2019-21 Top-Up Fellowship Winners

Five top-up fellowship awards were presented to five continuing UW-Madison graduate students, with research interests in the field of science and technology studies (STS). Each recipient will receive a $4,000 award, distributed over two years from 2019-2021. Each graduate student will attend the Holtz Center’s brown bag series and STS-related events during the academic year. Recipients are also encouraged to take the introductory graduate seminar, STS 901. Up to six awards are offered during the annual award cycle each spring.

The 2019-21 Top-Up Fellowship winners include:

Kallista Bley (Geography) is conducting research related to water quality monitoring and public health governance.

Chloe Haimson (Sociology) is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology department. Her research examines both the direct and indirect consequences of incarceration, as well as the discretionary decisions made by professionals working in the criminal justice system. For her dissertation, she is focusing on the role of parole supervision after prison in the reentry process and how parole agents perceive, as well as make choices about, the reentry trajectories of the people they supervise. She is interested in the rising role of algorithmic risk prediction tools in this process, as well as its impact on the broader criminal justice system.

Zhe Yu Lee (Geography) is a PhD student in the Department of Geography. He is developing a PhD project oriented around the knowledge politics of land-related bureaucratic practice in Indonesia. He has broader interests in how scientistic epistemological frameworks that became dominant during the 1950-1970s in the context of global decolonization and Cold War geopolitics have consequentially structured techno-managerial imaginaries of contemporary global environmental governance. His research draws on scholarship in subfields as diverse as political history, science and technology studies, political ecology, critical development studies, socio-legal studies, history of social sciences, social studies of neoliberalism, critical international relations as well as environmental and agricultural history.

Mariam Sedighi (Educational Policy Studies) is specializing in Comparative International Education and Global Studies. Mariam is broadly interested in the ways individuals make meaning of different systems of truth — such as imperialism, Islam, and globalization—and how those different discourses translate into material, social, and ethical practices.

Patrick Walsh (History) is a historian of modern biology. His current project examines the life and work of nineteenth-century French physiologist Charles Brown-Séquard, who is famous (and infamous) for his unconventional experiments on blood, nerves, glands and gonads. Brown-Séquard’s work provides an insight into how biological “life” was articulated, navigated and then defined in the nineteenth century, and how this elusive concept was translated into technologies of the body. Walsh’s project tracks how the concept of “life” changes with time, and how it persists as an ongoing intellectual issue in contemporary scientific debates.