BROWN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Visiting Professor
- Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
Adi Ophir is a visiting professor affiliated with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Middle East Studies. At the Cogut Institute, he directs the Political Concepts initiative. He is also Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. His current research focuses on political concepts as events, performances, and discursive apparatuses, with special attention to three concepts: "concept," "political," and "the Other." He studies types of Others in general, and the structure and genealogy of one type of Other in particular - the Goy, the Jew's Other. Ophir also writes occasionally on violence and ideology in Israel/Palestine. He is the founding editor of Theory and Criticism, Israel's leading journal for critical theory, and Mafte'akh: Lexical Review for Political Thought. His recent books include The One-State Condition (Stanford University Press, 2012), co-authored with Ariella Azoulay; Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (Hebrew, The Van Leer Institute, 2013); and Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-authored with Ishai Rosen-Zvi.
Ahmad Abu Ahmad is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, where he works across the modern and classical Arabic literary traditions with a focus on Palestinian literature and film. Having completed a B.A. in English and an LL.B. in law at Tel Aviv University, he has been committed to questions of sovereignty and violence in Israel/Palestine as both a student activist and, later, an attorney. Such involvements inform his current research, which examines the intersections of space, language, and memory and attests to the complex politics of linguistic and (inter)cultural contact zones in the project of settler-colonial state-building. For him, translation offers not only a rubric for close textual analysis, but an expanded mode of circulation of meaning both within and outside text, where language functions as a contact zone and a site of asymmetric force and violence.
Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Political Science, specializing in political theory. He is interested in exploring a more-than-human account of political subjectivity. What prospects unfold from radically opening up subject formation to the variegated forces of what is usually (mis)understood as inert "stuff?" One possibility is that we can begin to understand different stimuli not as merely events that evoke specific reactions in an already formed subject but also as constitutive of the subject itself. A set of stimuli that Alcaraz is particularly interested in exploring is the constant stream of lights, sound, and vibrations that emanate from our cell phones. How are these (and the information that they represent) rewiring our understanding of the self, other, and community?
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Fellow
- Associate Professor of American Studies and English
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. She is a two-time winner of the Darwin T. Turner Award for best essay of the year in African American Review and winner of the 2020 GL/Q Caucus' Crompton-Noll Essay Prize. She has also been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She is the author of Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Duke University Press, 2012). Her second book, Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in early 2024. Additional scholarship has appeared in such venues as African American Review, GL/Q, The Black Scholar, ASAP/Journal, The Faulkner Journal, American Literary History, and James Baldwin Review, among other scholarly journals and critical anthologies. She is the guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of The Faulkner Journal examining Faulkner's canon in light of race, racism, and the work of antiracism.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Andrew W. Mellon Professor
- Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities
Amanda Anderson leads the Cogut Institute for the Humanities since 2015 and is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities.
Amanda Anderson is Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture, addressing broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. She is the host of the podcast Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities and her books include Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, TRIOS series, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, is the director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her predecessors include Mary Ann Doane and Carolyn Dean as interim directors of the Brown Humanities Center and Michael P. Steinberg as director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities from 2005 to 2015. Timothy Bewes also served as interim director in the 2019-20 academic year.
Job Titles:
- International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Ambra Marzocchi is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. Trained as a classical philologist in Italy and as a historian of the book in the United States, she specializes in the study of the history of scholarship and humanist education in early colonial Spanish America. Her current research seeks to advance the understanding of the cultural-historical dynamics surrounding the early modern transmission of Greco-Roman, pagan, and Christian literatures, through humanistic - and specifically Jesuit - pedagogy, from Europe to colonial Mexico. For her doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, she edited and studied the first textbook of Latin poetry printed in the Americas. At Brown, she plans to expand her analysis to a wider array of Latin textbooks used in colonial Mexico, many of which are preserved in the University's bibliographic collections. Her teaching philosophy is inspired by tenets of Renaissance educational treatises, which she put into practice at the University of Kentucky's Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance associated with Johns Hopkins University.
