Samia Cohen is a public scholar and PhD student in American Studies whose research interests include the U.S. built environment, urban ecology and infrastructure; environmental history and feminist science and technology studies. Samia has exhibited as a research-based artist at sites in Providence and upstate New York, with a thematic focus on distressed landscapes (some of these projects are documented at samiacohen.com). Their dissertation project, titled Watershed Metropolis, explores people’s relationships to the urban rivers of the Providence area in the face of anthropogenic change, and asks how the presence of many different kinds of infrastructure--from highways to bioswales--have mediated those relationships.

Katherine Contess is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.  She holds an M.A. in English from CUNY Brooklyn College and a B.A. in English and International Comparative Studies from Duke University.  Her work is within television studies, digital media studies, and the history of technology.

Benjamin Driver is a PhD candidate in the department of classics at Brown University writing a dissertation which is for now cumbersomely entitled "Per Fraudem Terram Movere: Encomium, Catasterism, and Apotheosis via Intertextuality in the Copernican Revolution." The dissertation is a literary history covering the years 1460-1810 that investigates how panegyrical peritexts (mostly dedicatory epistles and poems) of Latin astronomical treatises lent credence to new discoveries by allusively coöpting classical authorities. In his free time he enjoys reading, hiking, looking at birds, and playing video games.

Kristen Iemma is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Brown University. She holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University and an MS in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute. Her research addresses twentieth and twenty-first century state record keeping practices in the U.S. and contends with questions of epistemology, representation, empire, and historiography. She has worked as an archivist at a number of museums and cultural institutions. 

Théo Lepage-Richer is a SSHRC/FRQ-SC Fellow and PhD Candidate in Modern Culture and Media working at the intersection of media studies and STS. His current research is broadly concerned with the history and epistemology of a machine learning model called “neural networks,” with a specific focus on the development of a neural imaginary throughout the 20th century. Bringing together turn-of-the-century neurophysiology, post-war cybernetics, and late 20th century computer science, Théo’s dissertation attends to the ways the artificialization of intelligence partakes in the biopolitical management and uneven distribution of agential, intellectual, and vital potential.

Jonathan MacDonald is a student in the PhD Program in American Studies at Brown. He holds an MA in History from Virginia Tech, where he completed a thesis titled "Reel Guidance: Midcentury Classroom Films and Adolescent Adjustment." He is interested in the relationship between publics and experts in the 20th century United States, particularly how ideas from the social and behavioral sciences influenced (and continue to influence) common beliefs about personality, behavior, etiquette, citizenship, civic responsibility, and narratives of "success."

Lillian Tsay is a Ph.D student of the History Department. Her primary research interests lie in the history of the food industry in the Japanese Empire with a focus on sugar and sweets businesses. She is specifically interested in the relationship between food and bodily senses, food science and nutrition, and the history of businesses and capitalism.