Michael Berman is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in Language and Health in the Department of Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. His research focuses on how different forms of care and listening constitute modes of governance. His first book manuscript, “Heart of a Heartless World: Alienation, Compassion, and Listening in the Making of Secularist Japan,” follows religious professionals in Japan in their efforts to ameliorate suffering. It argues that the political transformation of compassion into altruism has strengthened the category of religion while vitiating the traditions comprised by that very category. His second project, tentatively titled “Bad Vibrations: Listening, Care, and National Defense,” draws attention to ways that governance and care intersect in prisons, cities, and borders. More specifically, it considers how the nation-state is formed in acts of listening for signs of trauma, aggression, and violence.

Manimporok (Maro) Dotulong is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in Modern East Asia in the World in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He received his DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. He specializes in multilingual archival research and the transnational history of larger insular Asia (Japan, Southeast Asia, and Australasia) and the Western Pacific. Focusing on questions of how nature shapes the course of history, his research explores competing modernities and the intellectual lives of ordinary nonstate actors, as well as topics ranging from indigeneity and local knowledge to environment and technological change. He is currently working on a book that covers the history of East- and Southeast Asian transnational connections born from the ocean. It is a project that examines how currents, winds, and marine biota shaped the life and times of ordinary seafolk — and focuses on the ways they carved out autonomous spaces and times for themselves in the interstices of 19th- and 20th-century empires. He is coeditor of a forthcoming volume offering new transnational approaches to the history of Japan’s global connectivity and is also involved in a dictionary project for the Tondanese language, a local language of North Sulawesi (Indonesia).

Eric Johnson is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Art and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 2021. His research combines archaeological and historical methods to examine intersecting effects of colonialism and capitalism in North America, specifically northern New Jersey. His current book project, “An Archaeology of Settler Capitalism: Appropriating and Industrializing Wampum Manufacture in New Jersey (1770–1900),” exposes the entwined nature of capitalist and settler ideologies through the untold story of Euro-American settlers who produced Indigenous shell beads for export to the fur trade. He has begun a new project examining potential stone landscape features of the Northeast that are not currently recognized by state agencies as Indigenous heritage. Combining landscape surveys, mapping, and re-reading the colonial archive of New Netherland, this project seeks to survey, contextualize, and ultimately preserve at-risk sites while interrogating settler-state criteria for recognizing Indigenous architectural heritage.

Hannah Rose Silverblank is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Classical Reception in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her research focuses on how meaning is constituted and exchanged across time, languages, species, and embodied differences. Her book project, “Listening to the Monster in Greek Poetry,” tunes into the monster’s cosmic positioning in more-than-human worlds by attending to the aesthetics of nonhuman sonic expression in ancient Greek poetry. Several of her recent and forthcoming publications have focused on the role of disability and/or queerness in translation theory, lexicography, reception theory, and the occult arts and sciences. Her teaching philosophy is informed by her research in disability studies and the wisdom of disability justice movements. She is therefore committed to creating inclusive and collaborative classroom experiences for her students. She earned her DPhil in classical languages and literature at the University of Oxford in 2017, and she taught in various humanities departments at Haverford College from 2017–22.

Sebastián Antezana Quiroga is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He received a Ph.D. in romance studies from Cornell University in 2019 and worked as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Dickinson College and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. His book project, “Migrant Afterlives: Spectral Narratives of Greater Mexico and Greater Bolivia,” focuses on migrant communities in contemporary literature and film from the Mexican and Bolivian cultural spectrums, on the ways in which these communities are strategically associated with specters and other afterlife figures, and on how this association reflects the disjointing, spectral logic of different variants of the national model (like the transnational, the multinational, and the postnational) that operate in unison. He has published several academic articles and book chapters and is the author of three books of fiction. In Fall 2025 he will begin the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of Spanish at Xavier University.

Ambra Marzocchi is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. Trained as a classical philologist in Italy and as a historian of the book in the United States, she specializes in the study of the history of scholarship and humanist education in early colonial Spanish America. Her current research seeks to advance the understanding of the cultural-historical dynamics surrounding the early modern transmission of Greco-Roman, pagan, and Christian literatures, through humanistic — and specifically Jesuit — pedagogy, from Europe to colonial Mexico. For her doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, she edited and studied the first textbook of Latin poetry printed in the Americas. At Brown, she plans to expand her analysis to a wider array of Latin textbooks used in colonial Mexico, many of which are preserved in the University’s bibliographic collections. Her teaching philosophy is inspired by tenets of Renaissance educational treatises, which she put into practice at the University of Kentucky’s Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance associated with Johns Hopkins University.

Eleanor Paynter is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her research engages narrative and ethnographic methods to explore how the entanglements of migration and racial capitalism shape forms of witnessing, experiences of border crossing, and understandings of belonging and rights. This work bridges critical refugee and postcolonial studies, focusing on the politics and literatures of migration in Italy and the Black Mediterranean. Paynter’s book-in-process, “Emergency in Transit,” challenges pervasive "crisis" framings of precarious migration through a discussion of oral, written, and filmic testimonies by African migrants en route to Europe and residing in Italy. She is committed to collaboration and the public humanities, including through podcasts, translations, and writing for broad publics and as a member of the Action Research and Rights Collective. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative studies (Ohio State University) and an MFA in poetry (Sarah Lawrence College). Before joining Brown, she was Postdoctoral Associate in Migrations at Cornell University. Her current project, “Up/Rooted,” situates contemporary issues of migrant, racial, and climate justice within a longer cultural history of the figure of the farmworker in modern Italy.