Brendan Fleig-Goldstein is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. His research focuses on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with particular attention to normativity, agency, and resource-bounded cognition. He is interested in issues such as how to evaluate how well cognitive systems make use of limited resources, how cognitive limitations shape epistemic norms, and how irrationality can serve as evidence for cognitive models. His current project, Normative Commitments and the Foundations of Rational and Moral Agency in Artificial Intelligence, builds on his account of resource rationality to provide a framework for empirically investigating and engineering normative commitments in AI systems. He holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining Brown University, he served as Director of the Program in Cognitive Science at Columbia University. 

Catherine Nuckols is International Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her research examines the visual nature of ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing and how the study of its non-linguistic features can lead to new insights on visual forms of communication. Her book project, Full-Figure Glyphs: Iconicity, Figuration, and Tz’ihb in Ancient Maya Inscriptions, examines a subset of visually complex Maya hieroglyphs, the scribal workshops that created them, and the implications of this highly iconic script for our understanding of ancient Maya perceptions of “writing” and “art.” She received her joint Ph.D. in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University; she also holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Brigham Young University. Her research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Casa Herrera, the Tinker Foundation, and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her work has been published in Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas and MEXICON, with upcoming publications in other presses.

Lou Silhol-Macher is International Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of German Studies and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her current project, Of Goo and Dust: Aesthetic Theories of Formlessness, theorizes the emergence of an aesthetics of formlessness in German and American film and visual arts from the 1970s to the present day. Engaging current cross-disciplinary conversations about formalism and materialism as renewed methods of inquiry, Of Goo and Dust centers minoritarian artworks that reveal form and the formless as political categories. Silhol-Macher is also at work on her second book project, “Artificial Images,” which interrogates the current reconfiguration of discourses on images — their ontologies, anthropologies, politics — and the paradigmatic shift heralded by AI. She holds a Ph.D. in German and Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a recipient of the Townsend Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship and was a Norman Jacobson Memorial Teaching Fellow. Her research and writing can be found in Camera Obscura, liquid blackness, and Qui Parle.

Sloane Geddes is International Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Classics and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She is a scholar of early medieval Sanskrit poetry, and her research focuses  on Sanskrit courtly poetry and the cultural worlds in which they were produced. Her current research examines the religious, aesthetic, and affective ends of description-based poetry in an erudite Sanskrit poem known as the Kapphiṇābhyudaya or, The Rise of Kapphiṇa. Alongside this research, which will be the prime focus of her time at Brown, her broader interests include gender and sexuality, literary aesthetics, affect studies, and the materiality and history of Sanskrit manuscripts. She is especially interested in birch bark manuscripts produced in Kashmir and has previously supported the research, conservation, and recontextualization of several manuscripts held in North American collections. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Toronto and holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. 

Mikey McGovern is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He is a historian of computing, law, and social movements in the United States, and is interested in how the politics of race and recognition have shaped our “information age” and what this can teach us about technology and inequality today. His research has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. At the Cogut Institute, he will work on his first book project, Justice in Numbers, which tells the story of how data-driven approaches to discrimination transformed civil rights law in the postwar U.S., He will also teach a lecture course on the legal and technological construction of information networks that distribute power and mediate our relationships — whether social, political, or intimate. He received his Ph.D. in History of Science and African American Studies at Princeton University, and comes to Brown from Yale Law School, where he was the Knight Law and Media Fellow at the Information Society Project.