Pre-doctoral Fellows

Pre-Doctoral Fellows are graduate students who are not enrolled at Yale but who are associated with the CCS. Typically they have come to us as visiting students for a substantial period of time and will have presented at the workshop or a conference. Pre-Doctoral Fellows are often working on Strong Program influenced PhD projects under the supervision of one of our former students or a Faculty Fellow.

Alphabetical, by last name

Grzegorz Brzozowski

The Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, Poland

Grzegorz Brzozowski is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. He participated in a number of Summer Schools on the topic of religion in public life (including Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen 2010, UCSIA 2011, New School TCDS 2011). He was a Visiting researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (April-May 2012) and was a visiting graduate student at Yale University in 2013, where he was affiliated with Center for Cultural Sociology.

He works on the topic of ritual-like festive events in the contemporary Polish public sphere. His academic interests include anthropology of performance, methodologies of visual research, neo-Durkheimian sociology of religion and post-secular theories of public sphere. His recent article is: Spatiality and the Performance of Belief: The Public Square and the Collective Mourning for John Paul II (Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2013). Currently he became a member of the international research group “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource” organized by University of Oslo.

He also works as a documentary director, graduated from Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing (2010), with a movie Today in Warsaw, Tomorrow Whatever. He participated in a number of documentary workshops (VGIK Summer School 2009), having his projects shown in Israel, Sweden and France (Cannes Short Film Corner). Since 2011, he works as an editor of Kultura Liberalna, a Polish intellectual weekly online journal, where he also published a number of articles on the role of performative religion in Polish public sphere and pop-culture.

Helena Funk

Leipzig University, Germany

Lily Ivanova

University of British Columbia

Anne Lin

State University of New York at Albany

Anne Lin is a graduate student in the Sociology Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Albany. She received her undergraduate degree at the National Taiwan University in Taiwan, where she studied international relations and gender theories. Anne’s broad range of research interests include gender and queer theory, body politics, media studies, cultural globalization and transnational interactions, and postcolonial theories. She developed deep interest in gender issues and did many research on topics concerning sex work and body politics. In addition, Anne is also a strong advocate for the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement.

However, Anne’s current research focuses on the transnational media and cultural flows in East Asia. She is aiming to utilize research tools in the strong program paradigm to analyze narratives and cultural symbols that travel around the East Asian region. She also hopes to delineate how countries define and redefine, draw and redraw boundaries between national and cultural borders in an age of postcoloniality and globalization, and how these efforts in interpreting culture weave into webs of meaning structures.

Michael Perlt

University of Copenhagen

Michael Perlt is a PhD fellow at the Department of Church History, Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on cultural trauma, collective memory & mourning, and narrative construction of identity.

His dissertation is titled “For God, King, and Country”, and is a historical dissertation with a cultural sociological attention that aims to trace the Danish national narrative, to see how or if Christianity has any role to play in the construction of collective self-understanding in the Danish national identity. The dissertation is built on the assumption that the Danish clergy in periods of historical crises (1848-65) have acted on behalf of the Danish nation as a cultural carrier group and as individuals as social actors performing from the pulpit of the Danish churches. B.A. and M.A. in Theology from the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen.

Sandra Simonsen

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sandra Simonsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her areas of interests include social conflict and taboo and how that manifests in language.

She has published in a range of communication and sociology journals on the topics of war legitimation discourse, religious propaganda, metaphors of pollution, and literary degradation. Analyzing the core concepts in Nietzsche’s works – the eternal recurrence, will to power and the Übermensch – she obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from Aarhus University in Denmark. Also from Aarhus University, she earned her Master’s Degree in Journalism by examining Israel’s public diplomacy during wartime.

Her doctoral dissertation focuses on migration in Scandinavian national news outlets and how new journalistic professional values and routines has emerged in tandem with increased ethnic heterogeneity caused by migration. She combines qualitative, quantitative, statistical and computerized methods for data analysis in order to examine a large corpus of news content.