Our Current Fellows
Internal Fellows
Ben Baker (spring 2025)
Assistant Professor, Music Theory, Eastman School of Music
Ben Baker is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. His research focuses on cross-pollinations between jazz and popular music, with a broader interest in forging links between models of musical structure and interpretive issues related to intertextuality, improvisation, agency, and affordance. In 2019, his paper on harmony in the music of jazz pianist Robert Glasper received the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award from the Music Theory Society of New York State; this work was subsequently published in Theory and Practice. Additional publications appear in Music Theory Online, the Oxford Handbooks series, and the Eastman Case Studies Series. Ben’s current book project, which he will be working on during his fellowship semester, examines how modern improvising musicians approach musical re-creation, with a particular focus on post-1960 popular music. This project grows out of his dissertation, which received Eastman’s 2021 Alfred Mann Dissertation Award.
An engaging and dynamic classroom teacher, Ben teaches in Eastman’s undergraduate core theory curriculum, as well as a variety of courses on jazz and popular music, tonal analysis, and keyboard skills. He has received both the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student (2019) and Eastman’s Teaching Assistant Prize (2016). He is the current chair of the Society for Music Theory’s Jazz Interest Group, and he recently completed a four-year term as the treasurer of the Music Theory Society of New York State.
In addition to his work as a theorist, Ben is an experienced pianist. Before coming to Eastman, he worked as a full-time freelance musician in New York City, where he performed regularly as a jazz and pop keyboardist in various professional ensembles, a pianist in musical theater and cabaret productions, a collaborative pianist with choirs and vocal soloists, and a church musician. He also worked for four years as a regular music director, collaborative pianist, and vocal coach in NYU Steinhardt’s Vocal Performance Department (2011-15). He remains active as a pianist in both New York and Rochester. Outside of his musical pursuits, Ben is an avid runner, and he adores spending time with his wife and young children. He holds degrees from Eastman (Ph.D. and M.A. in music theory), NYU (M.M. in jazz piano performance), and St. Olaf College (B.A. in music and mathematics).
John Givens (spring 2025)
Professor, Modern Languages & Cultures
John Givens is Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures. His first book, Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture, examined the life and works of one of the most popular Soviet artists to emerge in the post-Stalin period. A prolific actor, director, and writer whose life and works were a study in border crossing between artistic genres, cultural strata, political camps, and demographic divisions, Shukshin altered important paradigms through which we have traditionally understood Soviet writers and Soviet literature. In addition to his monograph on Shukshin, Givens co-translated a volume of his prose, titled Stories from a Siberian Village. The anthology is the most comprehensive collection of Shukshin's stories to appear in English and reflects Givens's interest in the art of translation. From 1999 to 2016, Givens also served as editor of Russian Studies in Literature, a quarterly journal of translations from the Russian literary press.
His second book, The Image of Christ in Russian Literature, focuses on the four authors who most famously imaged Christ in their works: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the nineteenth century and Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth. These authors all felt a need to speak about Christ in an age of unbelief but, at the same time, paradoxically affirmed him or his teachings through indirect or even negative means. The subject of the book is thus not so much Russia's Christian literature but rather its anxiety over its Christian heritage, specifically, its anxiety over the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ.
He is currently working on a study provisionally titled The Anxiety of Belief in Russian Cinema. His multi-disciplinary investigation of religion and religious belief on Russian silver screens, both during the short Soviet century and in the post-Soviet, post-secular period since 1991, will be the first monograph on this topic in Russian studies. Different "anxieties of belief" are analyzed, including: films commissioned to discredit religion in the 1920s and 1960s; films by Andrei Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s that deploy film grammar in service of indirect representations of the inbreaking of the sacred or transcendent (hierophanies) into the material(ist) world; two post-Soviet devotional Bible movies (still a rare phenomenon in post-secular Russia); and Kirill Serebrennikov's 2016 depiction of religious fanaticism as a form of male hysteria projected onto queer bodies (The Student), among other case studies. This project will be the focus of Givens's spring fellowship at the Center.
