Presenters

Vaughn Cooper

Vaughn Cooper, Ph.D. is an evolutionary biologist and microbiologist. He is currently Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and Computational and Systems Biology, at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine. He co-founded and is Director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM), which works to catalyze research and education at the interface of these disciplines. He’s also a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an elected Board member of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), and is President-Elect of ASM in 2025-6. The Cooper laboratory studies how potential pathogens evolve to adapt to new hosts and environments, including by forming biofilm or gaining antimicrobial resistance. Recently, Dr. Cooper joined a team of scientists considering the potential existential risks of mirror life and is a board member of the Mirror Biology Dialogue Fund. He is proud to have founded EvolvingSTEM (evolvingstem.org), a comprehensive educational program that provides authentic classroom research experiences for thousands of middle and high school students annually in which they conduct a microbiology experiment that demonstrates evolution in action. The major goal of EvolvingSTEM is to help students see themselves as scientists and join the STEM workforce.

Paul Fine

Paul Fine was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 2004. He lived in Peru for much of his Ph.D. work, conducting field work near Iquitos, Peru, in some of the most species-rich forests on earth. He studied the evolution of habitat specialization by plants to different soils and the role of herbivores and plant defenses in influencing this process. Fine continued this work for his University of Michigan Society of Fellows postdoc and then was hired by UC Berkeley in 2007. He has continued his work on tropical diversity and has also built up a research program the evolution of Protium (Burseraceae) as a model system to understand speciation and the role of biotic interactions in diversification. With a love for undergraduate teaching, Fine has taught Ecosystems of California at Berkeley for 17 years, a field course with 20 field days and many overnight camping trips. In the past decade, he has become very involved in faculty governance and has served in the Academic Senate as Chair of a Committee that oversees the university’s budget and on the divisional council. He is also the co-Chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, which advocates for faculty rights, academic freedom and the value of public higher education.

Cecile Fromont

Cécile Fromont is an art historian specializing on the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Her scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded during this period across and around the Atlantic Ocean. She is Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and Faculty Director of The Alain Locke Gallery at Harvard. She is the author of several books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).

Alice Goff

Alice Goff is a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period. Her research and teaching center on material culture, the history of museums, and the history of aesthetics. Her first book, The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of German cultural politics and aesthetics during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. It tells this story through Germans’ engagement with the French looting of European art collections, a Kunstraub [‘art robbery’] that challenged the faith that art offered a powerful source of societal liberation in a period of revolutionary violence. By following conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of objects, the book argues that the world of arts administration at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a ground of struggle over the powerlessness of art to convey political meaning, a struggle with lasting consequences for how we understand the modern public museum of art. In addition to the monograph, two additional essays draw on this research: The Honor of the Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era in The Things They Carried: War, Migration and Material Culture, edited by Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (Cornell University Press, 2018); and Lüdwig Völkel’s Sababurg List: An Inventory of the Public Museum of Art, in Taking Stock: Media Inventories of the German Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen (De Gruyter, forthcoming).

Neil Gong

Neil Gong is associate professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and co-editor of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press, 2020). Neil’s public commentary can be found in outlets like the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the LA Times.

Roger Grant

Roger Mathew Grant is the Deputy Provost and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. A music theorist and cultural historian, his research concerns eighteenth-century music, affect theory, and the history of music theory. He is the author of two award-winning books, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical and Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. He is currently completing a new book on mission music in eighteenth-century Bolivia. His work has appeared in wide variety of venues including Critical Inquiry, Representations, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of Music Theory. He has held fellowships from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Zeynep Gürsel

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the visual production of the War on Terror and the digitalization of the international photojournalism industry. She is also the director of Coffee Futures (2009), an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune telling. Coffee Futures had one of its earliest screenings at the 40th Anniversary celebrations of the Michigan Society of Fellows. Her current projects investigate the emergence of the global surveillance regimes policing mobility and nationality and the critical role of photography in this history. In 2023 she was the inaugural Senior Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Center for Research in Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, Black Studies, and Law. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. Her two books, War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (Liveright 2021) won multiple awards and were both named New York Times Notable books. Professor Hinton’s articles and op-eds have been published widely. Professor Hinton served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she continues to serve as founding co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. A Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.

Eduardo Kohn

Eduardo Kohn studies the intimate relationships that the indigenous peoples of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon have with one of Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Focusing on how they understand and communicate with rainforest beings has led him to the audacious conclusion that complex living systems manifest “mind” in a variety of ways. From this he develops an empirically robust framework to understand our broader relationship to such mind-like phenomena with the goal of rethinking how to live in the face of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. His book, How Forests Think, won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Award. It is translated into several languages and has inspired the planetary ecological imagination in a surprisingly diverse number of ways ranging from an eponymous symphony premiering at Lincoln Center, to museum exhibits. He teaches Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.

Meghna Sapui

Meghna Sapui is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Miami. She is currently working on her book, Edible Empire, which examines the role of foodways in literatures of British India. Her work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Victorian Studies, and Global Food History.

Rebecca Spang

Rebecca L. Spang is Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University and was previously Lecturer, then Reader in European History at University College London. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of Minnesota, at the University of Tűbingen, and at Yale’s School of Management. She is the author of The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture and Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (both published by Harvard University Press). Spang has written for the TLS, the FT, and the Atlantic among other publications. Her work has been supported by New America and by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Henry Stoll

Henry Stoll is the 2025-2026 ACLS Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow in Music Studies. His research focuses on the musical and intellectual legacies of the Haitian Revolution. His current book project, Unsung: The Revolutionary Music of Haiti, examines how Haiti’s leaders used music—in particular, song and opera—to broadcast radical new visions of sovereignty and freedom in the aftermath of the Revolution. He is also co-editing a volume that examines the musical repercussions of the Haitian Revolution on the soundscapes of the Atlantic world, with case studies from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, France, Louisiana, and Delaware. Alongside his written work, Henry also reconstructs and edits music from early Haiti, drawing on a corpus of three operas and over one hundred songs rediscovered over the course of his archival research. These musical reconstructions have been performed across the United States and, most recently, as part of a special exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. He is also preparing critical editions of two nineteenth-century Haitian operas. In addition to an ACLS fellowship, his research has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the John Carter Brown Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Camargo Foundation.

Michael Szalay

Michael Szalay is Professor of English, Film, and Media and UC Irvine.

Marlous van Waijenburg

Marlous van Waijenburg (Ph.D. History) is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor van Waijenburg’s main research agenda centers on the long-term development patterns of African economies. To date, her projects have focused on the material living standards, fiscal capacity building efforts, coercive labor market institutions, and skill accumulation. Recently, she added a second research line on the business history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Ana Vinea

Ana Vinea is a cultural anthropologist whose work is situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, and science studies. Her current book project, Healing Muslims: Islam, Psychiatry, and Therapeutic Dilemmas in Egypt, examines revivalist Islamic therapies as prominent sites of innovation and contestation within changing medical, religious, and media landscapes. She is also developing a new research project that looks at opioid addiction in Egypt as a lens into the dynamics of everyday life in post-revolutionary Cairo. Ana has a Ph.D. degree from the City University of New York and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Scott Watson

Scott Watson is a Professor of Physics at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the connection between fundamental particle physics and cosmology with an emphasis on physics beyond the Standard Model. These investigations lead to testable predictions, which make it tractable to probe the earliest moments of the universe and properties of fundamental theories, such as string theory.