The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics has announced its 2024-25 fellows, with three current or former PhD students named Fellows-in-Residence and Graduate Fellows – as well as a number of our concentrators appointed as Undergraduate Fellows.
Adriana Alfaro Altamirano – PhD alumni of the Department of Government – has been appointed a Fellow-in-Residence and will be the Edmond & Lily Safra Center’s inaugural Civil Discourse Fellow.
Currently an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, her research explores questions regarding power, law, and agency as they appear in modern and contemporary political thought, from a comparative perspective. She is particularly interested in how our subjectivity – both individual and collective – is shaped by language, habit, reason, and emotion in different social, political, and legal settings.
She is the author of The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (Penn Press 2021). While at the Center, she will work on her project “The ‘Art of Listening’ and the Challenges of Spectatorship in the Digital Age” and on building out the Center’s civil discourse initiative.
Liya Haefner – a current PhD student in political theory – has been appointed as an Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow.
She is studying political theory and the history of political thought, with her dissertation examining the history and politics of pardon and oblivion, as well as contemporary debates on forgiveness and forgetting.In brief, her dissertation focuses on the following question: How can people peacefully coexist when there are events in their collective past that can conjure up feelings of resentment, anger, and hate towards each other?
Prior to Harvard, she received her BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Yi Ning Chang – a current PhD Candidate studying political theory – has also been appointed as an Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow.
She is writing a dissertation on the end of anticolonial politics. Through a study of 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, the project examines the relationship between decolonization and the remaking of politics in the postcolony. It asks how normative commitments to citizenship, welfare, and other anticolonial demands were reconsidered and rearticulated after the end of empire, and what that might mean for postcolonial politics today. Based on archival and library work in four languages and six countries, the dissertation intervenes in the political theory of anticolonialism and empire, as well as related debates in the history of twentieth-century political thought.
We are incredibly pleased for Adriana, Liya, and Yi Ning as well as our undergraduate concentrators, and wish them the best of luck in their new roles.