Job Titles:
- John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies
Andrew Laird came to Brown in 2016 from Warwick University in the UK, where he was Professor of Classical Literature. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and colonial Latin America, with a focus on the role of humanism in mediating native languages and legacies in sixteenth-century Mexico. His publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (Oxford University Press, 1999), Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Epic of America (Bloomsbury, 2006), and the first comprehensive surveys of Latin writing from colonial Spanish America and Brazil for Brill's Encyclopedia of the Neo-Latin World (Brill, 2014) and Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (Oxford University Press, 2015). At the Cogut Institute, Laird directs the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Fellow, Concentrator in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture
Andrew Lu '24 is an undergraduate concentrating in comparative literature (English and French) and the history of art and architecture. He is broadly interested in how the "medieval" informs and disrupts modern constructions of time, race, gender, perception, and ability. His thesis project, tentatively titled "Devouring Stone: Rethinking the Monstrous in Romanesque Monastic Sculpture," turns a critical eye to the carved stone creatures of 12th-century Languedoc monasteries, probing their paradoxical proliferation in religious spaces through questions of embodiment, alterity, and subjecthood. Through a polychronic approach that constellates materiality and historicity with theory - drawing simultaneously from hagiography, material culture, and cross-disciplinary postmodern thought - he seeks to unearth from medieval sculptural assemblages an urgency of the now. He also edits magazines such as XO Magazine and The Forager and interns at the Met Cloisters.
Andrés Emil González is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. He holds a B.A. in comparative literature and politics from Oberlin College and an M.A. in Spanish from the Middlebury College Language School. His research is primarily on Anglophone and Hispanophone horror film and literature, the production of tropes and narrative conventions, and genre studies.
Anna Wright is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Music. Her research interests focus on Scottish traditional music and nationalism and include gender and sexuality studies and disability studies. Her current work examines madness in bagpiping discourse, following how accusations of madness reveal historical censorship of contradictory narratives and individuals, contrasted with modern discourses that tactfully leverage madness as a means to allow for a plurality of simultaneous truths. She has a background in performance, and before coming to Brown, she studied at the University of British Columbia, where she earned M.A. degrees in saxophone performance and ethnomusicology. She plays pipes in her spare time and is originally from Edinburgh.
Arnav Adhikari is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English, where his research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial theory, intellectual history, and visual culture. His planned dissertation project examines the politics of temporality with reference to 20th-century South Asia in a transnational frame. Working across literature, photography, and film, he examines practices of citizenship, subjectivity, and diaspora as articulated alongside decolonial movements. He has also taught courses on graphic novels and academic writing at Brown. Previously, he was an editorial fellow at The Atlantic, and an associate editor at PIX, a photography publication based in New Delhi, where he worked on multiple curatorial projects as well. He holds a B.A. in literary studies from Middlebury College.
Aseel Azab is a fourth-year doctoral student of Islam, society, and culture in the Department of Religious Studies. She holds a B.A. in political science from the American University in Cairo. She is interested in the cultivation of contemporary Muslim sociopolitical projects and expressions of ethical subjectivities, particularly in Egypt, and the ways in which these projects are produced in response to political circumstances, as well as ongoing textual engagement with premodern Islamic traditions. She has published "The Secular in Anglophone Scholarship on Premodern Islam: A Critical Historiography" in the Havard Divinity School Graduate Student Journal (2021), and recently presented a paper titled "Blessed Be the Strangers: An Islamic Ethical Framework for Eschatological Times" at the conference Muslim Futurism (2022) and an ongoing project "Do What You Can to Keep the Good Word Alive: Salafi Subjectivity in Post 2013 Egypt" at the Doha Institute's Arab Centre for Policy and Research.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, Lecturer in
Ashley Champagne is Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), the University's digital scholarship hub that provides inspiration, expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication to Brown faculty, staff, and students. Dr. Champagne is also a Cogut Institute Lecturer in Humanities teaching courses in digital humanities and supporting the Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities. She is the Principal Investigator of the "New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art," a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the co-Research Director on the "Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas" project, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities, JMIR Infodemiology, ITHAKA S+R, Digital Humanities Now. Dr. Champagne earned her Ph.D. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018.
