Veronica Fitzpatrick is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with a dissertation on representational and epistemological instability in modern horror and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. Her current research is a book-length close reading of “The Bachelor” franchise’s trademark language, which draws on etymology, film theory, affect studies, and ordinary language philosophy to diagram precisely how, under the guise of “reality,” this hyper-produced fantasy phenomenon registers and refines our working definitions of intimacy and authenticity. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she is a co-editor of World Picture and editor-at-large at Bright Wall/Dark Room, where she regularly contributes criticism. She cohosts The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast.

In 2021–2022, she published the essay “The Eyes of Nicolas Cage” in Post45.

Read an interview about her research in The Humanities in Practice.

Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Hispanic Studies, with affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and American Studies. His research and teaching explore the literary, religious, and theoretical aspects of 20th- and 21st-century Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban writing and various arts (visual, performing, multimodal, etc.). His current book project develops the concept of “mortuary poetics” to examine the vital role played by mourning in portrayals of African diaspora religions within contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art. In the Fall of 2022, he will teach a course titled “Blackness and Puerto Rican Literature,” which focuses on discourses of racial blackness in key Puerto Rican texts from the 19th century to the present.

He earned a Ph.D in the study of religion and an M.A. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University as well as an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School. He has served as assistant managing editor for Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and his creative nonfiction is published on public platforms such as ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Political Theology Network, and La Respuesta Magazine.

In 2021–2022, he presented his research at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown’s Modern Languages Conference, and Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

Read an interview about his research in The Humanities in Practice.

Mariah Min is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in the Department of English, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her book manuscript, “Figure Writing: Technologies of Character in Medieval Literature,” examines medieval literary characters in order to disentangle the longstanding conflation of character and human subjectivity within both critical and popular discourse. She demonstrates that medieval character — with its visible seams of construction — can reframe characterization as a tactic deployed by the text rather than an unmediated depiction of psychology; this enables us to recognize the ideological underpinnings of characterization as a literary technique and to ask for what ends the figure of the human is deployed, in contexts ranging from medieval literature to contemporary political rhetoric. Through her research and teaching, she aims to resist the isolation of medieval studies within English, speaking across periods in order to shed light on medieval materials through modern lenses, but also to refine modern lenses through medieval case studies.

In 2020–2021, she presented papers at meetings of the Modern Language Association and the Northeast Modern Language Association and spoke at AfterAffects: New Methods in Affect Theory, a virtual symposium hosted by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. She also started serving as the section co-editor for the Global Antiquity to Medieval ambit of Literature Compass, and she was a member of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2022 committee for the Alexandra Johnston Award, given to the best conference paper in early drama delivered by a graduate student.

Read an interview about her research in The Humanities in Practice.

Emily Lim Rogers is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies in the Department of American Studies and the Science, Technology, and Society Program, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She has published and has forthcoming articles in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and Osiris, and is a contributor to the forthcoming volumes Crip Authorship (NYU Press, 2022) and How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press). Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of STS, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, medical anthropology, and the history of capitalism. Her book project is called “Biomedicine’s Binds: ME/CFS, Patient Activism, and the Work of Debility.” It examines how biomedicine creates double-binds for people with ME/CFS: they live “in a bind” in the context of a condition without cure or sociomedical support, while also forming community in debilitated bodies, the ties that binds them together.

In 2021–2022, Emily published an article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly. She and Debbie Weinstein, director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, developed a symposium at Brown titled “Health, Sexuality, and Biomedical Knowledge.” Emily gave a talk in the “What I Am Thinking About Now” series at Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and was the keynote speaker at a student of color leadership conference at Brown. She also gave talks at UCSC’s quarterly anthropology colloquium and at a symposium at the University of Oxford.

With Leon Hilton, she has formed the Disability Studies Working Group at Brown. The group will host a number of events for during 2022–23 and aims to build intellectual community in disability studies across the university.

Read an interview about her research in The Humanities in Practice.

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 the temporality and spatiality of competing modernities, the intellectual history of ordinary people, cultures of everyday life (and everyday death), and topics such as indigeneity, local knowledge, 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 for themselves in the interstices of 19th- and 20th-century empires. He is also co-editing a volume offering new transnational approaches to the study of the “Opening of Japan” and is 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. As part of this work, he consulted with Michaeline Picaro (Turtle Clan Tribal Preservation Officer of the Ramapough Nation of New Jersey), leading to his current collaborative research project. The Ramapough have identified hundreds of potential stone landscape sites in ancestral Munsee territory that are not currently recognized by state agencies as Indigenous heritage. Combining landscape surveys, historical mapping, and Indigenous knowledge, the Mapping Munsee Landscapes project seeks to survey, contextualize, and ultimately preserve at-risk sites in Munsee territory 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.