Victoria Maung is a first year PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. Her work broadly examines the relationship between contemporary consumer and corporate culture against the backdrop of transnational capitalism. She holds a B.A. in Global Liberal Studies from New York University. Her previous work experience lies in the fashion industry, where she has held operations, public relations, and editorial roles.

Loogee Claude (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. She is broadly interested in popular culture as a site of contestation and imagination. Her current research positions the defacement and removal of Confederate monuments as a center and catalyst for the changing landscape of public and popular culture in the U.S. South. She follows decommissioned monuments, and the residents struggling over their future, to understand how activism continues and changes after national attention wanes. Loogee was previously a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Wellesley College where she earned her B.A. in Anthropology.

Born a citizen of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and a descendant of the House of Ninigret, Sherenté seeks to uplift their people, the sole Indigenous nation in Rhode Island. Sherenté is a renowned advocate for the Twospirit (LGBT Native) community after their battle for acceptance in the Powwow circuit was recorded in the documentary “Being Thunder”. For this work, Sherenté was named a 2019 LGBT History Month Icon. Sherenté has walked in NYFW, has been featured in news sources including the NYT, NBC, Yahoo!, and NPR, is a 2018 Presidential Scholar, was a 2019 Tedx Speaker, was admitted into the 2022 cohort at Yale Norfolk School of Art and is a graduate from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design through their 5 year Dual Degree Program. Now enrolled in the American Studies PhD program at Brown University, Sherenté is currently publishing their first book.

K Yin (they/them/ta) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. Their research and teaching focuses on Asian American art and visual culture, relational ethnic studies, the environment, and queer of color critique. Their dissertation examines how contemporary artists and writers engage sites in the American West as Asian American archives, tracing how ruins in the landscape register the enduring material afterlives of settler colonial racial capitalism. Working between the nineteenth-century and the contemporary, their project explores how aesthetic practices shift attention from recovery and representation toward relational orientations to history, place, and the (im)possibility of repair.

Isaac Essex (they/he) is a Ph.D student in the American Studies Department. They work in trans studies, decolonial environmental humanities, and aesthetics and visual culture to think through queer and trans endurance amid hostile climates, extractive atmospheres, and ecological precarity. His work is particularly interested in what it means to be queer and have bad feelings, how to move through them, and how to find common places for persistence. They think with the notion of 'weathering' as it refers to the act of endurance that is being worn down, and the attempts to withstand atmospheric pressure that foster modes of survival amid a climate of hostility. Isaac holds a B.A. in English and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Istifaa Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. They hold a BA from UC Berkeley in Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Istifaa’s research looks to queer/trans of color performance, aesthetics, and speculative fictions for its disruption of colonial and transatlantic violence. Her project is attuned to Black, Indigenous, and queer diasporic modes of creative practice and survivance across interspecies/elemental intimacies through conditions of historical dispossession. In so doing, they deeply consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. Istifaa is thinking with the concept of porosity, as the space in between matter, to think through the permeability and in-between-ness across sites such as flesh, disease, conspiracy, and apocalypse as inhabitations and praxis of queer/trans of color life and precarity. Istifaa is also a filmmaker/artist and pursues collaborative and movement-based projects that center creative and sensorial modes of knowledge production.

Jenny Dolan is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Her research interests include the history of American self-help culture, the history of science, and narrative theory. Her work has been published in The New York Times. She is currently an Interdisciplinary Opportunities Graduate Fellow at the Pembroke Center. Jenny is writing a dissertation that historicizes willpower by tracing how the concept became legible in the context of the rise of corporate capitalism and American empire building and later became empiricized by scientists. Unfortunately, the concept of willpower has produced a hierarchy of humanity, so Jenny’s hope is that denaturalizing willpower will create space for envisioning alternate modes of selfhood that might make life more livable for more people.

My dissertation “Expert Advice: Mediating Social Science’s Public Aspirations, 1930-1965,” investigates how American social scientists used mass media to popularize their ideas. I tell two stories together: the rise of the social scientific expert or public intellectual at midcentury and the institutionalization of mass communications technologies. I look to items that I group under the term “prescriptive media objects”: mass media texts that bear the mark of prescriptivity, informed by the social sciences, in their writing, aesthetics, and especially their intended function. I use objects like educational films and television, public service announcements, self-help writing, mass surveys, and other evidence of the quotidian and ephemeral presence of the social sciences in American life. Chapters examine pop-psych “personality tests” in the popular press, “social guidance films” in the classroom, a university course taught over broadcast television, psychological experiments related to the safety of billboard advertising for automobile drivers, and the Walt Disney attraction “The Carousel of Progress.”