Mahasan Chaney is Assistant Professor of Education. Her work focuses on the politics of race and discipline from the Great Society through the neoliberal era. At the Cogut Institute she will be completing her first book project, “Disciplining Opportunity: Antiblack Paternalism and Making School Punishment,” which offers an intellectual and cultural history of discourses of opportunity as a lens to examine the making of paternalistic and punitive school discipline policy. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation/National Education Association and can be found in edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of Urban History and Critical Studies in Education.

Mark Ocegueda is Assistant Professor of History. His research and teaching specializations include Latino and Mexican American history, labor, race, ethnicity, recreation, and public history. His current book project is under contract with the University of California Press and examines the development of Mexican American communities in Southern California’s Inland Empire with a focus on civil rights, race, urban renewal, culture, social movements, and labor. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining Brown University, he was Assistant Professor of Mexican American History at California State University, Sacramento, from 2017 to 2019 and the César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies program at Dartmouth College in 2019–20.

Amy Russell is Associate Professor of Classics and History. She is a Roman historian of the political culture of the Roman Republic, with a particular interest in space and architecture. Her previous publications center on public and private space in the city of Rome, the tribunate of the plebs, and the role of the Senate in the shift from Republic to empire. Forthcoming works take on the relationship between German and Anglophone scholarship on the Roman Republic and the spatial turn in Roman studies. While in residence at the institute she will work on the way political communities are constituted in Rome and beyond, focusing on the legal concept of the populus Romanus.

Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor in Political Science at the School of International and Public Affairs with appointments in the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology. She has published award-winning books and articles on human development, social welfare, public health, and ethnicity and nationalism. Her first book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare (Cambridge University Press, 2016), was awarded best book prizes from both the American Political Science and the American Sociological Associations. She has been awarded fellowships by the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Academy of Berlin, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Harvard Academy, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She serves on the editorial boards of Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Comparative Politics and Elements in the Politics of Development series. From 2021 to 2023, she was president of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Her ongoing book project compares the take-up of the world’s first vaccine across China and India through the 19th and 20th centuries. Her historical analysis shows how decisions to vaccinate are “moral” decisions that are embedded in the normative and affective relationship between states and societies.

Lindsay Caplan is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture. She is a modern and contemporary art historian whose research and teaching focus on the intersections of art, technology, and politics. She is the author of Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Other writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs, edited collections, and journals such as Grey Room, ARTMargins, Art Journal, Piano B, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Outland, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux. She is currently working on two books: a co-edited volume (with Kerry Greaves, University of Copenhagen) titled “Model Collapse: Contemporary European Art at a Time of Democratic Crisis” (University of Manchester Press, forthcoming 2025), and a second book project, which she will be pursuing at the Cogut Institute, which is a comparative study of artists who use analogies between humans and machines to reimagine creativity and collective life. Looking at Europe and the Americas from the ’50s to the ’80s, the project charts a history in which radically destabilized notions of the human were forged at the intersections of art and technology.

Marc Redfield is Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of German. He taught at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, for four years and Claremont Graduate University for 20 years before moving to Brown in 2010. He studies British, American, French, and German literature and literary theory of the 18th through 20th centuries, with a particular focus on romanticism and on intersections of literature and philosophy. He is the author of Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Cornell University Press, 1996); The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2003); The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham University Press, 2009); Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan (Fordham University Press, 2020). He co-edited High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction (University of California Press, 2002), edited Legacies of Paul de Man (Fordham University Press, 2007), co-edited Points of Departure: Samuel Weber Between Spectrality and Reading (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and has guest-edited special issues of the journals Diacritics, Romantic Praxis, and The Wordsworth Circle. He is currently writing about Kant, Celan, and Lispector.

Patricia E. Rubertone is Professor of Anthropology and a historical archaeologist with interests in settler colonialism, landscape and memory, and Indigenous survivance. Her research intersects archaeology, anthropology, history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies to explore the lives and colonial experiences of Native people and the effects of colonialist and collaborative scholarship on their histories and futurities. She is the author of Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award, and Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). She is also the editor of Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Left Coast Press, 2008). Her project at the Cogut Institute builds on her latest research on Providence to examine forms of spatial and symbolic violence in settler colonial cities contributing to the erasure of Indigenous modernity and to shed new light on Indigenous persistence in the context of domicide, ruination, and right-to-the-city discourses.

Daniel Vaca is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. His research and teaching focus on histories of religion and culture in the United States, with an emphasis on the relationship between religious and economic life. Much of his research has focused on cultures of business and media. In his award-winning book Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019), he traced the history of the evangelical book industry and its audience since the end of the 19th century, examining how commercial strategies and corporate ambitions helped evangelical Christianity to become socially coherent, prominent, and pervasive. His current research explores understandings of and responses to inequity in the United States. His current project, provisionally titled “A Religious History of Taxes in America,” focuses on the religious history of taxes and taxation in the United States, where taxation continually has been a primary site of political, economic, and moral conflict. In addition to examining how religious thought and practice has shaped understandings of what taxes are and what they do, this project reveals how tax regimes continually have transformed perceptions of what religion is and should be.