Recent Fellows
| Recent Fellows
Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein
Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein is a postdoctoral fellow at the Frieberg Center, where he researches the social history of North Korea. His work focuses on social control and surveillance in North Korean history, the intersection between economic and political control, as well as totalitarianism as a system of governance. He received his PhD in History in July 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral dissertation examines the evolution of surveillance in North Korea from 1954 until the present, using oral history interviews with close to 40 North Korean refugees in South Korea as well as North Korean archival materials.
Read MoreFrieberg Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2021-2022
Read LessDr. Avital Rom
Avital Rom is a Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow during the autumn-winter semester of the academic year 2021-22. She earned her BA in East Asian Studies (2013) from Tel-Aviv University; and her MPhil (2015) and PhD (2020) in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Read MoreHer research focuses on the social and political aspects of hearing, sound, and silence in early China (particularly the Warring States and Western Han periods). Her doctoral dissertation, titled Polyphonic Thinking: Music and Authority in Early China, examined the rhetorical and political functions of music in the Warring States (453-221 BCE) and Western Han (206 BCE – 9 CE) periods. Currently, she researches the social history of deafness in early China, and editing a volume on the history of disability in ancient China, titled Other Bodies: Disability and Bodily Impairment in Early China. She is also finalising the manuscript of a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation.
Dr Rom has been teaching Classical Chinese at the University of Cambridge since 2016. This semester, she is teaching an MA course titled ‘Music and Political Authority in Chinese History – From the Warring States to Early Medieval Times.’ Her publications include the articles ‘Echoing Rulership: Understanding Musical References in the Huainanzi’ (Early China, 2017) and ‘Beat the Drums or Break Them: Bells and Drums as Communication Devices in Early Chinese Warfare’ (Journal of Chinese Military History, 2020).
Frieberg Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2021-2022
Read LessDr. Yang Shen
Yang Shen is a cultural anthropologist of religion and secularism. She received her PhD from Boston University in Anthropology in October 2019 and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany from 2019 to 2021. Yang’s research explores how Chinese conceptions of religion and secularity transform global projects of modernity. Her first book manuscript, Sidestepping Secularism: Ritual and Agency in more-than Buddhist China, examined how Buddhist temple spaces accommodate and transform popular religiosity in late socialist China.
Read MoreHer current project, entitled Materializing Religious Mediation: Comparative Studies of the Social Efficacy of Lottery Divination, investigates the varying contexts of the availability of lottery divination and the changing ritual cultures in a digital time. Her publications include “Rethinking Traditions: Reading the Classics as Ritual. “Journal of Chinese Humanities 1 (2015) and, in Chinese, “Religion and Society in a Perspective of an Anthropology of Cultivation: Synopsis of the Second Workshop of Anthropology of Religion.” Studies of World Religions. vol6. (2016). 186-192.
Frieberg Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2021-2022
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