Cathy Wagner is a poet and essayist whose interests include labor, ecology, and connections between poetic form, social practices, and embodied experience. She is author of four books of poems, most recently Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and is working on two book projects. One, a poetry collection, interweaves notes taken in abandoned, semi-wild land between a golf course and a trailer park with documentary material on the area's racial and economic history. The other is a collection of essays and hybrid texts on academic labor and the role of the poet and poetry in the academy and in the broader economy.
Abigail Culpepper is a junior honors student from Dayton, Ohio pursuing a B.A./M.A. in French as well as a linguistics major and a German minor. She is a current Dean's Scholar and a former Undergraduate Summer Scholar with research interests in ecocriticism, conceptual metaphor, language & power, and phenomenology. She has studied in Luxembourg, France, and Germany.
Rachel Wydra is a senior honors student majoring in history with minors in music, French, and Latin American studies. Her honors thesis examines the history of women in Costa Rica and she has studied cross-cultural musical exchange in Chicago. In 2017, she was an intern for the Chicago Legal Clinic.
Phoebe Myers is a junior pursuing an individualized studies major that applies creative writing and social justice to individual empowerment and social change. She completed an Undergraduate Summer Scholars project on Cuban-American politics and her creative work has been published by Tricyle and East End Elements.
Sam Hunter is a senior pursuing a B.A./M.A. in English literature, a major in creative writing, and minors in rhetoric and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. A former University Summer Scholar, his research interests include queer representations, intertextuality, and visual forms including films, graphic novels, and comics.
Jacob Bruggeman is a junior honors student with majors in history and political science. He has conducted funded research on U.S. homelessness and, as a 2017 Undergraduate Summer Scholar, studied dystopian cityscapes in fiction. He studied in Italy during the summer of 2016.
Damon Scott examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, and urban planning in post-war America. His work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Urban Planning History, and Planning Perspectives. His current book project, “The City Aroused,” investigates the impact of urban redevelopment on the sexual geography of post-war San Francisco and has received funding from the Social Science Research Council. His recent article on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood won theJournal of Planning History Prize at the 2015 meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History.
Nishani Frazier focuses on 20th-century American history, social movements, and oral history. She is the author of Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism (2017) as well as essays on civil rights and black power. Frazier recently completed a Fulbright fellowship in Norway. She is also a fellow of The Next System Project, a non-profit subsidiary of Democracy Collaborative that fosters innovative, practical approaches to the global challenges of community building and economic development.
Jordan A. Fenton has published essays on the visual and performed expression of Nigerian masquerade arts, secret societies, esoteric knowledge systems, dress, economics, and ways in which so-called traditional arts and artists operate in metropolitan cities. Over the past decade, his ethnographic fieldwork in Calabar, Nigeria, has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays program, the Smithsonian Institution, and Miami University. He recently edited a special issue of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture on the economics of urban African arts (2016).
Diane Fellows is Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design. Her work in drawing, painting, photography, and digital film explores the long-term effects of displacement on individuals and communities and the creation of personal and cultural meaning in unfamiliar landscapes. Her recent architecture design studios have helped create needed structures for the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, in collaboration with camp residents and non-governmental organizations. Her work has been exhibited in Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. Her recent essay on forced migration will appear in Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter (Berghahn, 2020).
Annie Dell’Aria studies the intersection of contemporary art, media, and public space. She has published essays in Public Art Dialogue and Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) as well as in edited volumes. Her current book project explores uses of moving image media as public art and the concept of mobile spectatorship. In summer 2017, Dell’Aria participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Space, Place and the Humanities at Northeastern University.
Tammy L. Brown is an interdisciplinary scholar, creative writer, and visual artist. Her research, writing, and art range from historical studies to abstract paintings and multimedia poetry. Her book, City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (2015), tells the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals to reveal the history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. She is currently working on a biography of rock ’n’ roll virtuoso Jimi Hendrix.
Jana Evans Braziel is author of five monographs: “Riding with Death”: Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-au-Prince (2017); Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures (2010); Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds (2009); Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora (2008); and Diaspora: An Introduction (2008). She has also co-edited five collections and two special journal issues and contributed a number of articles and book chapters to scholarly forums.