2022–23 Fellows
Alice Diaz Chauvigné is a fifth-year PhD student in the Anthropology department. She is a zooarchaeologist, trained at the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle and the Sorbonne (Paris). Her PhD project focuses on transitions between pre-Columbian and early colonial periods in Northern South America (Caribbean coast of Colombia) in terms of Human/environment and Human/animal relationships. She is especially interested in understanding how Human techniques of predation on animals are transmitted through time. In addition to studying archaeological remains, she is interested in exploring different artistic mediums and the ways in which they can be used to grasp different aspects of lived experiences of predation (video, photograph, watercolor, oil painting, spray painting, linograving, etc.).
Soumik Ghosh is a second-year PhD student in computer science studying with Professor Bill Fefferman at the University of Chicago. He does research on the theory of quantum computing. As for his hobbies, he occasionally contributes to a popular science magazine, records episodes of a podcast with my friends, and tries to build a bridge between science and arts using visual media. So far, he has made a short film and co-directed a live performance piece.
Savannah Gowen is a PhD student in the department of physics. Her research focus is on pattern formation in fluid mechanical phenomena. As an experimental physicist, she is currently studying the role of pressure gradients in the patterns which form as a less viscous fluid penetrates a more viscous fluid within the confined geometry of two glass plates. Current and future study will also examine the nature and “trainability” of elastic materials. In particular, considering whether materials can be trained for desired functionalities and retain a physical memory of that training. Savannah received her BA in French and physics from Mount Holyoke College. Outside of the lab, she also pursues amateur filmmaking.
Chloe Lindeman is a PhD student in the physics department, where she studies soft matter as part of the Nagel Group. She is interested in how complex materials respond to external stimuli and the subtle ways that such responses can encode information about the material's history. Outside of the lab, Chloe is an active violinist and occasional composer. She has been principal second violinist in the University Symphony Orchestra for five years and plays in several chamber music groups. She also has an interest in science communication and served as co-editor in chief of the Bi-College News of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. She graduated from Haverford College in 2017 with a BA in physics.
Clara Nizard (she/they) is a joint-PhD student in English and Theater and Performance Studies. Her research considers motion, movement, and mobility, particularly the ways in which these terms intersect and bind Anglophone and Francophone histories of the Americas together. Clara has also shown multi-media performance work focused on queer epistemologies in France, the UK, and Canada.
Darlene Castro Ortiz is a fifth year PhD Student in Music Composition. Inspired by her bilingual upbringing, her creative interest mostly lies within translation and creating sonic representations of non-musical objects, often using electronics, noise, and extended techniques. Her music draws most of its inspiration from trying to auralize processes or extra-musical objects in order to arrive at vivid, self-contained musical translations. These musical translations can sometimes be literal, other times more subtle and often use visual art, poetry, scientific processes, and active words as starting points. Her music has been performed and commissioned by ensembles such as Spektral Quartet, the Runnin' Fl'UTES', Salty Cricket Composers Collective, PANTS (Wind Quintet), Nightingale Ensemble, the Salt Lake City Public Library's SHH! A Very Quiet Music Series, Plena Libre, and Fonema Consort. Her research on historical music notation has been presented with the American Musicological Society (Rocky Mountain Chapter) and has led her to conduct research in a week-long seminar on historical music notation at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Most recently, her creative research has centered around sensors and their use in translating performer movement into data for sound processing through gesture mapping
Jacob Browning Pet is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago and MFA candidate, making work in needle felted fiber sculpture and transmission arts. His work is interested in the structure of communication, belief and the phenomenon of hypnosis - its relationship to art making and art interaction. Through the lens of the hypnotic phenomena, Jacob’s work investigates the point where consciousness and aesthetic sense-making intersect. Jacob graduated from Union College with a BA in Art History and Studio Art.
Nicolas Rueda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. His dissertation research considers spatial and environmental dimensions of cinema and videogames in order to understand their role in upholding (or altering) Anthropocene conditions and mediating our relation to infrastructures, ecologies, and patterns of land use.
Michael Stablein Jr. is a joint-PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies and English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His dissertation centers on the generic contours of the bildungsroman—or more specifically the popular, American coming-of-age novel—and how its normative conventions of anticipation, expectation, and accomplishment play out as, and structure the performativity of, violence across media and social performances post-45. His research picks up the temporality debates in queer theory at an intersection with Black studies, psychoanalysis, and performance studies. He has presented his research at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, is an Emerging Scholar in Performance Studies with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and will be presenting work on forms of catastrophe with the American Society for Theatre Research this fall. In addition to his scholarship, he maintains a performance practice which deploys pedestrian movement and social choreographies to address questions of repetition, seriality, and identity-formation. In his writing-as-research he engages the lives disciplined within and by narrative forms; in his performance-as-research he engages the lives disciplined within and by aesthetic forms. He has exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and Berlin. He holds a bachelor’s from Florida State University and a Master's from Columbia University of New York.