SHC Welcomes New Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows!
October 3, 2023
The Science in Human Culture program is delighted to welcome new Mellon postdoctoral fellows to campus. Shireen Hamza and Benjamin Lindquist will teach two undergraduate courses in science studies each year during their tenure at Northwestern (2023-2025). They will also coordinate the program's visiting lecture series (the Klopsteg Lecture Series) and pursue their own research agendas. Welcome to both of them!
MEET THE SCHOLARS
shireen Hamza
Science in Human Culture 2023-2025
Department of History
Areas of Interest
History of Medicine, History of the Body, History of Sexuality, Sound Studies, Medieval History, Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean History, South Asian History, Middle East History
Biography
Shireen Hamza obtained her PhD from Harvard's Department of the History of Science in May 2023, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She produces works in sound, movement, and other artistic media, alongside and in conversation with her scholarly publications. Shireen's work lives on the shores of the history of medicine, Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean History, and the history of sexuality. At Northwestern, they will be working on a book, Environment & Medicine in Medieval Islam, which draws on Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts from across the western Indian Ocean world to investigate the role of place and locality in knowledge production. Shireen will also begin work on her second book project about sound in medieval Islamic cities, interrogating the ways filmmakers in and beyond these regions have imagined their soundscapes in the last century.
Courses Taught: Podcasting the History of Science (Fall 2023); Histories of Asian Medicines (Spring 2024)
Benjamin Lindquist
Science in Human Culture 2023-2025
Department of History
Areas of Interest
History of Technology, Sound Studies, History of the Body, Material Culture, History of AI, History of Computing, Disability Studies, Art History, Media Studies, History of Information
Biography
Before earning a Ph.D. from Princeton University, Benjamin Lindquist trained as a painter at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA) and Yale University School of Art (MFA). This background has shaped his current interest in the history of computing. Specifically, his work asks how tools and concepts drawn from the world of art influenced early computer simulations of human creativity and the mechanical synthesis of human attributes. At Northwestern, he will work on two book projects: a history of text-to-speech and another provisionally titled “The Irrational Computer.”
Courses Taught: The Romantic Computer (Winter 2024); A History of Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2024)