Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. She is a two-time winner of the Darwin T. Turner Award for best essay of the year in African American Review and winner of the 2020 GL/Q Caucus’ Crompton-Noll Essay Prize. She has also been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She is the author of Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Duke University Press, 2012). Her second book, Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in early 2024. Additional scholarship has appeared in such venues as African American Review, GL/Q, The Black Scholar, ASAP/Journal, The Faulkner Journal, American Literary History, and James Baldwin Review, among other scholarly journals and critical anthologies. She is the guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of The Faulkner Journal examining Faulkner’s canon in light of race, racism, and the work of antiracism.

Ravit Reichman is Associate Professor of English. She works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2009) examines law and literature in the context of the world wars. At the Cogut Institute, she will be completing a study of property’s cultural and psychological life, “Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times,” which offers a genealogy of property’s expansive role in our psychic life, beginning with more conventional notions of property and ending in ideas of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.

Faiz Ahmed is Associate Professor in the Department of History. A historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, his core research and teaching interests include human mobility, travel, and migration; networks of learning and expertise; and the intersections of law, citizenship, and diplomacy. His first book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press, 2017), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2018. His current book project, “Ottoman Americana: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Early United States” (under contract with Princeton University Press), examines the social, economic, and legal underpinnings of Ottoman-U.S. ties, based on Ottoman sources and perspectives. His published articles can be found in multiple journals of law, history, and Global South studies, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Global Jurist; International History Review; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Iranian Studies; Law and History Review; Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and Perspectives on History. Interviews with him have appeared on national radio and history channels, as well as local news, including NPR’s “Throughline,” Boston Globe, ABC6 Rhode Island news, Toynbee Prize Foundation, Borderlines, and “Ottoman History Podcast.”

Christopher Grasso is Professor in the Department of History and a historian of American culture, religion, and politics. His research and writing have focused on the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (UNC Press, 1999) and Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the SHEAR Book Prize. He has received year-long grants from the NEH, ACLS, and National Humanities Center and has published essays in journals including the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and The Journal of American History. His latest book is Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (Oxford University Press, 2021); he also edited part of Kelso’s Civil War memoir for Yale University Press as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (2017). Before coming to Brown in 2022, he was the Pullen Professor of History at William and Mary. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1992 and also taught at St. Olaf College. He was editor of the William and Mary Quarterly from 2000 to 2013.

Jessaca Leinaweaver is Professor of Anthropology and served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology from 2020 to 2023 and as Director of the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies from 2016 to 2019. She is the author of The Circulation of Children: Adoption, Kinship, and Morality in Andean Peru (Duke University Press, 2008), which won the Margaret Mead Award. Her second book is Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain (Duke University Press, 2013). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, among others. Her op-eds on migration, adoption, and child welfare have been published in multiple venues, including U.S. News & World Report and the CBC.

Katherine A. Mason is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a medical anthropologist of China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2016), based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize from the British Sociological Association in 2019. Since 2020, she has been working on several projects in both the U.S. and China focused on COVID-19. She is cofounder of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a multidisciplinary effort to build an archive of diverse populations’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the form of text, voice, and image-based journals. The project has received national and international media attention and was recently featured in the international traveling exhibition, “Picturing the Pandemic.” She is working on several spin-off projects using the PJP platform, including an NSF-funded study with Assistant Professor of Education Andrea Flores on first-generation college students’ experiences of COVID-19. In addition to her work on COVID-19, Mason also studies perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. and China.