MELLON SAWYER SEMINAR 
TEAM
Arzoo Osanloo
CO-CONVENER
Cabeiri Robinson
Co-Convener
Cristian Capotescu
​Postdoctoral Scholar
Gözde Burcu Ege
Doctoral Fellow
Mediha Sorma
DOCTORAL FELLOW​
Caitlin Palo
Program & Events Manager

MELLON SAWYER SEMINAR 
​WORKING GROUP​

Our Mellon Sawyer Seminar Working Group is comprised of a cross-disciplinary community of scholars, including faculty members and graduate students from the University of Washington and beyond, who work at the intersection of humanitarianism, refugees, and migration in the Global South.
AYDA APA-POMESHIKOV
Ayda Apa-Pomeshikov (Ph.D. Candidate, Interdisciplinary Near & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Washington). Ayda's research interests center around forced migration studies, critical humanitarian studies, and anthropology of religion. Ayda has currently finalized her field research in Gaziantep, Turkey. Her dissertation project examines the emerging conceptual deployments around Islamic humanitarianism that affect the accommodation and recognition of Syrian refugees in southeastern Turkey. In her dissertation, she focuses both on the role of Turkish faith-based humanitarian organizations in providing religious solidarity for the displaced communities and how these communities utilize the social support of local humanitarian networks.
Aria Fani
Aria Fani (Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, University of Washington). Fani’s research focuses on modern Persian literature and traces transnational literary connections, particularly between Iran and Afghanistan. He also engages in social advocacy for non-citizen Americans, particularly Mexican and Central American asylum seekers.
Radhika govindrajan
Radhika Govindrajan (Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Washington). Govindrajan is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her research is motivated by a longstanding interest in understanding how human relationships with nonhumans in South Asia are variously drawn into and shape broader issues of cultural, political, and social relevance: religious nationalism; elite projects of environmental conservation and animal rights; everyday ethical action in a time of environmental decline; and people’s struggle for social and political justice in the face of caste discrimination, patriarchal domination, and state violence and neglect. She is the author of Animal Intimacies (University of Chicago Press 2018; Penguin 2019).
Danny Hoffman
Danny Hoffman (Bartley-Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Jackson School of International Studies; Chair, African Studies Program, University of Washington).  An anthropologist by training, Hoffman’s research focuses on youth and violent conflict in the West African nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia.  
Emma Meyer
Emma Meyer (Ph.D., History, Emory). Meyer’s research, which focuses on histories of forced migration between India and Burma (Myanmar) in the mid-twentieth century, traces the historical development of refuge-making in modern South Asia.   
Shanna Sherbinske
Shanna Scherbinske (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, University of Washington).  Scherbinske’s research focuses on political and legal anthropology, migration and refugees, human rights and humanitarianism, and on education.  She works in the Horn of Africa and in the US.
Kathleen Woodward
Kathleen Woodward (Lockwood Professor in the Humanities; Professor, English; Director, Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington). Woodward is the author and editor of books on aging, the emotions, and technology and culture, including Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions (2009). Her interests in 1) assisted living for those in need of care and 2) the emotional stances of benevolence, pity, and mercy, today largely discredited in the U.S., intersect with the project of Humanitarianisms.
Rawan Arar
Rawan Arar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. Her research program begins with the refugee as a central figure of analysis. Refugee displacement is the manifestation of the breakdown of borders and citizenship rights while refugee status, as a legal construct, is delimited by the principle of sovereignty. Refugees’ lives and life chances are inextricably tied to national and global policies, which create or impede access to basic needs, education, rights, and mobility. Arar’s research lies at the intersection of these issues and pushes forward debates about states, rights, and theories of international migration. Her scholarship has been published in Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Middle East Law and Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Contexts. Arar has also written for other academic, policy-oriented, and generalist outlets including the Middle East Institute, the Scholars Strategy Network, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog. 
Kathie Friedman-Kasaba
Kathie Friedman-Kasaba (Associate Professor, Jackson School of International Studies, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and Near & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Washington). Friedman-Kasaba is engaged in two projects. The first is a book based on interviews with Bosnian refugees from the 1992-95 war in the former Yugoslavia; she explores how individuals remember inter-ethnic coexistence and how they enact membership in a multiethnic host society after extreme ethno-religious violence and multiple forced displacements. The second studies the meanings of citizenship among second-generation young adults with diverse refugee backgrounds, by focusing on their formal and informal civic engagement.   ​
Jenna Grant
Jenna Grant (Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Washington). ​Grant is a cultural anthropologist working in the fields of medical anthropology and medical humanities; feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies (STS); visual anthropology; and Southeast Asia Studies. Her work includes ethnographic and historical analysis of medical imaging and community-based inquiry of archival images. Her book project, Fixing the Image (under review), based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research in Cambodia and France, examines contemporary medical imaging services in Phnom Penh.
Parijat Jha
Parijat Jha (Doctoral Student, Anthropology, Cornell University). Jha’s research focuses on the interstices of humanitarianism and development, particularly on understanding how humanitarian and development projects require material labor and coincide with migrations. A question central to his research is, how does labor as a site of inquiry add to, challenge, or put into question the politics surrounding humanitarianism and development interventions?
