Danielle Taschereau Mamers works at the intersections of critical media theory, environmental humanities, and critical Indigenous studies. Her research at Penn examines the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives with settler colonial politics, through archival and contemporary documentation of bison extermination and reintroduction in the North American west. Danielle completed her PhD in Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in 2017.
Sarah Franzen is an anthropologist and filmmaker whose research uncovers how rural African American communities negotiate with, resist, and transform, the political-economic structures that dominate the Black Belt in the southeastern USA. Her PhD, completed at Emory University, focused on the community-based development efforts of a regional network of African American farm cooperatives, and explored how grass-roots institutions support sustainable livelihoods and maintain a unique Black agrarian culture.
Helen Melling is a scholar of visual culture, whose research focuses on representations of the African diaspora in 18th and 19th century Peru. She is working on her first book, provisionally entitled Visualizing Black Peru: Representations of Afro-Peruvians in Late Colonial and 19th Century Lima. She is also a contributor to The Image of the Black in Latin America and the Caribbean, a companion to the series The Image of the Black in Western Art.
Liana Brent earned her Ph.D. in Classics from Cornell University, where she specialized in Classical Archaeology.
Derek Sheridan studies transnationalism, migration, commodity flows, and theories of empire from the perspective of the anthropology of ethics, inequality, and the politics of knowledge production.
Lauren Flood works at the intersections of music, anthropology, sound studies, and science and technology studies. Focusing on experimental musical instrument builders in Berlin and New York City, her work investigates the interrelations between sonic machines, design and craftsmanship, discourses on artistic labor, and hands-on DIY practices in an increasingly digital world.
Christina Bush earned her PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sarah Jones Weicksel is a scholar of history and material culture whose research centers on the intersection of race, gender, and the politics of everyday life in the United States. At the Wolf Humanities Center, she is working on her first book, The Fabric of War: Clothing, Culture and Violence in the American Civil War Era.
Katherine Tycz studies early modern Italian devotion and material culture, with a focus on material text. She completed a Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Cambridge where she was a member of the European Research Council-funded project, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600. Katherine helped curate the 2017 exhibition Madonnas & Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy and contributed to the 2015 exhibition Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, both at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Adam Foley recently finished his PhD in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame where he wrote his dissertation on the first Latin translations of Homer in the Italian Renaissance. He has been in Rome for the past two years where he spent one year as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His interests span the classical tradition, including epic poetry, translation and reception studies, the history of Platonism, and the history of historiography.
