2017-18

James Beebe*

Professor, Philosophy
“Judicious Skepticism: Distinguishing Expertise from Grandstanding and Propaganda in a Post-Truth Age”

James Beebe, Professor of Philosophy, is writing a book entitled The Limits of Skepticism that examines the history of skeptical approaches to knowledge and evidence within a variety of philosophical traditions. His research considers which kinds of skeptical challenge should be taken seriously, how far they can be pushed before they collapse, and how illegitimate challenges to our knowledge can be rebutted. He also carries out research in a field known as ‘experimental philosophy,’ where he performs empirical studies of how ordinary people and various kinds of experts think about knowledge and evidence.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter

Assistant Professor, Theatre & Dance
“Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Memory”

Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Assistant Professor of Theatre. Her current book project, Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief, takes on sites as varied as live-broadcast theatre, reality television, and alternate reality gaming to examine how theatricality and mediatization work both to enact and to interrogate notions of authenticity and realness in performance. Her writing appears in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and Contemporary Theatre Review, and in a forthcoming special issue of the journal Amodern devoted to ephemera, archives, and performance.

Richard Cohen

Professor, Jewish Thought
“A Theory of Injustice: Democracy and Plutocracy”

Richard A. Cohen, Professor of Jewish Thought and Professor of Philosophy, is distinguished for his work on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, comprising the translation of four books by Levinas and authorship of four books on Levinas, the latest of which is Out of Control: Confrontations Between Spinoza and Levinas (SUNY Press, 2016), in addition to articles and edited volumes. More broadly, his area of expertise lies in modern and contemporary continental philosophy, about which he has published many essays.

Amy Graves Monroe

Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures
“Making the Early Modern Event”

Amy Graves Monroe is Associate Professor of French in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department. Her book Post tenebras lex : preuves et propagande dans l’historiographie engagée de Simon Goulart, (Geneva, Droz, 2012) explores how religious propaganda and pamphlet literature engages questions of testimony, documentary proof and history writing during the French Wars of Religion. She has worked on the Reformation(s) in the early modern period, print culture and ephemera, political thought and sovereignty, Montaigne, early modern sensory perception and affect, martyrs, neo-stoicism and satire. Her current project studies the early modern perception of the ‘event’ as a happening and charts ideas of prediction and probability as they evolve toward the threshold of modernity.

Julia Jamrozik

Assistant Professor, Architecture
“Growing up Modern”

Julia Jamrozik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, has worked as an Architect for at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel and taught at the ETH in Zurich. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto where she studied both architecture and art history and holds an M.Arch. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her research and creative activity focus on play and its spatial and social implications and potential. During her fellowship, she will focus on the project “Growing up Modern.”​

Nicholas Lustig

Assistant Professor, Geography
“Oppositional Urban Poetics in the Work of Nathaniel Mackey”

After receiving a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, Nicholas Lustig arrived at UB as an Assistant Professor in Geography in 2014. He is an urban geographer, whose research draws upon Foucault, new media theory, and variegation studies to examine the technological restructuring of the institutions and infrastructures of American cities over the last several decades. His primary research project analyzes the emergence, spread, and opposition to the mass surveillance programs and real-time crime centers constructed by police departments throughout the US.

Katja Praznik

Assistant Professor, Arts Management
“The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor: The Autonomy of Art and Art Workers in the Transition to Neoliberal Governmentality”

Katja Praznik holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Ljubljana. After working as a freelancer in the Slovenian independent art scene, she joined UB as an Assistant Professor in the Arts Management Program where she teaches cultural policy. In 2016, Praznik published her second book in Slovene language, The Paradox of Unpaid Labor: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism, which analyzes the birth of unpaid artistic work in the former socialist Yugoslavia and the deterioration of working conditions in the arts during the post-socialist era.

Jasmina Tumbas*

[photo coming]
Assistant Professor, Art
“In the Specter of Desire: Art, Sex, and Politics under Yugoslav Socialism”

*OVPRED-sponsored fellows for 2017-2018.

All photos this page by Douglas Levere.