Elizabeth Berman is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, and is pursuing an M.A. in German Studies through the Open Graduate Education program as well as a certificate in Science and Technology Studies. Her research and teaching engages broadly with critical theory and modern continental thought, spanning interests including trauma theory, bioethics and disability, philosophies of temporality, and film and media theory. She is currently examining how certain technologies — cinema, psychoanalysis, and narcotics — are figured as both curative and wounding, simultaneously alleviating and engendering anxieties about (in)finitude, (dis)enchantment, and the (im)possibility of repair. In addition to her research, she serves as an assistant editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and has taught on subjects including theories of reproduction, Holocaust film and literature, and surveillance studies. She holds an M.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was also a lecturer and Fulbright research fellow, and B.A. degrees in History of Art and German Studies, also from Brown University.

Tessa Finley is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies. Her work pursues questions of how we may conceive of literature as engendering morally and politically formative practices, with special attention to conceptions of prayer. Her research interests include the philosophy of religion, literature and literary theory, psychoanalysis, mysticism, and political theory. Her dissertation project is broadly concerned with ideas of literature as a form of redemption, and considers how practices of divination and mystical reading compare with the practices of reading and ideas of literature that are enshrined in institutions such as the university or the church. She holds a B.A. from Pomona College and a MFA from Oregon State University.

Michele Moghrabi is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation research attempts to trace a genealogy of “diseases of the soul.” Starting in a web of Ancient Greek philosophy, medicine, and tragedy, he hopes to explore how the very birth of the notion of a “soul” or “psyche” shifted the Greek conception of madness away from an illness that is the product of external possession, and toward a true disease of the order of this nascent structure conceived to be the soul. Tracing this development of conceptions of mental illness through the history of Greek medical and philosophical reception, he hopes to place the contemporary culmination of this particular tradition within psychoanalysis. By emphasizing alternative psychoanalytic traditions in phenomenology and German existential philosophy, he aims to show how the Greek birth of the thinking of “disease of the soul” comes full-circle in a lesser-read psychoanalytic tradition that, in its deeply Greek inheritance, strives to conceive of psychopathologies as dysfunctions in the psyche’s distinctive spatiotemporal order. He was raised between France and Italy before starting university in the United States.

Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. His research, focused on South Africa, interrogates the ontological and libidinal dimensions of anti-Blackness. He traces the circulation of Black suffering across juridical, cultural, and libidinal economies, critiquing the aesthetic and political complicities of representation within regimes of control. Before coming to Brown University, he earned a B.A. in Motion Picture Medium from AFDA: The School for the Creative Economy, followed by a B.A. Honours in Curatorship and an M.F.A. from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He currently serves as an Exhibitions Proctor at the Brown Arts Institute and the Bell Gallery, and programs films with the Magic Lantern Cinema, a Providence-based curating collective.