James Pangilinan
James Pangilinan (Ph.D. Candidate, Geography, University of British Columbia). Pangilinan’s research traces historical geographies of postcolonial asylum and relational humanitarianism through the Philippines at two critical junctures. He considers how Filipino elites, during the Philippines' decolonization before World War II, collaborated with Jewish humanitarians to host refugees in Mindanao. Focusing on the closure of Cold War refugee aid in Southeast Asia, he details how practices of “Global South” refugee care formed transnational connections and comparative grounds for diasporic contestation through aid linkages between the Philippines and post-Katrina New Orleans.
Vincente L. Rafael
Vicente L. Rafael (Professor, History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Washington). Much of Rafael’s research has been on the cultural and political history of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines and the United States. He has written several books dealing with such themes as language and empire, translation and religious conversion, revolution and representation, nationalism and diaspora, and photography and trauma. Currently, he is finishing a book on the poetics of vulgarity and the politics of obscenity under the authoritarian neo-liberal regime of Philippine president Rodigro Duterte. 
Anand Yang
Anand Yang (Walker Family Endowed Professor, History and Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington). Yang began his career specializing in South Asian History, specifically relating to colonial India. In recent years, his interests have become more comparative and global, increasingly focusing on the connections between India and China, Southeast Asia, and other world regions. His latest book entitled Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (2021) narrates the laboring stories of Indians who were banished to penal colonies in Southeast Asia for their criminal and/or political activities. His next two projects are on the north Indian labor diaspora across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Caribbean; and a history of New Delhi in the early 1960s.
Sara Curran
Sara Curran (Professor, Jackson School of International Studies; Director, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology, University of Washington). Curran is a sociologist and demographer. She researches gender, migration, and the environment in many contexts around the globe. Her current projects examine 1) social change and migration dynamics, 2) climate change, natural disasters, and population change, 3) applied research and training, and 4) global studies research.  She is the founding editor of Global Perspectives, a new journal published by the University of California Press. For more information visit her personal website.
Katie Sophie gonser
Katie Sophie Gonser ​(Ph.D. Candidate, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington). Gonser’s research focuses on intersections and interactions between humanitarianism and human rights in North Korea. Recent literature suggests that these traditionally distinct fields are increasingly overlapping, and her research investigates whether this is the case in the North Korean context by comparing humanitarian and human rights organizations’ structures, official discourse, practices, and perspectives.  
Maryam S. Griffin
Maryam S. Griffin (Assistant Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington-Bothell). Broadly, Griffin’s work examines people’s ordinary movements, both physical and political, and how they confront state power in quotidian and spectacular ways. She is the author of Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank (forthcoming from Temple University Press), which considers collective Palestinian movement via public transportation as a site of social struggle through which Israel advances its settler colonization of the West Bank and Palestinian communities refuse and transcend that project through quotidian, activist, and artistic engagements.
Selim S. kuru
Selim S. Kuru (Associate Professor and Chair, Near Eastern Languages & Civilization; Director, Turkish & Ottoman Studies, University of Washington). Kuru is a philologist and literary historian. His work focuses on early modern Ottoman imperial literary culture with a focus on poetics and poetry in the lives of the governing elite. His research interrogates expressions of masculinity and being human across genres through philologically critical reading of literary works in Ottoman Turkish language. His teaching involves Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkish cultural and literary history, methodologies in Near Eastern Studies and representations of the Middle East in Cinema and Graphic novels. ​
Stephanie Selover
Stephanie Selover (Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, University of Washington). Selover’s research interests include the effects of modern politics on archaeology of the Middle East, the prehistoric cultures of the Near East, evidence of violence on ancient human remains and the origins of violence and warfare in the ancient world.
Lynn Thomas
Lynn Thomas (Professor, History, University of Washington). Thomas is a historian of politics and gender in twentieth-century Africa. Her first book, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003), examines how and why female circumcision, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy became the subject of intense debate and intervention in colonial and, after 1963, postcolonial Kenya. Her new book Beneath the Surface (Duke and Wits University, 2020) is a transnational history of skin lighteners centered in South Africa that extends into the broader Southern African region, East Africa, and the United States.
Smadar Ben-Natan
Smadar Ben-Natan is the Benaroya postdoctoral fellow in the Stroum Center
for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington and a longtime Israeli human rights lawyer who completed her Ph.D. in the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben-Natan specializes in law and society and international law, with a particular focus on the intersection of criminal justice, national security and human rights. Ben-Natan holds a Master in International Human Rights Law, with distinction, from the University of Oxford (2011), and an LLB from Tel-Aviv University (1995). She has litigated high-profile cases in the Israeli Supreme Court, appeared on national media, and published op-eds and blog posts on various platforms.
Ben-Natan is a 2020 Harry Frank Guggenheim distinguished scholar for her research about incarceration in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “The Carceral State in Conflict: Between Reconciliation and Radicalization.” Her article “Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges” (which appears in the profile as forthcoming 2020) is published  in Law & Social Inquiry, in 2021.
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​MIGRATIONS AND CARE THROUGH THE GLOBAL SOUTH​
© 2021 Mellon Sawyer Seminar Humanitarianisms