Fellows

Jack Vees

Jack Vees is renowned as a performer and composer, at locations as varied as CBGB’s downtown New York scene and the Berlin Biennale Festival. His book The Book on Bass Harmonics has become the definitive technical text for bassists today. He has developed a distinctive musical style that combines rigorous formal thinking with the energy of rock and roll.

Paul Vermeal

Kalindi Vora

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second book is Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, a project on the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence. With the Precarity Lab, she is co-author of Technoprecarious (2020), which tracks the role of digital technologies in multiplying precarity. A book of her collected work on transnational gestational surrogacy in India is forthcoming under the title, Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Technologies of Human Reproduction.  

She has also edited three anthology special issues, “Whiteness and Technoscience,” in Catalyst: Feminist, Technoscience, Theory Critical Perspectives (2018) and “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution” (2018) in Social Identities with Neda Atanasoski; and with Fouzieyha Towghi, “Bodies, Markets and the Experimental in South Asia,” in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (2012) 

Her past research has included STS and ethnographic study of information and communications technology, assisted reproductive technology, and robotics and machine learning, about which she has published in journals such as: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Social Identities, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She currently sits on the editorial board of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and The Anthropology of Work.

Professor Vora is currently involved in several research projects. She continues writing and publishing on artificial intelligence and automation through the lens of STS and critical race and gender theories. She is also beginning a book project, supported by a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies award (2022-2024) tentatively titled, Autoimmune: Chronic Conditions and Care in a Time of Uncertain Medicine. It places contemporary narratives of illness by patients facing racism and sexism in their daily lives within an analysis of the history of the concept of autoimmunity and contemporary practices of healthcare self-monitoring to understand the potential for patient-physician co-production of medical knowledge. “Asking Different Questions” is a pedagogical project funded by the National Science Foundation’s “Innovations in Graduate Education” award program (2018-2021). Through modules, workshops, and Ph.D. seminars, this curriculum trains advanced STEM researchers to incorporate social (justice) impacts into their research design and practice. She is also working on the collaboratively authored book, The Science We are For: A Feminist Pocket Guide (under review), with the Star Feminist Collaboratory (K. Vora, L. Irani, C. Hanssmann, S. Varma, S. Zarate, L. Quintanilla). Intended for researchers and readers invested in technoscience of all types, this how-to guide breaks down basic concepts in gender/sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies for pragmatic and applied uses in a variety of learning and research contexts. 

Prior to Yale, she was the Director of the Feminist Research Institute and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at The University of California Davis and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research has been supported by several National Science Foundation grants, Hellman fellowships, as well as University of California Humanities Research Institute fellowships. She was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley, and has been a visiting fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University in Luneburg, Germany and at GEXcel at Linköping University in Sweden. 

John Wargo

Tamar Wells

Tamar Wells is a founding member of the Grammy-nominated Borealis Wind Quintet and the principal oboist of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony. She is also well acquainted with the underside of her sea kayak as she and her husband, Rich, work toward their BCU level 3 kayak certification, a piece of which requires their skill of rolling to be at least rudimentary.  They enjoy ballroom dancing, and taking lessons in “how not to be embarrassed on the dance floor.”

In the interest of communication with new Brazilian in-laws, Tamar is attempting to learn Portuguese, which she finds delightful!

They divide their time between Northwest CT and the coast of RI.

R. John Williams

John William’s research and teaching focuses on the intersections between international histories of technological innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness.  His current book project, “Technology and the Meeting of East and West,” examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth century film and literature. He argues that insofar as Anglo American modernism based its aesthetic innovations on a range of new technologies, it did so by throwing into question the relation of these technologies to the cultural traditions from which it seemed to break. It is from this vantage that Asia signaled both the perilous transnationalization of Western technologies as well as an especially therapeutic and non-alienated relation between technê and the environment.

Jonathan Wyrtzen

Jonathan Wyrtzen is a comparative-historical sociologist with teaching and research interests in North African society and politics. He works on the areas of state formation and non-state forms of political organization; colonialism and empire; ethnicity and nationalism; urban and rural contentious politics; and Islamic social movements. He has recently completed a book manuscript titled, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity, that examines the relationships among European imperial expansion, colonial policies of modernization and state formation, and the rise of Arabo-Islamic nationalism in North Africa in the mid-20th century. This study also explores the central roles of three marginal groups – Imazighen (Berbers), Jews, and women - in defining Moroccan identity during the mobilization of anti-colonial nationalism. He is beginning a comparative project examing the transformation of political space in the North Africa and the Middle East in the 1920s, looking at movements defending local autonomy in Morocco, Libya, Syria, Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Susan Yankee-Dillner

Susan Yankee-Dillner performed the Mezzo-soprano repertoire across the country, including two solo appearances at Carnegie Hall and soloist in the Mozart in Mass Series at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center and the New York City Opera National Company. Ms. Yankee is a graduate of the Hartt School of Music and the Yale School of Music.

Ms. Yankee is a (3) three times National Endowment of the Arts grant recipient for her creation of interactive educational operas for children based on popular fairytales to the music of classical opera composers. Each opera has a civic-minded topic; youth smoking prevention, recycling, and healthy eating and exercise. She is the past Artistic Director of Shreveport Opera’s Young Artist Program. Ms. Yankee has been on the faculty of many young artist programs and makes it her mission to guide young performers in a successful career in the arts.

Calvin Yu