Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, and a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Among her films: Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Among her exhibitions: “Errata” (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and “Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order” (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).

Candace Rice is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Classics. Her research focuses on Mediterranean maritime trade and economic development during the Roman period. She is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which the inhabitants of the Roman world chose to engage with and respond to the economic conditions and opportunities afforded by imperial-period connectivity. She co-directs the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, focused on the excavation and interdisciplinary study of the Roman villa at Vacone and its associated late Roman and early Medieval cemeteries, and is also beginning a new archaeological project in southeastern Sicily. At the Cogut Institute, she will be working on a monograph project that examines the economic landscape of Roman and late antique Lycia (Turkey) through a multiscalar approach, exploring the impact of maritime connectivity on the lived experiences of the people inhabiting this region.

Mark Suchman is Professor of Sociology; a former Chair of the American Sociological Association’s sections on Organizations, Occupations, and Work and on Sociology of Law; and a former board member of the Law and Society Association and the American Bar Foundation.  His research interests center on the relationship between law and organizations, with a particular focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in the information technology and healthcare sectors. Perhaps best known for his theoretical work on organizational legitimacy, he has also conducted major empirical studies on the role of law firms in Silicon Valley, the governance challenges posed by new information technologies in health care, and the sequential structure of the entrepreneurial start-up process. In addition, he has written on organizational networks, on interorganizational disputing practices, on social science approaches to the study of contracts, and on the “internalization” of law within corporate bureaucracies. His project at the Cogut Institute explores a string of startling developments in American legal doctrine on “corporate personhood,” situating those developments in the context of evolving social-science understandings of organizational action, and evolving cultural understandings of entrepreneurial agency and corporate social responsibility.

David Wills is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and teaches 20th-century literature and “high” theory of the period 1960–1985. His major work, published principally in three volumes in the Posthumanities Series at the University of Minnesota Press (Prosthesis, Dorsality, Inanimation), deals with the originary technicity of the human. He hails from New Zealand, where he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (University of Auckland), before undertaking doctoral studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). He came to the U.S. in 1985, and held positions at Louisiana State University and SUNY-Albany, arriving at Brown in 2013. He is also well known for research on and translations of work by Jacques Derrida, notably Right of Inspection, The Gift of Death, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Theory and Practice, Clang (with Geoffrey Bennington), and two forthcoming volumes of the seminar Perjury and Pardon.

Benjamin P. Hein is Assistant Professor of History and teaches courses on European and global history. Born and raised near Frankfurt, Germany, he moved to the United States to earn a B.A. in economics and history (Emory University) and a Ph.D. in history (Stanford University). Interested in histories of migration, cultures of work, and political economy, he is currently at work on his first book, titled “The Migrant’s Spirit: Industrial Revolution in the German Lands.” The study explores the impact of nearly a century of trans-Atlantic migration to the Americas on European work cultures, economic thought and institutions, and commercial law. Research for this project was made possible by generous grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Brown University, the Free University of Berlin, and Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

Stephen Houston serves as Dupee Family Professor of Social Sciences. He has prepared many books and articles, including, most recently, Temple of the Night Sun: A Royal Tomb at El Diablo, Guatemala (Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, 2015); The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence (Yale University Press, 2014), winner of the PROSE Award for Art History and Criticism; The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text (Yale University Press, 2018); and A Maya Universe in Stone (Getty Research Institute, 2021). He also co-curated “Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea,” an exhibit exploring ecological aesthetics in Maya civilization. He has been honored with a MacArthur “genius grant,” along with fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, the Clark Art Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Gallery of Art. In 2018–19, he served as the inaugural Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress. In recognition of his scholarship, the President of Guatemala awarded him, in 2011, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Quetzal, the country’s highest honor. He is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. is from Yale University.

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature. His published work has focused on the archaeology of listening — Listen: A History of Our Ears (Fordham University Press, 2007), All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham University Press, 2016) — on the politics of reading — Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville (Fordham University Press, 2009), Of Stimatology: Punctuation as Experience (Fordham University Press, 2018), Pouvoirs de la lecture: de Platon au livre électronique (La Découverte, 2022) — and on the economies or ecologies of visuality — Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World (Fordham University Press, 2015), The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images (Fordham University Press, 2019), Pour une écologie des images (Éditions de Minuit, 2021). He has curated the exhibition “The Supermarket of Images” at the museum of the Jeu de Paume in Paris (February–June 2020).

Rachel Wetts is Acacia Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology. Her research examines how cultural and social psychological processes interact with systems of power and privilege to shape American politics. She focuses on two areas of American politics with profound consequences for contemporary American society and for societies across the globe: the politics of white racial resentment, and the problem of stalled political action to address climate change. In each of these areas, she examines how elite-public interactions shape how we understand, discuss, and respond to large-scale changes in social relations and the natural world. While at the Cogut Institute, she will be working on a new project conceptualizing American climate change politics as a form of status politics — as a way that various groups in American society seek to have their skills, tastes, and identities recognized and socially validated. Her research has been published in Social Forces and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others, and has been covered in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR.