Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship
Established in 2020, the Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship program provides emergent, interdisciplinary scholars with time to further their work in an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary setting, and to provide them with mentoring from a faculty member in their field.
Current Taft Postdoctoral Fellows
William García-Medina, Ph.D., focuses on Black diasporic public humanities, AfroLatinx education, cultural studies, and museum studies. García-Medina has provided educational consulting, training, and workshops for numerous organizations, universities, school districts, and museums. He's taught courses in Latino Studies, American Studies, and Black Studies and has published in these fields in academic journals, blogs, and podcasts. García-Medina has contributed to Latino Rebels since 2015 and has been a guest on national broadcast radio such as Latino USA and NPR. He tweets from @afrolatinoed.
Harshavardhan Bhat, Ph.D., is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. Bhat is currently thinking through concerns of an abolitional meteorology, exploring the archives of global climatic logistics and its accounting categories, in unpacking stories of race, tropical meteorology and decarceration. His book manuscript Maḷḷæ explores the death of seasonalities and politics of a global story of rain, at a time of breakdown. Recent writings can be found in GeoHumanities, Lo Squaderno, Hyphen Journal, Monsoon As Method (book), Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene (book), International Relations in the Anthropocene (textbook), Aquatic Encounters (book), among others. Prior to his PhD, Harshavardhan worked in academia and also consulted on political communications and policy concerns for states and electoral campaigns.
Megan Jeanne Gette, Ph.D., approaches the techne of listening and atmospherics as modes of description against extractive industry and interplanetary exploration. Her book project, thoughtlessness, centers Venus as a means to understand how prospective modeling and measurement of climate change in the American West is constructed and affected by ordinary ways of listening with heat, tremors and breath. Ethnographically attuned to geophysical technologies used in seismic prospecting and methane detection, it centers thinking across an elemental anthropology, feminist and anticolonial science studies, and sound studies to ask after the role of sensation in the construction of nothingness of the desert and the indefiniteness of global heating.
Her work has been supported by many fellowships, awards and residencies, and has been published or is forthcoming in Ways of Breathing and Knowing: the Politics and Poetics of Air, Atmosphere, and the Body, Venti: a Journal of Air, Art and Aesthetics, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020, among others. Her books include Majority Reef (Inside the Castle, 2020) and several chapbooks. Her intermodal poetics includes experimental writing, bookmaking and sound art, and models for collaborative authorship and publishing infrastructure as interventions in the apparatus of knowledge production.
Previous Taft Postdoctoral Fellows