erase certain types of bodies and/or embodiments. These assertations raise questions about what we learn as we attend to how bodies and embodiment are entangled in larger forces.
Dr. Kleinkopf, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, will work on a book manuscript entitled Beyond the Body: Asceticism and the Fight for (Il)Legibility in Late Antique Christianity, which “examines the lives of ancient Christian ascetics from North Africa and the Middle East, who spent most of their lives encased within huts, tombs, or even the hollows of trees.”
Dr. Polzer, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, will undertake a research project entitled The Domesticization of the Dead: Cemetery Practices in Contemporary Palermo, Sicily. She writes, “Ideologies of family and communal memory will be explored through research and participation-observation fieldwork on funerary practices and subsequent commemoration in contemporary Palermo, Sicily.”
The other Bingham Faculty Fellows and their projects will be:
- Joshua Adams (English): Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems
- Yuxin Ma (History): Nation, Market and Femininity: Chinese Sportswomen in the Economic Reform Era
- Olivia Schuman (Philosophy): Compassionate Transfer: An Alternative Method for Disposing of Excess Embryos
- Marc Tamarit-Galdón (Classical and Modern Languages): Beyond the Bodies of LGBTQIA+ Medical Interpreters: Reflecting on Discrimination and the Perception of Self
Congratulations to all the 2023–2024 Bingham Faculty Fellows!
