Leon J. Hilton is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, where he is also a faculty affiliate with programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science and Technology Studies. He is the co-convener of Brown’s Disability Studies Working Group, launched in 2022 with support from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which examines the cultural politics of neurodivergence across theater, documentary film, and performance art. His research and curatorial work focus on performance studies, disability studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and the aesthetics of risk, endurance, and vulnerability in contemporary art. He is currently an associate curator of the Performance Art Museum’s multiyear initiative on the history and legacy of High Performance, the first international magazine devoted exclusively to performance art. During his fellowship at the Cogut Institute, he will work on a new book project, The Vulnerability Artist, which examines how contemporary artists and writers mobilize vulnerability to experiment with different modes of aesthetic expression and political intervention. The project traces a genealogy of “vulnerability art” to explore how and why artists perform their own exposure to risk, danger, and sacrifice. 

Ourida Mostefai is Professor Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies. She received a Licence de Lettres from the Université de Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from New York University. She is the author of two books on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as numerous articles on the French Enlightenment. She has edited and co-edited several scholarly volumes, and most recently the critical edition of Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert for the new Complete Works of Rousseau with Garnier Classiques publishers in France. Her research interests include Enlightenment literature and philosophy, 18th-century novels and tales, the French Revolution, and pamphlets and polemics. She also teaches courses on the history of the Romance languages, on the Algerian war, and on contemporary French culture. Her project at the Cogut Institute, titled Problematizing Consent: Theories and Fictions of Resistance to Oppression in the Enlightenment, offers an examination of fictional representations of resistance to political oppression in the 18th-century novel. By exploring the contradictions of literary discourses that aim to promote political resistance and that stage the desire for freedom this study proposes to clarify the role played by fiction in the theorization of resistance to political oppression.

Melinda Rabb is Professor of English with a special interest in the long 18th century. Her publications include Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650–1750 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture 1650–1765 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), as well as many articles and book chapters on authors and texts of the period in journals such as ELH and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and in volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson (2022), The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), British Women Satirists of the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and The Blackwell Companion to Satire (2007). Her Cogut project is the completion of a new book. Parting Shots: War Trauma and English Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century examines literature’s role in mediating the disaster of war, especially civil war which is (one contemporary noted) “the most uncharitable mischiefe that a Common-wealth can be engaged in” because “wee . . . execute the designes of our enemies upon our selves.” The final chapter, “War and the Pursuit of Happiness,” looks toward America, and focuses on the postwar fixation on pursuing the elusive promise of wholeness and wellbeing after years of violent dissension.

Daniel A. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of History. His work examines the social history of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century Cuba. His first book, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postcolonial Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how struggles over disease and health shaped the lives of Havana’s residents during the transition from colonial rule to independence. His work has also appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, and Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos, among others, and his more recent work examines the history of race, policing, and incarceration during Cuba’s transition out of slavery. His other teaching and research interests include the history of welfare and philanthropy, the history of crime and punishment in the Americas, and the history of gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. During his Fall 2026 Cogut Faculty Fellowship, he will work on his book project about  the history of childhood in post-emancipation Cuba, examining how new labor, political, and carceral regimes transformed the meanings of childhood as well as the lived experiences of poor children in the decades after slavery. 

Joshua Babcock is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and affiliate faculty in Linguistics, Public Humanities, Environmental Studies, and the Southeast Asian Studies Initiative at Brown University. He is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose work focuses on colonial images and the desires that both sustain and disrupt them. His work has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Society and Space, Language and Communication, Signs and Society, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, MediaTropes, and others. He is Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association and a Contributing Editor of Anthropology News. During his Cogut fellowship, he will be completing his first book project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinction in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore.

Tyler Franconi is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Classics. He specializes in the environmental and economic history of the Roman Empire, especially in frontier regions. Rivers have long played an important part in his research, and he has written widely about the interactions between Romans and their fluvial landscapes in the Northwestern provinces and beyond, including editing the volume Fluvial Landscapes in the Roman World (Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017) and co-authoring English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is also an active field archaeologist; has co-directed the excavation of a Roman villa and early medieval settlement at Vacone, Italy, for 12 years; and has recently begun working as the Finds Laboratory Director at Antiochia ad Cragum, a Roman city located on high cliffs above the Mediterranean in southern Türkiye. While on fellowship at the Cogut Institute, he will focus on investigating the changing relationship between Roman economic exploitation and environmental dynamism within the Rhine River basin. 

Aparajita Majumdar is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society. Her scholarship focuses on the historical significance of failed crops, multispecies history and ethnography, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage. Through archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS, Majumdar studies the socio-ecological impact of extraction and development in these colonial and postcolonial borderlands, alongside Indigenous regenerative practices of growing living root bridges from F. elastica. She has a Ph.D. in History from Cornell University, an M.Phil. in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and an M.A. in History from the University of Delhi. Her writings have appeared in journals like Environmental Humanities, Indian Historical Review, and an edited volume titled Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia: Between the Mekong and the Indus (Routledge, 2019). At the Cogut Institute, her project will focus in particular how Ficus elastica, a “failed” rubber crop from the plantations of 19th-century British India, became crucial to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. As the rainiest place on earth, the Khasi hills in India, connected to the floodplains of Sylhet in Bangladesh, represent an extraordinary borderland ecology shaped by extreme climates, extractive economies, and Indigenous regenerative practices. 

Douglas Nickel is the Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor of Modern Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and a specialist in the history of photography. Prior to arriving at Brown, he served as a curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and as Director of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. His book, Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2004), turns to cultural studies and art history in order to understand the political and theological implications of photographic picturemaking in the Holy Lands in the mid 19th century. Other published work extends this interest in photographic belief in more rhetorical, psychological, and phenomenological directions that can begin to account for the experience of the viewer in conceptual and historical terms. His project for the Cogut Institute, titled Photography, Art, and the Human Imagination, entails theorizing just what makes our individual responses to and experiences of the photograph so distinctive and difficult to articulate.