Four scholars holding chair positions at the Kluge Center began their terms in residence in September 2021. These positions are filled by invitation of the Librarian of Congress and scholars enjoy individual offices in the Jefferson Building, where they engage in writing and research and interact with other scholars in residence. Keep reading to get to know more about them and their work.
Valentine M. Moghadam is Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, as well as Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston. In addition to her academic career, Moghadam has been Coordinator of the Research Program on Women and Development at the UNU’s WIDER Institute and a section chief for gender equality and development, UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector. Moghadam is author of “Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East”; “Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks”, which won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck award for best book on women and politics for 2005; and “Globalization and Social Movements: The Populist Challenge and Democratic Alternatives.” Moghadam will work on the project “Varieties of Feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa” at the Kluge Center.
Tom Mullaney is the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He a professor of Chinese history of Stanford University and a Guggenheim fellow. Mullaney is the author or lead editor of six books, including “The Chinese Typewriter,” “Your Computer is on Fire,” and the forthcoming “The Chinese Computer”—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing. Mullaney is Curator of the international exhibition, “Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age.” At the Kluge Center, he will work on “Global Futures of Computing, New Media, and Information Technology.”
Barbara E. Mundy is Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas. Mundy is an art historian whose scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She is Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University, Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and serves on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl. Mundy is also the incoming president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Her most recent book, “The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City,” draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century. With Dana Leibsohn, she is the creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Her project at the Kluge Center is titled “Indigenous Artists and European Book Culture, 1540-1600.”
Sean Theriault is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center. Theriault, a University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas, is fascinated by congressional decision-making. He has published five books: “Congress: The First Branch,” “The Great Broadening” (with Bryan Jones and Michelle Whyman), “The Gingrich Senators”, “Party Polarization in Congress”, and “The Power of the People.” Theriault, whose classes cover topics including the US Congress, congressional elections, party polarization in the United States, and the politics of the Catholic Church, has won a number of prestigious teaching awards on campus. Theriault obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2001. At the Kluge Center, he will work on a project titled “Contempt in Congress.”