Announcing the 2023-24 Fellows-in-Residence and Graduate Fellows
It is our pleasure to announce the incoming class of fellows for our Fellows-in-Residence and Graduate Fellows programs. As you will see in their bios below, they are a fantastic group and we look forward to welcoming them in the fall.
Fellows-in-Residence
César Cabezas is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He received his PhD from Columbia University. His research focuses on the concept of racism—specifically, on how different conceptions of racism lead to different (and sometimes conflicting) diagnoses and proposed solutions to the problem of racial injustice. While at the Center, he will work on a project titled “Racism: A Systemic and Explanatory Account”.
Tantum Collins is a researcher and former policymaker. He focuses on how machine learning can help build better systems for democratic governance and collective intelligence. Tantum is an Affiliate at the Collective Intelligence Project and at the Centre for the Governance of AI. Previously, Tantum worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where, as Assistant Director for Technology Strategy, he oversaw a portfolio of issues related to AI and national security. Prior to that, he worked at DeepMind as a Research Scientist, leading the Meta-Research team. He currently lives in London.
Tatum is a JHD Initiative Fellow
Alex Gourevitch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His first book, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, showed how the critique of slavery developed into a critique of wage-labor and a defense of any economy based on producer cooperatives. He has written widely on topics like work, freedom, political economy, Marxism, and socialism. His current book project is on the political ethics of strikes. He is also working on a book on shared-labor socialism.
My Hedlin is an economist studying the private process of money creation by commercial banks. She did her doctoral studies at the European University Institute in Italy and was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Centre for Ethics at Tel Aviv University in Israel prior to joining the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. During her year at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, My plans to study the interconnectedness between private and public creation of money; that is, how the private process of money creation by commercial banks is influenced by, as well as influences, the public process of money creation by central banks — and how their joint interaction affects society at large.
My is a TAU Exchange Fellow
Zoë A. Johnson King is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy who joined Harvard in Fall 2022. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, a secondary school teacher in Croydon, and an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (in that order, going backwards through time). Johnson King works in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, decision theory, and philosophy of law. Her primary research project lies within moral psychology and focuses on issues involving motivation, agency, and responsibility.
Nitika Khaitan is a criminal defense lawyer and researcher, whose research focuses on legal professional ethics under authoritarian regimes and the mental health of lawyers in India. She holds a B.A. in Humanities magna cum laude from Yale University (2016), an LL.B. from the University of Delhi (2019), and is currently an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School. Her work has appeared in leading Indian journals and newspapers, including Economic and Political Weekly, The Caravan and The Indian Express. She has been featured by international publications including The New York Times, Financial Times and Al Jazeera.
Nitika is a joint fellow with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Chad Lee-Stronach is an Assistant Professor of Information Ethics at Northeastern University. He was previously an Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, and Apple University. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University. As a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Center for Research on Computation and Society, his research will develop normative theory concerning privacy, predictive fairness, and transparency in automated decision-making.
Chad is a joint fellow with CRCS
Michael Rain is the founder of ENODI, an organization focused on people with immigrant backgrounds. Previously, he was a fellow at Stanford University (Knight Journalism) and The Aspen Institute. He delivered a TED Talk that has over 1 million views and has been translated into 28 languages. Michael is a class of 2023 mid-career MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School. He earned a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Columbia University. He’s Ghanaian-American, a lifelong New Yorker, and a Brooklyn native.
Michael is a joint fellow with the Hutchins Center
Graduate Fellows
Nicole West Bassoff is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is also a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She uses the disciplinary approach of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to examine the ethics and politics of technology-driven urban development projects in the U.S. Through a comparative study of controversies surrounding “smart city” projects, her dissertation interrogates the social compact between cities and citizens in the digital age. She explores how the rights and duties of citizens are reformulated when cities are transformed through private investment and technological innovation.
Nicole is interested broadly in the ethics of emerging technologies and has taught for courses ranging from “Philosophy of Technology” to “Bioethics, Law, and the Life Sciences.” She is a co-founder and organizer of the annual Graduate Research in STS (GRiSTS) conference at Harvard. Prior to the PhD, she worked for the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative at the Berkman Klein Center. Nicole holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History and Science from Harvard University.
Sam Bookman is an SJD (doctoral) candidate at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the future of constitutional law in the Anthropocene, including issues related to constitutional theory, rights of Nature, and climate change litigation. Sam received his first law degree from the University of Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where he was a Judge’s Clerk to New Zealand’s Chief District Court Judge. He has also practiced extensively in the field of international environmental law and is qualified as an attorney in New York. Sam is currently working on a project investigating the motivations of communities which enact rights of Nature laws, and the meanings they ascribe to the concept. Outside of work, he enjoys watching cricket, hiking, and reading to his two-year old son.
Soren Dudley is a PhD candidate in the Harvard Department of Government, where she studies political theory and the history of political thoughts. Her dissertation theorizes the concept of “hyper-politics” --roughly, something that looks and feels like politics but is not politics. She exposes this theme in several theorists of modernity, locating it alongside the emergence of commercial society and the later development of industrial capitalism. Her dissertation also explores contemporary expressions of hyper-politics, arguing that hyper-politics is a key feature of depoliticization in neoliberal society. Her research interests broadly include Marxist political thought, politics and aesthetic experience, and democratic theory. She received a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Macalester College in 2016.
Emma Ebowe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Government department with a secondary field in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests in political theory are at the intersections of public policy with feminist theory and black political thought in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her current dissertation research focuses on the welfare state, social infrastructure and racial disparities in foster care.
During her time at Harvard, Emma has worked as a teaching fellow for courses on the foundations of political theory, public policy, and black feminist theory. She is also a resident tutor in Quincy House where she advises undergraduate concentrators in Government. She was a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration at Harvard Kennedy School’s Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy from 2022-2023. Emma received a B.A. in 2018 from McGill University.
Adam Longenbach is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. His research focuses on moments in which architectural knowledge and planning practices have, counterintuitively, functioned as instruments of destruction and violence. In his dissertation, Adam investigates the mid-twentieth century entanglement of wartime policies, government agencies, private sector collaborations, and mass media technologies that led to the rise of military “mock villages.” These so-called “laboratories of war” were sites where US military operations were repeatedly tested, analyzed, and refined before their deployment in actual theaters of war. His work connects this history to the ongoing production and operation of mock villages by militaries and police forces around the world, questioning what it means to replicate the built environment for the purpose of enacting violence in and against it.
Julia Silverman is a PhD candidate in the History of Art + Architecture (secondary field in American Studies), where her research focuses on how craft and design have naturalized and resisted American colonial ideologies during the 19th and 20th centuries. Broadly, she is interested in how the material practices of art and design tacitly structure or complicate peoples' understandings of concepts like value, knowledge, and truth.
Her dissertation-in-progress examines Native American arts and crafts projects developed during the 1930s, a period marked by the seeming reversal of assimilationist Indian policy and the search for an American "useable past." Analyzing historical—and sometimes dubiously-ethical—interventions into Native artistic production by non-Native individuals, governmental organizations, and private institutions, her dissertation illustrates how Native artists consistently redefined slippery period terms like “tradition” or “authenticity” that outsiders used to regulate their work. From a museum’s purported invention of a Hopi style to the interwar manufacture of a Seneca ethnological collection or an Iñupiat craft collective’s military contract, each chapter illuminates how project participants destabilized colonial understandings of these tropes in ways that served their communities’ vitality. This work has been supported by the Center for Craft, Crystal Bridges Museum, the University of Arkansas, The Decorative Arts Trust, the D'Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, among others.
You can read about our Undergraduate Fellows, including the new cohort, on the website.