Ben Safran manages operations including strategic and financial planning, facilities management, academic programs, and supervising administrative staff. They have a Ph.D. in music from Temple University and have presented research on protest music, campaign strategy, identity studies in music, music in childhood and youth culture, media studies, hermeneutics, ecomusicology, and 20th- and 21st-century concert music. Their scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Yale Journal of Music and Religion, while their compositions have been performed by musicians ranging from principal members of the Philadelphia Orchestra to grassroots activists performing a guerilla concert in a corporate headquarters lobby. They also serve on the board of environmental activist group Earth Quaker Action Team.
Bonnie Jones is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Music, focusing on composition. She is an improvising musician, poet, and educator working with electronic sound, spatial audio technologies, archives, and text. Her work explores noise, sonic identity, listening, and sound as knowledge. Her current project explores the archival materials of transnational Korean adoptees and is informed by feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, and the Black radical tradition. She holds an MFA from Bard College and has presented her work in the U.S. and abroad at venues such as National Sawdust, New York City; REDCAT, Los Angeles; ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; and HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Berlin, Germany. She has released albums with Erstwhile, Northern Spy, Olof Bright, and Another Timbre. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 2004.
Brianna Eaton is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Africana Studies. She earned a B.A. in film and media studies and Black studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a M.A. in cinema studies from New York University. Her dissertation project examines symbols of Blackness in film and television in the 21st century, focusing on how visual markers of race link representations of Blackness across political borders and geographies. Black production in film and television in the contemporary moment is prolific and widely accessible, making it deeply embedded in and responsive to fractured, relational, and affective intraracial discourses. She examines Black productions from several countries to highlight how Black creators disrupt, reinforce, and negotiate Blackness, contending with the production of Blackness as art, entertainment, and commercial enterprise and as a political project aimed at undoing centuries of misrepresentation.
Job Titles:
- Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies
Chanelle Dupuis is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of French and Francophone Studies. Her research focuses on the representation of odors in French and Francophone literature. At the intersection of smell studies and trauma studies, she focuses on the way odors can be triggers for past traumatic events and how stench denounces a slow violence on bodies and environments in 20th-century French literature. She is also interested in how odors can be indicators of environmental change and the shifting scents of an environment. Before coming to Brown, she received a B.A. in French and Spanish from Florida State University.
Christopher Grasso is Professor in the Department of History and a historian of American culture, religion, and politics. His research and writing have focused on the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (UNC Press, 1999) and Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the SHEAR Book Prize. He has received year-long grants from the NEH, ACLS, and National Humanities Center and has published essays in journals including the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and The Journal of American History. His latest book is Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (Oxford University Press, 2021); he also edited part of Kelso's Civil War memoir for Yale University Press as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War (2017). Before coming to Brown in 2022, he was the Pullen Professor of History at William and Mary. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1992 and also taught at St. Olaf College. He was editor of the William and Mary Quarterly from 2000 to 2013.