Cilas Kemedjio (fall 2024)
Professor, Modern Languages & Cultures
Cilas Kemedjio is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on the memory of slavery, the decolonization of the theoretical infrastructure of postcolonial literatures, the representation of the black body, “anthropological mutilation” and critical investigations of humanitarian interventions in Africa. His books include De la Négritude à la Créolité : Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant et la malédiction de la théorie (1999), Mongo Beti, le combattant fatigué : une bibliographie intellectuelle (2013), Remember the Flame: White Papers from the 1990 Yaoundé University Strikes (2013). Kemedjio is co-founder and Co-Editor of the Acamedic Blog CIHABlog.com (Critical Investigations Into Humanitarianism in Africa), a Blog that seeks to challenge unequal hierarchies wihtin the humanitarian galaxy with the view of bringing about more egalitarian exchanges in the redemption of our shared humanity. His latest publication (Cilas Kemedjio and Cecelia Lynch, Eds. “Who Gives to Whom”: Reframing Africa in the Humanitarian Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan (May 2024). He is working on a monograph tentatively entitled “The Humanitarian Misunderstanding” and a collective volume on the representation of African Americans in the African Imagination. During his tenure as Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies (2010-20200, he held the Frederick Douglass Professor Chair.
Tingting Xu (fall 2024)
Assistant Professor, Art & Art History
Tingting Xu’s research centers on the medium, format, and related discourses in Chinese art. As a fellow in Fall 2024, she aims to complete her book manuscript on the practices and ontology of early Chinese photography. This manuscript views photography against the backdrop of the still ongoing radical political and cultural transformations that have been transpiring in the process of China’s dramatic self-refashioning from an imperial empire to a modern society. It unearths the multifarious understandings of what is “true” about the photographs at the incipient stage of its history in China, or, put more philosophically, the ontological question of the being of photography in different cultural contexts from the 1860s to the 1910s. Her second project explores new methods of conceptualizing the surface, depth, and depths of East Asian pictorial art through the folding formats, especially the accordion format. Xu’s articles have appeared in History of Photography, Archives of Asian Art, Yishu, in addition to edited volumes in both English and Chinese. She was assistant curator of the exhibition Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China, held at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2022-23 and a main contributor to its eponymous publication (Yale University Press, 2022) which won the 2024 Bei Shan Tang Catalogue Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies.
External Postdoctoral Fellows
Jonathon Catlin
“Thinking against Catastrophe: A Concept in Twentieth-Century European Thought"
Jonathon Catlin is a modern European intellectual historian who will join the Humanities Center as a postdoctoral associate in September 2023, after earning his PhD in History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton. His dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought, from the First World War to climate change, with a focus on German and Jewish thinkers including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Jonathon’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Research Grant to Germany, where he was a visiting researcher at Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, and, most recently, by the Berlin Program at Freie Universität Berlin. His work has been published in History and Theory, Memory Studies, Radical Philosophy, Antisemitism Studies, and edited volumes about Zygmunt Bauman and environmental apocalypse. He has also written on topics including Holocaust memory, the Covid pandemic, and representations of climate catastrophe for a number of popular venues, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, HuffPost, The Point, The Spectator, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, where he is a contributing editor. Jonathon holds a BA in Jewish Studies and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts from the University of Chicago and an MA in Philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium.
Richard Fadok
"Animal House: Space, Species, and Subjectivity in the United States"
Richard Fadok is an anthropologist of design and multispecies ethnographer. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds dual appointments with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Department of Anthropology. He received his doctorate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his master’s degree in Biomedicine, Bioscience, and Society from the London School of Economics; and two bachelor’s degrees in Neuroscience and Science, Technology, and Society from Brown University. His writings have appeared in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Domus, Noema, Platypus, Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds (University of Chicago Press), and Teaching and Learning Anthropology. During his fellowship with the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, Richard will be working on two ethnographic projects about contemporary ecological design in the United States. The first, Lifelike, explores how the design practice of biomimicry signals a shift in the relationships between nature, labor, and capital. Animal House, the second, examines the confluence of space, power, and species in built environments designed for urban wildlife. Together, his work asks how climate change and other environmental crises are altering the meaning of design.
Visit https://www.richardfadok.com/ for more information.