By Kate Rix

With teaching and research experience from Venezuela all the way to Istanbul, five new post-doctoral scholars will spend the next two years at Berkeley as the 2009-2011 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellows — all women, as it happens — bring international talent to Berkeley, with research areas spanning the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences, from digital animation to the linguistic anthropology of Central Asia

“We are extraordinarily grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the generous grant of 2.3 million dollars that supports this post-doctoral program,” says Janet Broughton, the dean of arts and humanities.  “The benefits run in two directions, because tomorrow’s leading scholars have the opportunity to come to Berkeley to stretch their capacities in teaching and research, while Berkeley is enriched by an infusion of fresh perspectives in our classrooms and our broader intellectual community.” 

The current cohort was selected from a pool of 229 applicants.  “The fellows in this group stand out for several reasons,” says Broughton. “Their research and teaching profiles are exceptionally strong and they are particularly well-matched to their home departments. We also see fascinating connections among their various projects and expect that they will form a particularly strong cohort together.”

Daniela Blei

Working in the History Department, Daniela Blei came to Berkeley from Stanford University’s graduate program. Her research into German history focuses on education in the decades before the rise of National Socialism.

Historians, Blei says, have tended to make assumptions about the German schools of that period, essentially writing them off as early “agents of authoritarianism.”

“What I have found is far more complicated,” she says. “There was a long tradition of educational innovation and reform.”

Blei used textbooks, lesson plans and photographs in an effort to reconstruct life in a German elementary school in the early 20th century.

Studying German history began early for Blei. Her grandparents were Central European Jewish Holocaust survivors, and Blei has her grandfather’s full set of the work of German philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller.

“I grew up with the big questions about German history,” she says. “My grandparents were survivors but at the same time they saw Germany as the seat of civilization. How can Germany represent the best of culture and the worst that humans can do to each other at the same time?”

 The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship allows her to pursue these basic questions, both in her research and her teaching.  “I love the freedom and the length of time of this fellowship,” she says. “The students are fantastic. Teaching is the best way to learn.”

Eva-Marie Dubuisson

Linguistic anthropologist Eva-Marie Dubuisson comes to Berkeley after completing her graduate work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dubuisson says, is “a precious gift.”

“This position gives me the breathing room to help start my career,” she says. “Young faculty are under immense pressure to teach, publish and commit to public service when they begin a tenure track position. This fellowship allows me the space and time to anticipate those demands. The opportunity is incredibly substantial, particularly at a top-ranked university and department.”

Dubuisson will teach a variety of courses of her own design and work on articles and a book manuscript. She will also start a new long-term research project on Central Asia, which, like her doctoral work, centers around politics and oral culture in the region.

After living off and on in Central Asia for more than a decade and conducting a three-year ethnographic research project, primarily in Kazakhstan, Dubuisson will spend this semester teaching a seminar focused on religion and politics in broader Eurasia, ranging from the Mongols all the way to the Taliban.

Undergraduate students are enthusiastic about the material, she says. They are excited that their teacher has actually spent substantive time in the area they are studying. But students also bring their own perspectives, which makes the experience even richer for her as a teacher and scholar.

“I have a kid in the class who spent six years in the military and has served in Iraq,” she says. “Half the class is made up of first generation college students. The student body here is appreciative and motivated. Teaching in this environment is amazing.”

Ammay Y. Ghartey-Tagoe

For Ammay Y. Ghartey-Tagoe, who recently finished her Ph.D. in performance studies at New York University, the decision to apply for the Mellon Fellowship at Berkeley “all came down to the faculty.”

Ghartey-Tagoe grew up in Alabama and Kansas, but her family is from Ghana.  Her dissertation looks at black performance in the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, which included a recreated West African village, a plantation with former slaves working in a cotton field and a display about black progress by African-American intellectuals.

She enjoyed her time as a graduate student in New York, especially because she was able to work extensively with the History Channel there.  She says she might have stayed on if she had not attended a conference and met Ula Taylor, professor of African-American Studies at Berkeley. Taylor urged Ghartey-Tagoe to apply for post-doctoral fellowships at Berkeley. Later, Ghartey-Tagoe contacted Berkeley professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies Professor Catherine Cole.

“Her enthusiasm was so contagious, even over the phone. Even though I was a total stranger, she offered her mentorship,” Ghartey-Tagoe says. Cole even helped pay for Ghartey-Tagoe’s ticket to fly out and visit Berkeley.

“If I hadn’t come that weekend and if those two faculty members hadn’t reached out, I wouldn’t be here,” she says. “Now, with access to the resources of Berkeley and its faculty, I really feel I have the freedom to develop the best versions of myself,” she adds.

One of Berkeley’s strengths, she says, is how eager the undergraduates are to learn. This semester she is teaching a course called Performing History, which will look at the way scholars, and artists present history to the public.

“This is an interdisciplinary field that does not formally exist,” she laughs. “Fifteen brave acting students are going with me on this journey into the unknown.”

Fabiola Lopez-Duran

For art historian Fabiola Lopez-Duran, the journey to Berkeley began when she was a young student but ended up touching on three continents. A native of Venezuela, Lopez-Duran completed architecture school in Venezuela and taught at universities there as well. Later, her studies took her to Italy and France and eventually to Boston, where she recently completed her doctoral work at MIT.

Since her days as a young student in Europe, however, she has found inspiration in the work of Berkeley scholars. One of the first was History of Art professor T.J. Clark.

“His work was critical in the direction of my professional and academic life,” she says. “I think I have always been fascinated by Berkeley as an institution, by the way it can keep highest standards and at same time be a public university, having political consciousness.”

Lopez-Duran studies the interplay between art and politics, with a dissertation that  analyzes the way the theory of eugenics influenced architecture in Latin America.

Eugenics, a social and pseudoscientific movement that claimed to “improve” the human race, rose in popularity in the early 20th century. In Latin America, members of the medical elite believed that eugenics would enable their society to keep up with the progress that was taking place in the United States and Europe. Her ongoing research uncovers the spread of this ideology from the realms of medicine and law to architecture and urban planning.

Her students here at Berkeley bring inspiration to this research, she says. This semester she is teaching a lecture course on Latin American art.

“They have this wonderful political consciousness,” she says. “The dialectic between art and politics may be new to them, but it is wonderful to get this kind of freshness, the desire to learn and not just being interested in grades.”  

Ozge Samanci

Digital artist Ozge Samanci comes to Berkeley from her native Turkey, by way of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where she earned her graduate degree in digital media. The field is broad, including the design of software applications, games and social networking sites. Samanci integrates many of these elements in her work and has developed a form of digital performance called “Embodied Comics.”

“What happens if I take digital comics off the computer screen,” she asks, “and make an installation in a white room? I want to use the technology for storytelling.”

Her doctoral dissertation was an interactive installation with a humorous story framework that challenges participant-viewers to think about what parents hope for when they have children.

Samanci is co-teaching a course this semester, “Foundations of American Cyber-Culture” with Art Practice Professor Greg Niemeyer. Next semester she will teach a course in comics and graphic novels.

Doctoral programs in digital media did not exist in Turkey when Samanci was a student there. In Berkeley, she says, the culture is much more experimental and encourages innovation to a far greater extent than Turkish universities. The Bay Area art scene, she adds, also adds opportunities for creative collaboration.

“I can spread my wings here,” she says. She plans to propose a new course that explores the boundaries between film, comics, animation, and painting. “We will look at the limitations of each medium and come up with ways of expanding the borders.”