Job Titles:
- Director of Academic Programs at the Cogut Institute
- Director of Academic Programs, Lecturer in
Damien Mahiet is Director of Academic Programs at the Cogut Institute and Lecturer in Humanities. He provides administrative support for the Collaborative Humanities Initiative and Doctoral Certificate as well as the institute's communications and programs. His research focuses on the ways musical ideas and practices have informed political history in general and international relations in particular. Trained in political thought (M.A. Sciences Po Paris) and musicology (Ph.D. Cornell University), he was a fellow at Harvard University's Mahindra Humanities Center in 2012-13. His work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music, Dance Research, History of European Ideas, and the Journal of International Political Theory. He coedited L'Institution musicale (Delatour, 2011) and Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He serves as a review editor of the H-Diplo network.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of American Studies, Interim Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Devon Clifton is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. Her dissertation, titled "Psychoanalytics: Towards a Black Object Study," makes use of psychoanalytic object relations theory to examine both African American literature and literary criticism. Using the work of Hortense Spillers and D.W. Winnicott, Clifton reads canonical African American women's literature as theorizing the ways that blackness materializes as an object of thought in the first place. "Psychoanalytics" explains how attending to this materialization is vital to upholding the intellectual and ethical objectives of black feminist scholarship since scholars necessarily orient towards their own "objects" of study. Clifton's first article "Rededication: Hurston, Black Object Thinking, and ‘the black feminist critical enterprise'" was published in The Journal of American Culture. Her research has received funding from the Pembroke Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Clifton was also chosen as a 2022 national finalist for the WW Women's Studies Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
2022-24 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
Eric Johnson is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Art and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 2021. His research combines archaeological and historical methods to examine intersecting effects of colonialism and capitalism in North America, specifically northern New Jersey. His current book project, "An Archaeology of Settler Capitalism: Appropriating and Industrializing Wampum Manufacture in New Jersey (1770-1900)," exposes the entwined nature of capitalist and settler ideologies through the untold story of Euro-American settlers who produced Indigenous shell beads for export to the fur trade. He has begun a new project examining potential stone landscape features of the Northeast that are not currently recognized by state agencies as Indigenous heritage. Combining landscape surveys, mapping, and re-reading the colonial archive of New Netherland, this project seeks to survey, contextualize, and ultimately preserve at-risk sites while interrogating settler-state criteria for recognizing Indigenous architectural heritage.
Fabrizio Ciccone is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. His research focuses on the long 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic, with a special emphasis on the intellectual history of catastrophe and the political utility of comedy. His teaching interests include literary modernisms, post-1945 and contemporary global Anglophone fiction, film and film theory, and the history and theory of comedy (from the 18th century to the present). Of central importance to both his teaching and his research is the theoretical recuperation of failure. His dissertation examines texts that refuse a tragic perspective when conceptualizing the experience of defeat, choosing to turn instead to a distinctly comedic mode of thinking. One avenue his research on this subject has taken is the phenomenon of cultural defeat, specifically how comedy has been used by artists and thinkers to understand the ongoing political, environmental, and economic catastrophes of the 20th and 21st centuries. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies at Brown, he earned an M.A. in English from Boston College and a B.A. in literature from Sarah Lawrence College.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Fellow
Faiz Ahmed is Associate Professor in the Department of History. A historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, his core research and teaching interests include human mobility, travel, and migration; networks of learning and expertise; and the intersections of law, citizenship, and diplomacy. His first book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press, 2017), was awarded the American Historical Association's John F. Richards Prize in 2018. His current book project, "Ottoman Americana: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Early United States" (under contract with Princeton University Press), examines the social, economic, and legal underpinnings of Ottoman-U.S. ties, based on Ottoman sources and perspectives. His published articles can be found in multiple journals of law, history, and Global South studies, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Global Jurist; International History Review; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Iranian Studies; Law and History Review; Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and Perspectives on History. Interviews with him have appeared on national radio and history channels, as well as local news, including NPR's "Throughline," Boston Globe, ABC6 Rhode Island news, Toynbee Prize Foundation, Borderlines, and "Ottoman History Podcast."
Goutam Piduri is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English and holds a B.A. in English from Ashoka University. He is interested in nonacquisitive forms of imperialist thought and style. His dissertation project focuses on the 17th century, inquiring into the mechanisms by which nonpossession - a cultivated indifference to material goods - is allied to early imperialist thought. To this end, he reads the work of English poets, East India Company ethnographers, and Puritan spiritual authorities to excavate a counter-intuitive relationship between nonpossession and empire. The project thus complicates the ascetics claim that the abandonment of "material" ownership in favor of "spiritual" renunciation is a path of nonviolence or resistance to imperialism. He has attended seminars convened by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He translates from Telugu, and his translations have appeared in Asymptote and Denver Quarterly.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Fellow, Concentrator in History of Art and Architecture
Grace Xiao '24 (she/her) is an undergraduate concentrating in the history of art and architecture, with interests in modern and contemporary art of the Asian diaspora and the history of photography. Her project, tentatively titled "(Dis)location, Diaspora, and the Camera Image: Contemporary Women Artists of the South Asian Diaspora," draws on postcolonial studies, theories of diaspora, Asian/American/diasporic studies, and feminist theory to investigate the work of Zarina Bhimji and Seher Shah, two contemporary women artists of the South Asian diaspora. Her work investigates the ways that these artists are undermining photography's historical and continued use as a violent tool for coloniality, as they insert moments of ambiguity and fluidity brought from their diasporic experiences to challenge the objectivity and transparency expected of the medium. As a Community-Based Learning and Research Fellow with the Swearer Center, she has aided in developing coursework that considers how writing about arts and culture can advance public discourse about race, equity, and justice. She has served as a Racial Justice Fellow with the Hay Library and is a 2023-24 Pembroke Seminar Undergraduate Student Fellow. She has also worked across different departments at the RISD Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gregory Kimbrell promotes the institute's initiatives and events and the accomplishments of its faculty, fellows, and students across a variety of channels. For 11 years, he organized events and managed event space and publicity for Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries. He completed his MFA in creative writing at VCU and has since published two books of poetry: The Primitive Observatory (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) and The Ceremonial Armor of the Impostor (Weasel Press, 2019). He is currently studying UX design at Springboard.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Hannah Rose Silverblank is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Classical Reception in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her research focuses on how meaning is constituted and exchanged across time, languages, species, and embodied differences. Her book project, "Listening to the Monster in Greek Poetry," tunes into the monster's cosmic positioning in more-than-human worlds by attending to the aesthetics of nonhuman sonic expression in ancient Greek poetry. Several of her recent and forthcoming publications have focused on the role of disability and/or queerness in translation theory, lexicography, reception theory, and the occult arts and sciences. Her teaching philosophy is informed by her research in disability studies and the wisdom of disability justice movements. She is therefore committed to creating inclusive and collaborative classroom experiences for her students. She earned her DPhil in classical languages and literature at the University of Oxford in 2017, and she taught in various humanities departments at Haverford College from 2017-22.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Modern Culture and Media
Helene Nguyen is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media working at the intersection of media, diagnostics, and tropical medicine. Through legacies of pathology, symptomology, and exchange, her research explores diagnostics as a mode of mediatic encounter that connects across different conceptions of somatic being and genres of the human. She is particularly invested in the effects and implications of medical knowledge and its archive, and its friction with ways of living and being in the world.
Henry Neim Osman is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. In his research, he draws from the history of computation, digital media, and philosophy of technology. His planned dissertation project is a critique of the analog as both a mode of correlation and computational paradigm, as seen in analog computers. Working across military science experiments and corporate-developed AI, he examines how the use of biological analogies such as the neural net, swarming, and plant-based computing naturalize new modes of control. Before coming to Brown, he received a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Itamar Levin is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Classics, specializing in ancient history. His research combines traditional philology with contemporary frameworks to explore the relationship between power and culture in ancient Greek society. In his two forthcoming publications, "Legal Death and Odysseus' Kingship" (The Classical Quarterly) and "News and the Family in Ancient Greece" (The Classical Journal), he illuminates tacit cultural institutions in antiquity by applying notions from legal theory and communication studies. He is currently working on his dissertation, which expands the concept of necropower and develops a methodology for studying the politics of commemoration in ancient Greek society. Specifically, he focuses on cenotaphs and the instrumentalizing of the absent dead for the (re)production of civic ideology. His work is situated within broader scholarly conversations about the role of power in shaping cultural practices and the ethical responsibilities of scholars in examining these dynamics.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Fellow, Concentrator in Comparative Literature and Anthropology
James Langan '24 is an undergraduate studying comparative literature and anthropology. Working primarily in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, he is interested in comparing modernist and avant-garde movements across Western Europe, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. His other research interests include post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School, the philosophy of anthropology, Third World cinema, and the diffusion of Marxism beyond Europe. His thesis, provisionally entitled "Rereading Modernity: Specters of Cannibalism in the Caribbean Avant-Garde," traces the epistemological and ontological formation of a modern(ist) Caribbean through the figure of the cannibal. In framing the act of anthropophagy as a Derridean specter - the paradoxical materialization of a "non-present present" - this project will compare how writers in Brazil, Cuba, and the Francophone Caribbean digest and reformulate representations of cannibalism to capture the haunting, swallowing nature of Modernity. In other words, how does the Caribbean eat (with) ghosts? This thesis will seek to incorporate Marxist, psychoanalytic, anthropological, ecocritical, and postcolonial perspectives to unsettle our understanding of cannibalism as a device of social critique and literary innovation.
