Arnav Adhikari is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. His dissertation examines the intersecting trajectories of the Cold War and decolonization in South Asia. Weaving together literary texts, documentary cinema, and political history, his project is particularly interested in the memorialization of anticolonial movements and the aesthetics of postwar socialisms. At Brown, he has taught courses on contemporary graphic novels and the global city, and has held fellowships from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, and the Graduate School. His writing has appeared in Postcolonial Text, Global South Studies, and public venues like The Atlantic and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He holds a B.A. in literary studies from Middlebury College.

Lee Gilboa is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Music, specializing in multichannel audio composition and sound studies. In addition, she serves as an Assistant Professor in Berklee College of Music’s Department of Electronic Production and Design. Her creative and scholarly work engages with themes such as the sonic identity, representation, collectivity, and self-expression. Currently, she examines the role that listening assumes in the socio-political sphere through a rigorous investigation of testifying voices. In a forthcoming publication, “Against All Odds: Listening for Vocality and Heardness in Oral Testimonies” (Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture), she introduces a transcription methodology that is attuned to the vocality of the testimony through the analysis of Central Park Five member Korey Wise’s coerced confession. Her research received funding from the Jerusalem Institute of Contemporary Music and was supported by Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)’s Artist in Residence Program. Her music was featured in Folly Systems, Cube Fest, NYCEMF, Experimental Intermedia, and Ars-Electronica’s Forum Wallis festivals, among others. She participated in conferences and artist residencies internationally, including Ircam’s ManiFeste Academy, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Sound of Sound Studies, and the SpokenWeb Symposium.

Nomaan Hasan is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His dissertation, titled “Experiments in Collective Selfhood on the Last Days of Democracy,” examines how minoritized groups imagine and articulate political identity under conditions of democratic disrepair. Fieldwork for the project was conducted in northern India with the support of the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and several intramural grants. This research has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthropology and Humanism and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Prior to Brown, Hasan studied sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.

Amanda Macedo Macedo is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Her research interests encompass cultural geography, transnational feminisms, decolonial thought, visual culture, and sound studies. In her dissertation project tentatively titled “Unraveling Resistance: Aesthetic Interventions in the Face of Imperial Violences,” she critically examines the impacts of imperialism that produce an unjust distribution of death and exploitation towards minoritarian bodies, with a particular focus on contemporary Mexico. Through the lens of aesthetic interventions, she aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how experiences of violence and resilience influence the political realm. By recognizing the body as a site for knowledge production and resistance, she explores practices of radical imagination, subversion, and disruption that challenge established power structures. Prior to her doctoral studies at Brown, she earned an M.A. in communication from the Graduate Program in Political and Social Sciences at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a B.A. in political science and social management from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Xochimilco (UAM-X).

Katharina Weygold is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies. She specializes in Black internationalism, 20th-century African American history, U.S. imperialism, and transnational American studies. In her dissertation, she studies African American women’s ideas about Haiti and their writing, performances, artwork, and interactions and collaborations with Haitians, in the context of U.S. imperialism in Haiti from the U.S. occupation (1915–1934) to the Duvalier regime (1957–1986). Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, the project explores how focusing on women changes our understanding of the meaning of Haiti and U.S. imperialism for African Americans. Weygold holds an M.A. in public humanities from Brown University and an M.A. in American studies from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her research has received funding from the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture at Duke University, and the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands.