Cohort 2

Emily Doucet is a historian of photography and visual culture. She will be a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University from 2022-2023. She has previously held fellowships at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, the Ryerson Image Centre, and the British Library, among other institutions. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Toronto in 2020. During her time as an International Fellow at the KWI, she began work on a new project exploring the relationship between photography and the postal service, examining photography’s transatlantic mobilities between 1870-1945. She also completed a book proposal based on a revision of her Ph.D. dissertation, tentatively titled Inventing Nadar: Photography and the History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century France. 

Péter Kristóf Makai is set to begin his Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in January 2022, researching how board and video games portray anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity. He worked as a KWI International Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, focusing on how computer games mediate the physical pleasures of theme parks and how board games use themes to convey meaning. He was the Crafoord Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. He obtained his PhD from the University of Szeged in Literary Studies, writing his dissertation on the depiction of autism in contemporary Anglophone literature and literary theory. In addition, he regularly publishes on Tolkien and games and in science fiction studies. He is a Member of Mensa HungarIQa, an avid hiker and biker, and holds a Level 3 Award in Wines from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust.

Chiara Salari is a researcher in art, photography and visual culture. Currently an assistant lecturer at Paris Nanterre University, her research focuses on relations between landscape photographic representations, cultural identities and environmental issues.

She has completed her PhD at the University Paris Diderot, in co-supervision with Roma 3 University in Italy (PhD program “Contemporary city landscapes. Politics, technics, and visual studies”), where she previously obtained a Master’s degree in “Cinema, television and multimedia production”, before undertaking the Erasmus Mundus Master “Crossways in cultural narratives” (Canada/France).

Chiara held the Thyssen@KWI Fellowship from April to September 2021. During this period, she explored the idea of environmental aesthetics in relation to postindustrial landscapes. Her ongoing project aims to investigate the role of photography in the perception and use of the environment, from constructing cultural visual identities to preserving and transforming abandoned sites. It proposes a comparative perspective through three case studies in Germany, France and Italy. She participated in the ColloKWIum with a lecture titled “Environmental aesthetics and landscape photographic practices. From natural to urban, technological and post-industrial sublimes”, and to the KWI blog with the article From Fear to Pleasure. Photographic Representations of Industrial Sites and their Conversion into Recreational Landscapes Along the Industrial Heritage Trail.

Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Senior Editor of the MLN Hispanic Issue. His research focuses on the literary, cultural, and political history of modern Spain, with related interests in political theory, intellectual history, and cultural sociology. In 2016, he completed his PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University, where he was a Graduate School Dean’s Scholar and an Andrew W. Mellon and John E. Sawyer Seminar Fellow. During his time as a KWI International Fellow, he wrote on Spanish politics for The Nation, a volume he edited for the journal boundary 2 was published, and he worked toward the completion of his first book, The Op-Ed Novel: Spain and the Politics of Literary Persuasion, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.