Job Titles:
- Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
JD Stokely (they/them) is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Their research interests include Black queer ecologies, aesthetics, and embodiment. Currently, they are interested in the politics of the (im)possible, cultural memory, and public space. They are a co-founding member of Unbound Bodies Collective, a multidisciplinary arts lab for QTBIPOC creatives centered around healing, embodiment, pleasure, and joy. They are also a part of the curating team for Hot Bits, an annual traveling erotic queer film and performance festival, and a 2019 artEquity cohort member. They received an M.A. in advanced theatre practice from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2014 and a B.A. in applied theatre from Hampshire College in 2011.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Anthropology
Jessaca Leinaweaver is Professor of Anthropology and served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology from 2020 to 2023 and as Director of the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies from 2016 to 2019. She is the author of The Circulation of Children: Adoption, Kinship, and Morality in Andean Peru (Duke University Press, 2008), which won the Margaret Mead Award. Her second book is Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain (Duke University Press, 2013). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, among others. Her op-eds on migration, adoption, and child welfare have been published in multiple venues, including U.S. News & World Report and the CBC.
Job Titles:
- John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English, Shauna M. Stark '76 P'10 Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of European History, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Chair of Italian Studies
Job Titles:
- John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies
Job Titles:
- Jonathan Nelson Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy
Kamari Carter is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Music and Multimedia Composition, working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Carter's work has been exhibited at Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, the RISD Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Wave Hill and has been featured in a range of major publications including Artnet, Precog Magazine, Flash Art, Level Ground, and Whitewall. Carter holds a BFA in music technology from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in sound art from Columbia University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Medical Anthropologist of China
Katherine A. Mason is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a medical anthropologist of China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2016), based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize from the British Sociological Association in 2019. Since 2020, she has been working on several projects in both the U.S. and China focused on COVID-19. She is cofounder of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a multidisciplinary effort to build an archive of diverse populations' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the form of text, voice, and image-based journals. The project has received national and international media attention and was recently featured in the international traveling exhibition, "Picturing the Pandemic." She is working on several spin-off projects using the PJP platform, including an NSF-funded study with Assistant Professor of Education Andrea Flores on first-generation college students' experiences of COVID-19. In addition to her work on COVID-19, Mason also studies perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. and China.
Job Titles:
- Portuguese and Brazilian Studies
Lee Gilboa is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Music. Her creative work uses speech, audio spatialization, and vocal processing, and engages with different themes around the sonic identity such as naming, representation, collectivity, and self-expression. These themes occupy her scholarly work as well, which brings together sound studies, semiotics, political theory, black studies, and voice studies. Prior to her studies at Brown, Gilbao earned her B.A. in Electronic Production and Design and Jazz Composition from Berklee College of Music, and an MFA from Columbia University. Her music was featured at venues such as Roulette Intermedium and The Cube in Virginia Tech, and was released by the labels Contour Editions and Surface World.
Job Titles:
- John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English, Shauna M. Stark '76 P'10 Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director
Job Titles:
- Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies
Job Titles:
- Academic Programs Coordinator
Matt Hoffmann provides administrative and logistical support for the institute's courses, fellowship programs, and funding opportunities. Previously, he worked as a Campus Coordinator for Levine Music, a large community music school in Washington, D.C. There, he managed teachers' studios and assisted students in beginning their musical journey. He graduated from George Mason University in 2022 with a B.M. in French horn performance, then interned with the education team at Washington Performing Arts. He has enjoyed teaching private horn lessons for the past six years.
