Second Book Institute
Second Book Institute Fellows with their faculty peers during the Summer 2023 workshop.
Photo Credit: Benjamin Kahan
SBI Fellows
Prosanta Chakrabarty
Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty is the E.K. Hunter Chair for Communication in Science Research, Professor and Curator of Fishes at the Museum of Natural Science and Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University. He is also a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He is a systematist and an ichthyologist studying the evolution and biogeography of fishes, his work has taken him to more than 35 countries around the world (including Japan, Australia, Brazil, Taiwan, Madagascar, Panama, Kuwait and the Galapagos). He has published more than 150 scientific papers and four books including most recently ‘Explaining Life Through Evolution’. He grew up in New York City, his undergraduate degree is from McGill University in Montreal (the city where he was born) and his PhD is from the University of Michigan. He is a former Program Director at the National Science Foundation, a National Geographic Certified Educator, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a TED Senior Fellow and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair. He is the Faculty Director for the LSU Center for Collaborative Knowledge and Past President of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and has described more than 15 species of fishes that are new to science including cavefishes and deep-sea fishes. Learn more about him from his website www.prosanta.org or follow him on Twitter @PREAUX_FISH
Deborah Goldgaber
Deborah Goldgaber is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University with a joint appointment in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Since 2019, she has directed the LSU Ethics Institute and has been principal investigator or co-investigator on a number of grants working at the intersection of research ethics and STEM.
She received her PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2014. Her scholarly monograph, Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism (2021) was published by Edinburgh University Press in the Speculative Realism series and examines the deconstructive expansion of the metaphor of writing and code to include the domains of biology and information sciences. She has published articles in leading philosophy and humanities journals on the use of metaphor in science, the nature of embodiment, culture as morphogenetic process, human-technological enhancement, and the metaphysics of nature-culture relations.
Her current research project lies at the intersection of ethics, contemporary French philosophy, and feminist theory. Her second monograph, tentatively entitled The Power to Punish, examines the expansion of the power to punish in the United States in the era of mass incarceration, and attempts to diagnose why normative discourses that have traditionally aimed to constrain this power have so little power today.
Gundela Hachmann
Gundela Hachmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where she also teaches in Comparative Literature and Screen Arts. Her research focuses on German literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, intermedia studies, literature and science, as well as literary theory and poetics. She published numerous articles and book chapters on authorship and creativity; most recently, she acted as lead editor of the compendium Handbook Lectures on Poetics (de Gruyter, 2022) and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Arts and the Social.
Kalling Heck
Kalling Heck is Assistant Professor of English and Screen Arts. His work connects political theory and global cinema in order to examine the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the author of After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition (2020). His current project addresses the political significance of negative aesthetic judgment, it is titled On Hating Movies.
Carmela Mattza
Dr. Carmela V. Mattza is Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Louisiana State University and an MLA Field Bibliographer. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and specializes in the portrayal of women in Early Modern Iberian literature, the politics of art and culture, and the study of emotional language in Cervantes’s and Calderón's texts. Her notable works include the book Hacia La vida es sueño como speculum regina: Isabel de Borbón en la corte de Felipe IV and the discovery of a previously missing 17th-century manuscript by Juan de España in 2022. Dr. Mattza has been recognized for her excellence in teaching, receiving the "Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award", and plays a significant role in academic communities through her editorial work, conference organization, and mentorship of students. She is actively involved in various scholarly organizations and serves on multiple editorial boards, contributing to the advancement of her field.
Leslie Tuttle
Leslie Tuttle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where she teaches classes on the history of early modern Europe, the history of women, and the history of magic and witchcraft in the West. Her first book, Conceiving the Old Regime (Oxford, 2010) traced the rise of pronatalist policies in the early modern era of French state formation. She co-edited, with Ann Marie Plane (UCSB) Dreams, Dreamers and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World (Penn, 2013) a collection of essays examining the role of dreams in the transatlantic encounter between Europe and the indigenous cultures of the Americas. Her current monograph project, Dreaming in the Age of Reasoninvestigates practices surrounding nighttime dreams to probe the redefined boundaries between natural and supernatural during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment eras in France. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Humanities Center and the state of Louisiana’s ATLAS grant.
SBI Directors
Benjamin Kahan (Co-Director)
Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. He is also the editor of The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (2024).
Pallavi Rastogi (Co-Director)
Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is the J.F. Taylor Endowed Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her first book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa, was published by Ohio State University in 2008. Dr. Rastogi’s second book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Her co-edited collection of essays, entitled Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, published by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) appeared in print in March 2024. She has also written widely on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature as well as multiethnic British and American literature in various journals and anthologies. She serves as Associate Editor for The South Asian Review and is currently working on a book on minority non-South Asian representations of the Indian subcontinent and an edited collection on Asians in Louisiana under advance contract with LSU Press.