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.

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.

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. 

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.

https://bonnie-jones.com/

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.

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.

Stephen Woo is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the department of Modern Culture and Media. His research, which engages the politics of global cinema as well as cinematic form, pairs film theory with questions of trauma, race, coloniality, and sex. Before coming to Brown, he received a bachelor’s degree in film studies and American studies from Cornell University, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. He was the 2021 recipient of the Albert Spaulding Cook Prize in the Department of Comparative Literature and the 2022 recipient of the Student Writing Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. In 2021, he also received a Critical Language Scholarship for the Study of Chinese by the U.S. Department of State. In addition to his scholarship, he is a programmer for Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, RI.