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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.