PPEH Welcomes New Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellows
June 18, 2020
While we all continue to work remotely, we are thrilled to virtually welcome two new additions to our PPEH family this summer and fall. Andrew Niess, PhD candidate in the Department of Music at Penn, joins us this July as this year's PPEH dissertation fellow. Niess will spend his year at PPEH working on a multimodal dissertation project that theorizes a "parahuman" ethical orientation and invites its audience to "relate to their environments by putting into sonic relation multiple time scales and life-making practices." In the early fall, pending pandemic-related delays, we hope to also welcome in person a new 2020-2021 postdoctoral fellow: Dr. Rebecca Macklin. Dr. Macklin will join us from the University of Leeds' School of Languages, Cultures and Societies where she has been researching contemporary cultural engagements with racial, gendered and environmental forms of injustice, with particular attention to Native American and South African writing. Read their full bios below:
Andrew Niess
I am an audio-visual researcher based in Philadelphia. Impelled by the urgency of contemporary ecological crises, I make research that highlights their disorienting exigencies. I communicate this research through forms that invite embodied engagements from a wide range of audiences. In my dissertation, for example, I am designing and building new instruments that link one’s breath to audio-visual archives of Pennsylvania waste sites. My modular dissertation project can in turns be read, played, breathed, heard, and viewed.
My published writing is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, and in a Routledge collection on “eco-pedagogies.” You can view my film, Particulate Matters, about the afterlives of asbestos waste and environmental racism in Ambler, Pa., and my PNEUMATOGRAPHY series at andrewniess.com.
Rebecca Macklin comes to PPEH from a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Leeds, where she also completed a PhD focused on contemporary Native American and South African literature. In 2017-18, she was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher in English at Cornell University, affiliated with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. Her work brings together interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to centre questions of gender, decoloniality and environmental justice across a range of global spaces. Her writing has appeared in publications including ARIEL, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Wasafiri, and she co-edited a special issue of Transmotion on ‘Native American Narratives in a Global Context’ (July 2019). She is committed to producing research that works with and for communities and, since 2016, has helped to lead a number of participatory arts projects in South Africa and Indonesia, employing filmmaking as a tool for advocacy.
Rebecca Macklin
