Recent Research Fellows in Arts
Dr. Cori Hayden
I am a cultural anthropologist and I work on the contemporary biosciences in the Americas and the U.K. My work has primarily explored how claims to and about biological material and knowledge help shape contemporary social imaginaries of participation and marginalization. These questions shaped my earlier writings on reproductive technologies, kinship, and lesbian families in the US. They take expanded form in my recent ethnography of bioprospecting in Mexico, When Nature Goes Public, which tracks relationships among ‘local’ communities, public sector scientists, and drug companies involved in controversial benefit-sharing agreements. I am currently exploring the ethics and practice of clinical trials in Latin America, as well as the rise of an ethic of benefit-sharing in human genetic research. Together, these projects help me think about a number of intertwined concerns. I am interested in critical, ethnographically grounded approaches to intellectual property regimes, ethics, and other modes of governance; in developments in the emergent field of science studies in and of Latin America, and in how ideas of the public are constituted through the biosciences, both North and South.
Cori is now a professor in Social Cultural Anthropology at Berkeley.
Dr. Vahni Capildeo
Before coming to Girton, Vahni Capildeo completed a D.Phil. in Old Norse Literature and translation theory, Reading Egils Saga Skallagrimssonar: Saga, Paratext, Translations. At Girton, the focus of her research shifted and widened. At present she is working on a series of books on the processes of literary reading and writing. These books will refuse the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘nonacademic’ writing in the questions they raise and the way they address them. In 2003, she published No Traveller Returns (SALT), an autobiographical sequence of poems and prose poems which explores the relation between literary form and the experience of remembering. At present, she is revising a prose memoir, researching a monograph on metamorphosis in literature, and compiling a series of texts and questions for a book on Practical Criticism combined with essays on reading and writing. Teaching for the Tragedy paper and the Practical Criticism paper, as well as developing Creative Writing supervisions on an individual basis, have enlivened her understanding of the processes of reading and writing that are the subject of her research.
Dr. Fiona Macpherson
I was the Rosamund Chambers research fellow in philosophy at Girton from 2002 – 2004. I work on philosophy of mind, psychology and perception. I am a lecturer at Glasgow University and director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience there. I will be a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness at ANU from 2005–2006. Further information about me and my research can be found at my web page.
Dr Ben Griffin
My research focuses on how male politicians responded to demands for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what this can teach us about the history of feminism and liberalism, the history of masculinity, the role of gender in political processes, the history of family law, and changing beliefs about the nature of political representation. I have published on this in ‘Class, gender and Liberalism in parliament, 1868–1882: the case of the Married Women’s Property Acts’, Historical Journal 46,1 (March 2003), pp. 59–87. I am currently writing a book, provisionally entitled Feminism, masculinity and politics in Britain, 1867–1914.
Ben is now an official Fellow in History, shared by Girton College and Fitzwilliam College.
Dr Liz Irwin
My fields of focus are archaic and classical Greek literature and history. I work on the interation of texts with their social and political context, combining literary analysis with concerns about reception. My doctoral thesis, written at Girton, was primarily on the poet and lawgiver, Solon, and on what the fusion of these two identities in one figure means for understanding the political culture of archaic Greece. It is soon to appear as a book with CUP, ‘Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation’. I’m currently employed as a post-doctoral researcher on an Arts and Humanities Research Board funded project, ‘Anatomy of a Cultural Revolution, 430–380’ examining how Herodotus’ history of the Persian Wars interacts with the political trends and events of the late fifth century.
I come from Brooklyn, New York (John Dewey High School, from which I got an amazing state school education), but have been in Britain since 1991. I started studying Greek and Latin at university (Columbia) by accident. After a distressing year of being an engineer I transferred to a liberal arts course and began Greek to fulfill my language requirement – I got hooked! From there I went to Oxford as a second BA at Corpus Christi College and a PhD at Cambridge, at Girton, where I have been since 1995, with a few teaching stints in Reading and Oxford during the lean years. In July, I will begin a post as Associate professor of Greek at Columbia University.
My own experience studying Classical languages translates into a strong desire to make them available to a wide audience and to help ensure that the support exists for those who begin Latin and Greek at university to get the most from them and do well.
Dr. Michela Massimi
Michela Massimi was awarded the Italian Laurea degree in Philosophy (University of Rome “La Sapienza”). She then moved to London to complete an MPhil/PhD in Philosophy at the London School of Economics. At Girton College, she holds a Eugenie Strong Research Fellowship in History and Philosophy of Science. Michela’s research field is philosophy of science, with a focus on history of 20th century physics (from quantum mechanics to particle physics). Her current research is on scientific models and on the relationship between scientific theories and experimental evidence in the context of the on-going philosophical debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. She has defended a realist position against the middle ground of experimental realism (Philosophy of Science, Jan. 2004); and, she is now working on a new paper on data models in high energy physics and their impact on Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. She has recently completed a book for Cambridge University Press entitled “Pauli’s Exclusion Principle: the Origin and Validation of a Scientific Principle” (expected publication date October 2005), in which the history of the principle is reconstructed from the origins in spectroscopy to its later application in the quark theory. The historical analysis combines with the philosophical investigation of what a scientific principle is, and the role of Pauli’s principle during the revolutionary transition from the old quantum theory to the new quantum theory (post-1925). The philosophical framework underpinning this investigation follows up on Thomas Kuhn’s “post-Darwinian Kantianism” and Michael Friedman’s “dynamic Kantianism”.
Michela is now Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at UCL.
Dr Frisbee Sheffield
Frisbee Sheffield is a research fellow in Classics working on ancient philosophy and currently completing a book about Plato’s Symposium: ‘Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire’ forthcoming with OUP. She has recently been a visitor at Yale University. She has taught a variety of subjects in ancient philosophy at both Cambridge and Yale.
Selina Todd
My research focuses on the social and economic history of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, particularly working-class and women’s history. After benefiting from a fully comprehensive, state education in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I took my BA at the University of Warwick and my MA and DPhil at the University of Sussex. My DPhil thesis is entitled ‘Young women, employment, and the family in interwar England’ (Sussex, 2003). I subsequently held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of London prior to being elected Ottilie Hancock Fellow in History at Girton in October 2004. Publications include: ‘Poverty and aspiration: young women’s employment in interwar England’, Twentieth Century British History, 15/2 (2004); ‘Young women, work and leisure in interwar England’, The Historical Journal, 49/2 (2005); and my first book, ‘Young women, work and family in England 1918–50’ (Oxford University Press, 2005). My research argues that work structured people’s lives more profoundly than recent social histories, sceptical of the connections between occupation and social identity, suggest. It also demonstrates that working life is best understood in the wider context of people’s household, family and social experience. I am developing these conclusions in my current project which frames family and neighbourhood networks in British working-class communities between 1880 and 1939.
Selina is now Lecturer in the department of History at the University of Warwick.