Rebecca Louise Carter is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies. Her research focuses broadly on the cultivation of Black urban futures, particularly through the tracing of everyday conditions of structural and social violence and their reconfiguration via creativity, kinship and relatedness, and new forms of humanism and sovereignty. Her first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (University of Chicago Press, 2019), follows the religious work of African Americans in New Orleans who continuously raise the dead through restorative practices of kinship, which circumvent the denial of Black personhood and assert the social and spiritual value of the Black family in the crescent or emergent city. She has published several related articles and essays, most recently in City & Society, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies and Visual Anthropology Review. At the Cogut Institute, she will be working on new projects centering Black children and youth through engaged and multimodal forms of ethnographic and ethnohistoric practice including oral history, photography, film/animation, and collaborative and creative nonfiction writing.

Michelle Clayton is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching interests range over modern and contemporary Latin American literature, the historical avant-gardes, and interdisciplinary aesthetic practices. She is the author of Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (University of California Press, 2011), and she has published articles on modernist and avant-garde experiments, on Latin American novelists, poets, and critics, and on intersections between dance and literature in journals such as the Revista de estudios hispánicos, Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, and Dance Research Journal as well as a number of edited volumes. At the Cogut Institute, she will be working on her second book project, “Moving Bodies of the Avant-Garde,” focusing on the role played by dance as image and practice in the international avant-gardes.

Scott Frickel is Professor of Sociology and Environment and Society and serves as Community Engagement Core Leader for Brown’s Superfund Research Program. He is author of Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology (Rutgers University Press, 2004), a comparative history of urban industrial land use co-authored with James R. Elliott entitled Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and a new multi-authored monograph, Residues: Thinking through Chemical Environments, which will be published this fall. He has also co-edited three books exploring the politics of science, fields of knowledge, and interdisciplinary collaboration. He is currently studying the relationship between hazardous land uses, regulatory science, inequality, and health in Argentina and the United States.

Andrew Laird is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities. His recent self-authored and collaborative publications include Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (Wiley 2018), The Epic of America (re-issued as a Bloomsbury paperback in 2020), and Orazio: L’Arte Poetica (Bologna 2020), a study of Horace’s Ars Poetica to introduce Augusto Rostagni’s pioneering commentary on the text. His project at the Cogut Institute, entitled “Humanism and Experience in Post-Conquest Mexico: The Early Writings of Fray Cristóbal Cabrera (1530-1545),” surveys the work of the first known European poet on the American continent, who wrote in Latin. Profoundly influenced by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Cabrera addressed contemporary concerns: his invectives against the corruption of the Spaniards in the Indies anticipated the stance that would be adopted later in the 1540s by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

Tim Bewes is Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Modern Culture and Media. His published research has examined the relation between aesthetics and politics within a Marxist theoretical frame derived from the work of the Frankfurt School. His books include Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2002), The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Free Indirect: The Thought of Twenty-first Century Fiction (forthcoming, 2022). His current work continues this inquiry with a particular emphasis on the contemporary Anglophone novel. The project he will be working on during his fellowship, entitled “Recent Experiments in American Fiction,” is about fictionality, its affordances, and its limits. It also examines how and why a transformed relationship to fictionality is increasingly evident and influential in nonliterary discourses such as literary scholarship, historiography, and social and political theory.

Emily Owens is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History, where she teaches about histories of race, gender, and sexuality in the US and conducts research on US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. Her first book, The Fantasy of Consent: Violence and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans surfaces the survival strategies of women of color whose lives were bound by sexual labor under slavery and is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Her work has appeared in Louisiana History, Feminist Formations, The Black Scholar, differences, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. In addition to her appointment in History, Owens also acts as a faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. While at the Cogut Institute, Owens will begin work on a new manuscript that situates the figure of the lesbian in the intellectual and cultural history of American feminism.

Andrew Scherer is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology. He is an anthropological archaeologist and biological anthropologist with a geographic focus in Mesoamerica (Maya). He co-directs an interdisciplinary archaeological research project that is exploring Classic Maya polities along the Usumacinta River in Mexico and Guatemala. Scherer’s research interests include mortuary archaeology, bioarchaeology, landscape archaeology, ritual practice, warfare and violence, political practice, and diet and subsistence. He is author of Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul (University of Texas Press, 2015) and co-editor of Smoke Flames and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2018), among other volumes. His project at the Cogut Institute, tentatively titled “War, Violence, and the Morality of Killing in Ancient Maya Society,” is a study of war and violence among the ancient Maya as well as a reflection on the implications of such research.

Nikki A. Green is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College and one of the inaugural New England Humanities Consortium’s Faculty of Color Working Group Mellon Fellows. She is being hosted by the Cogut Institute, an NEHC member, during her fellowship year. She serves as an advisor to the ICA Boston for the 59th Venice Biennale, presenting the work of Simone Leigh for the United States Pavilion in 2022. She has written for numerous art museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Her forthcoming book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press, 2022), features artists Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. While at the Cogut Institute, she is conducting research for an exhibition that focuses on the multidisciplinary exercises of contemporary female-identified and non-binary artists who share the element of performance as a form of portraiture in ways that center Black feminist theory and practice.