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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

2024-25 CHABRAJA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS


Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowships
Sarah-Louise Dawtry completed her BA in History and MA in Art History at the University of Cincinnati. Her dissertation, completed at Northwestern University in August 2024, is entitled "The Performance of Care: Hospitals as Advertisements and Centers of Healing in the Mining Districts of the United States and Mexico at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." In it, she examines the significance of mining hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th century US-Mexico borderlands as indicators of capitalist growth and symbols of statebuilding, and shows how marginalized groups, particularly Mexican women, were able to use these institutions to further their own interests. While historical in nature, her work is intended to be a direct commentary on contemporary debates on the politics of care, the roles of state and private practice in public health, and the recent resumption of industrial mining in the Southwest. She is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Northwestern's Chabraja Center, and will be teaching a senior research seminar, "Depicting America," on visual culture in the United States in Spring 2025.
Conrad Hirano explores the environmental history of modern Japan, focusing on the history of air pollution and anti-smoke campaigns from the 1880s to 1990s. As a CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Hirano will teach a course in Spring 2025 titled “Energy and Environments: A Global History.” The class will examine the inseparable relationship between energy sources – human labor, biofuel, coal, electricity, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy – and the environmental concerns of the periods when these sources entered and dominated human societies. When a new energy source is introduced to a community, advocates often present it as a solution to existing environmental issues. However, throughout the entire cycle of energy production and consumption, many energy sources negatively impact both the environment and people. When a new energy source enters society, whose environment does it claim to protect? Who is marginalized by the energy shift? While developing and teaching this course, Hirano will also actively participate in CCHS events and engage in scholarly discussions with other members of the community.

Holly E.D. Swenson is a historian of modern Britain and the British empire, with particular interests in media and business history. Her research explores how the export of British media shaped cultural life and political economy on a transnational scale in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, "Cultural Commerce: How Media Exports Made the British World in Australia, 1850-1990," argues that British cultural products became popular in Australia neither as a cultural inevitability nor due to imperial ideology but because of the path dependent effects of commercial strategy—of the decisions made between British entrepreneurs and Australian intermediaries, and their impact on the opinions of Australian consumers. Her dissertation won Northwestern History Department's T.W. Heyck Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research in British History. Her research has been published in Enterprise & Society and Modern British History, where her article won the 2023 Duncan Tanner Prize for outstanding scholarship by a postgraduate student. She completed her MPhil in Modern British History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and her BA with Honors in History from Stanford University. She is currently developing an article on British book export during the Second World War, will be teaching Modern Global History in the Winter with Northwestern's SPS, and will teach a course on modern business failures in the Spring Quarter.

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in British History: Claire ARNOLD
Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowships in Public History

2023-24 CHABRAJA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

The Center, jointly with the Material History Laboratory of the History Department,  conducted a GLOBAL SEARCH (open to candidates worldwide) for  a postdoctoral scholar in African material history.

Chabraja Postdoctoral Scholar in African Material History
Chabraja Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow: Material History Lab
Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowships
  1. Claire ARNOLD, teaching a History 292 class on the History of Western Marriage (Spring 2024)
  2. Colin BOS, teaching a History 393 class on Science and Decolonization (Spring 2024)
Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowships in Public Service
  1. Chernoh BAH—at The Africanist Press
  2. Erica GILBERT-LEVIN (January through August 2024)—at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, UIC)
  3. Gil ENGELSTEIN—at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives
  4. Charlotte ROSEN— at Public Books 
2022-23
Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowships 

Gil Engelstein is a historian of sexuality and political economy in modern Europe and a 2022-2023 CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He received his PhD in History from Northwestern University in 2022. His first book project, “Queer Europe: Gay Liberation Between Market and Movement,” documents the understudied path of “Rainbow Capitalism” in 1970s Britain and West Germany, and points to LGBTQ commerce as a major force in the articulation of queer culture and politics in postwar Europe. His work has appeared in Contemporary British History, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, among others. This spring, he will teach a survey course on "The History of Protest."

Robin Pokorski is a historian of late medieval Europe and a 2022–23 Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. During her year with CCHS, she will be teaching two courses: a “lecture-ish” course (with plenty of room for student discussion and participation) in Winter on the "High and Late Middle Ages, c. 1000-1500," and a writing seminar in the Spring on "Medieval Women." Her own research examines the intersections of gender, religion, and urban life in fifteenth-century Germany, looking at how Dominican nuns leveraged their communities and networks in support of or opposition to monastic reform. One of her many goals for this year is to think about how to purposefully integrate her research and teaching agendas, and particularly to continue figuring out how to engage students with the distant, foreign past through engaging classroom activities and interesting assignments.

Chabraja History Department Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship

Marcos Leitão De Almeida received his Ph.D. in African History from Northwestern University in 2020. His book project, “Breaking the Silence: The Deep History of Slavery in Central Africa,” provides a detailed study of the construction and reconfiguration of slavery practices over three thousand years in the Lower Congo, a specific region of Central Africa. It is based on his Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Harold Perkin Prize for the best dissertation in the History department in 2021.

Almeida’s work uses linguistic methods in conjunction with archaeology and documentary sources to trace the distinct historical moments in which Lower Congo peoples innovated concepts of “slaves” and “pawns,” as well as the objects of restraint and techniques of plundering and seizing outsiders. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Society of Presidential Fellows at Northwestern University, among others. His work has appeared in the Journal of African History, Azania, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.

During his year with CCHS, Almeida will be teaching two courses. In the Fall, Almeida will offer a seminar called "Black Atlantic: Slavery and Diaspora in the Modern World" that discusses the entanglements between racism and slavery in the making of the modern world and how Africans interacted with and reacted against Atlantic slavery. In the Spring, Almeida will teach a course called "The Global History of Slavery," exploring how different historical actors from the earliest times to the 21st century (such as kings, dictators, merchants, and even peasants) have invented so many forms of enslavement throughout history and why such practices still exist today.

 Chabraja History Department Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Andrea Rosengarten is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. She completed her PhD in History at Northwestern in 2022 as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Her dissertation focused on the Orange/!Garib River border region of Namibia and South Africa as a rich case study for tracing the entanglement of African and Atlantic world ideas about land access, private land ownership, and wealth in the long 19th century. As a CCHS affiliate she will engage comparatively with work on land management transformation under capitalism across world regions while paying particular attention to dryland areas.In 2020-21 Andrea was the Chabraja Center’s Teaching Initiative Fellow and worked with Prof. Paul Gillingham to develop and teach a new undergraduate global history course called "The End of Citizenship," which explored citizenship as a category of exclusion across place and time.

Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowships in Public Service

Dr. Guangshuo Yang (he/him) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. In his dissertation, Between the Animal Kingdom and Human States, he probes how ideas about nonhuman animals undergirded identity-making and state evolution by analyzing a Buddhist-led animal protection movement active in early 20th century East Asia. He has also written on post-Mao knowledge production, pest control, slaughter reform, and Chinese sci-fi movies. A previous Newcombe Fellow and Freeman Asian Scholar, Dr. Yang has received grants from the SSRC, the ACLS, the Henry Luce Foundation, and other funding agencies. As the Chabraja Fellow in Public Service, Dr Yang is curating a public history project showcasing how gender and sexual minorities have utilized animal tropes in self-fashioning and community building. 



2021-22 CHABRAJA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS
Chabraja CCHS Teaching Postdoctoral Fellowships (History 200 seminars)
 Chabraja History Teaching Postdoctoral Fellowship (History 200 seminar
Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowships in Public Service
Chabraja Newberry Library Postdoctoral Fellowship