Current International Visitors
Professor of Philosophy
ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
May 1 to May 31, 2018
Paula Casal is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at ICREA (Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies) and at the Law School of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She received her PhD in philosophy from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, supervised by G.A. Cohen at Oxford, and has held research fellowships at Harvard University, Oxford University, and Université Catholique de Louvain, as well as lectureships at Reading University and Keele University.
Casal’s research examines how social institutions should distribute resources. This requires assessing the general principles (such as equality, priority, and sufficiency) governing distributive decisions as well as more specific policies designed to promote social or global justice. She is particularly concerned with policy responses to global poverty, climate change, and gender inequality, including various forms of taxation. In addition, Casal is interested in the intersection between ethics and primatology, including the origins of empathy and resource-sharing as well as violence and gender inequality, the moral status of non-human animals, and the distinction between natural and social inequality. She has also written about how the costs of raising children should be distributed, sea-access for landlocked states, the moral limits to religious accommodation, and the difference medical ethics draws between therapy and enhancement.
She is an Associate Editor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, co-editor of Law Ethics and Philosophy, President of “Academics Stand Against Poverty - Spain” and “The Great Ape Project - Spain,” and co-director of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra Center for Animal Ethics. Casal’s work has appeared in such journals as Ethics, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Hypatia, Political Studies, and Utilitas.
Casal was nominated by the Department of Philosophy.
Architect and Senior Researcher
Institute of Housing Research and Graz University of Technology
Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
October 23 to November 17, 2017
Andrea Jany is an architect and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Housing Research in Graz, Austria, where she is also a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Graz University of Technology. Jany earned a Masters of Architecture (Diplom) from Bauhaus-University Weimar in Germany, and has pursued further studies at Stanford University and at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Jany’s research focuses on resident satisfaction and housing requirements in combination with participatory concepts. She has contributed research results at the European conference Forum Alpbach in Austria and the think tank Re:think | Housing.Policy in Vienna. She co-founded the Institute of Housing Research in Graz, where she works as a Senior Researcher in the field of affordable/social housing. She has worked as a Project Manager for several affordable housing projects at IGZT GmbH, Vienna, for nine years. Currently she is also a managing board member of Forum Wohn.Bau.Politik in Vienna and a global collaborator of the Stanford Human Cities Initiative.
Jany was nominated by the Program on Urban Studies.
Associate Professor of Economics
Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi
FSI- Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
October 1 to October 31, 2017
Reetika Khera is Sulaiman Mutawa Associate Chair in Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She is a development economist whose work focuses on social policy issues including hunger, nutrition, public health, corruption, and basic education in India. Khera received her PhD in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, and her M.Phil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She has received fellowships from the Institute for Economic Growth, the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, King’s College London, and Princeton University.
Khera’s research has shaped several policy debates around India’s public services. For over fifteen years, she has conducted field studies on India’s public services – child-care centers, school meals, public health services, etc. – with a view to understanding the impact of government programs, contrasts across states, and change over time. She has published widely across disciplinary genres, including in the Journal of Development Studies, Food Policy, Population and Development Review, and World Development, and is regular contributor to Economic and Political Weekly.
Khera was nominated by the Center for South Asia.
Professor of History
Universidade do Grande Rio, Rio de Janeiro
FSI- Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
January 10 to February 10, 2018
José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy is Professor of History at Universidade do Grande Rio (UNIGRANRIO) in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to moving to Unigranrio, Sebe was Professor of History at Universidade de São Paulo, where he chaired a post in Iberian History, with an emphasis on the great overseas empires in Latin America.
Sebe’s research has traced the centuries-long responses to those imperial projects, analyzing contemporary social phenomena and social groups emergent from the interaction and/or confrontation between parties to the colonizing process. His research has shed light onto the reversals and turns of colonizing processes, examining internal migrations within Brazil as well as displacements from Brazil in human trafficking more broadly. He has published widely on these topics. Sebe’s most recent books focus on the cultural use of body in the male and female prostitution in Brazil, as well as on gender roles or images of Brazil abroad. In addition, he has been devoted for several decades to the reception studies of Carolina Maria de Jesus's unpublished originals.
Sebe has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Miami, Columbia University, and Universidade Agostinho Neto (Angola). At present, he coordinates the Nucleus of Oral History Studies at Universidade Sao Paulo (NEHO-USP).
Sebe was nominated by the Center for Latin American Studies.
Writer and Documentary Filmmaker, Paris
FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
Aron Rodrigue International Visitor, 2017-2018
January 22 to February 18, 2018
Photo credit: Antoine Rozès
Karim Miské is a writer and a documentary filmmaker based in Paris. Since 1989, he has been making films for French television (France Télévisions, Canal + and ARTE) on topics as diverse as religious fundamentalism, deafness, and civil war in Africa. His 4-hour documentary series, "Jews and Muslims, Intimate Strangers" (ARTE, 2013) was broadcast in 15 countries and awarded the prestigious Lauriers de la Télévision in France. His latest film, focusing on transitional justice in post-Arab Spring Tunisia will air on ARTE in fall 2017.
In 1997, Miské wrote his first literary work: "Nouakchott - Paris, Paris - Nouakchott" (in Le livre du retour, Autrement). In this autobiographical short story, he recalls his first trip to Mauritania, the country of his father, when he was 15. A few years later, he made a film about the lives and experiences of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists in the east of France ("Born again", ARTE, 2005).
He wrote his first crime novel, Arab Jazz (Éditions Viviane Hamy, 2012), which won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and which has subsequently been translated into nine languages. The English translation (Quercus/MacLehose) received the English Pen Award in 2014. The US edition of the book was released in 2016. In 2015, Miské went back to autobiographical writing and published N’appartenir (Viviane Hamy), a memoir about belonging and identity, which was adapted to the graphic novel, S’appartenir, in 2016.
Miské is currently working on two different projects: a novel set in Paris two years after the terror attacks, in which the city is seen through the eyes of two disillusioned millennials, and a film about his life and the life of his parents.
Miské was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
Professor of English Literature
University of Edinburgh
Humanities Center International Visitor, 2017-2018
November 11 to December 15, 2017
Greg Walker holds the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he was previously Masson Professor of English, and Head of the School of Literature, Languages, and Cultures between 2009 and 2011. His research interests are in late medieval and early Tudor literature and drama, and the cultural history of the sixteenth century. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the English Association, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in January 2017.
Among his recent publications are Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford UP, 2005); Reading Literature Historically (Edinburgh UP, 2013), The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama (Oxford UP, 2014), and Imagining Spectatorship from the Mysteries to the Shakespearian Stage (Oxford UP, 2016), co-written with John J. McGavin. He is currently writing a biographical study of the Early Tudor playwright and musician, John Heywood, supported by a Leverhulme Trust major research fellowship, and exploring the potential implications of the “cognitive turn” in literary studies for an understanding of medieval narrative and early drama.
Walker was nominated by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