Norman Frazier is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of History. He is broadly interested in nationalism and the politics of sound in 19th-century Europe, with particular focus on the formation of national identity in Germany. His research examines spaces and built environments, particularly within cities, where notions of Germanness were negotiated along lines of class, region, religion, and taste. His current project considers nationhood within the acoustic world and everyday music practices of Berlin tenements in the late-19th century. Prior to Brown, he received a B.A. in History from Loyola University Chicago and has studied at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany.
Osama Ahmad is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of History. His research focuses on colonial South Asia and the early-modern Persianate world, particularly the Mughal Empire. He is currently exploring the impact of colonialism on vernacular knowledge formations in the city of Lahore, Punjab under the British Raj. He is interested in examining the impact of modern colonial institutions (like colleges, art schools, and museums) and the ways it shaped ‘traditional' educational institutions, the old ‘native' city, the ‘Urdu bazaar,' and vernacular fields of Urdu, Persian as well as Punjabi writing and publishing. Before coming to Brown, he received his B.A. in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and an M.Phil. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge on the Commonwealth Shared Scholarship.
Job Titles:
- Jonathan Nelson Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy
Job Titles:
- Portuguese and Brazilian Studies
Job Titles:
- David Herlihy University Professor of Comparative Literature and the
Job Titles:
- Administrative and Event Coordinator
Rachel Ulm coordinates logistics and administrative support for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events. Previously, she worked as a Community Ambassador at Colgate University and served on a public relations committee that helped to coordinate and advertise events for the Tredecim Honor Society. She has also worked with children and teenagers as a private cello teacher. She earned her B.A. in geography and environmental studies at Colgate University. Her research focused on resource disparities within Indigenous populations, low-income neighborhoods, and communities of color with a particular focus on food insecurity and the viability of sustainable urban agriculture. She is currently pursuing a M.S. in geography and geospatial science at Oregon State University.
Job Titles:
- Professor of American Studies, Professor of English
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English
Ravit Reichman is Associate Professor of English. She works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2009) examines law and literature in the context of the world wars. At the Cogut Institute, she will be completing a study of property's cultural and psychological life, "Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times," which offers a genealogy of property's expansive role in our psychic life, beginning with more conventional notions of property and ending in ideas of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Modern Culture and Media
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Comparative Literatur
Job Titles:
- Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice
Thomas Dai is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies. His research and teaching interests include queer studies, Asian American literature and visual culture, and the environmental humanities. He is currently developing a dissertation that examines entomological figures and other cross-species intimacies within contemporary discourses on sexuality, race, and aesthetics. Alongside his academic work, he is also working on a book of creative nonfiction about travel and geography. Recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, New England Review, and elsewhere. He has received support for his writing from Lambda Literary and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Prior to Brown, he earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and A.B. in Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Pembroke Hall, renovated by architect Toshiko Mori and rededicated in October 2008, houses the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
Will Johnson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Music. Themes from his work include Black digital memory, phantom archives and the latent poetics of audio engineer speak. His proposed dissertation project centers on composition for trunk subwoofers and conceives of automobile collectives as orchestras-in-motion. Throughout his work, particular attention is paid to subfrequencies and the left-most regions of the frequency spectrum. Here, "bass" is explored as a vibrotactile substance that challenges the formality of "music" as a purely auditory phenomena. Johnson is a visiting researcher at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Johannesburg's Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) Research Centre. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation's Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship and the McKnight Fellowship for Musicians.
Yannick Etoundi is a third-year doctoral candidate at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. As a historian of the built environment, he specializes in postcolonial architectural history, global modernisms, visual culture of empire, and the architectures of slavery and abolition. His main area of focus is the African continent and the African diaspora, and he is particularly interested in the ways in which the memory of slavery, abolition, and colonialism is articulated around the built environment. He holds a M.Arch. and a B.Arch. from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a B.Soc.Sc. in international studies and modern languages from the University of Ottawa. He also has professional experience in architectural firms based in Yukon, Canada, and Tokyo, Japan.
Job Titles:
- Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies