carmel-organ-headCarmel Raz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University and lecturer in the department of music. She received her PhD in music theory from Yale in 2015, and holds a Masters degree in composition from the University of Chicago and a Diplom in violin performance from the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin. Her primary research interests focus on the music and neural science of the early Romantic period, in particular the influence of different theories of cognition on musical works, instrument design, and aesthetics. She is also interested in the influence of Common Sense philosophy on music theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, the interaction between experimental music and phonetics in the early twentieth century, and music in the Middle East. Her academic work has been recognized and supported by the Theron Rockwell Field Dissertation Prize, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, a Mellon Graduate Achievement Award, and the Baden Württemberg Stiftung. She has published articles in 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. Her chapters have appeared or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Wellbeing: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, and Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas: Musical Exodus.

 

lan_li_presidential_scholars_pssn-300x300Lan Li (Presidential Scholar of Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University), is a historian of the body and filmmaker.  She received her PhD in Science Technology and Society Studies from the HASTS program at MIT.  There, she explored a comparative history of body mapping among practitioners in China and Britain throughout the 20th century.  Lan is particularly interested in how representations of peripheral sensation through hand-drawn maps cohered and conflicted with different understandings of health and disease.  As a documentary filmmaker, Lan has also collaborated with integrative practitioners in India, Brazil, and China.  She seeks to expand these collaborations across disciplinary and geographic boundaries.  Lan is an alumna of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and as a new Scholar in the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program, will take on a comparative history of numbness.