Welcome New PPEH Scholars Kristina Lyons and Ben Mendelsohn
May 16, 2018
PPEH welcomes two new scholars to our intellectual community at Penn: Kristina Lyons (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Humanities) and Ben Mendelsohn (2018-2019 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow). Each comes to the program with exciting scholarly projects, excellence in teaching, innovative research approaches, and visions for public engagement in Philadelphia and beyond.
Join us in welcoming them to PPEH!
Kristina Lyons
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Humanities
Kristina Lyons will join the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She situates her research at the interfaces of the environmental humanities, feminist and decolonial science studies, socio-ecological justice and experimental ethnography. She has been awarded the Cultural Horizons Prize by the SCA and the Junior Scholar Award and Rappaport Prize by the A&E section of the American Anthropological Association. Kristina has published articles in Cultural Anthropology, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Social Studies of Science, among other venues. She is currently revising a manuscript entitled Decomposition as Life Politics for publication with Duke University Press.
Ben Mendelsohn
2018-2019 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities
Ben Mendelsohn is the 2018-2019 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. He earned his PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, where his dissertation combined written research with documentary video to examine the urban coastal geology of Lagos, Nigeria. His article, "Making the Urban Coast: A Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos” is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and his public scholarship has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Public Books. He was a 2017-2018 Global Dissertation Fellow at NYU Shanghai, and a 2014 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellow in "Oceanic Studies."