Samson Allal (he/him) is a Moroccan-American poet, translator, and sculptor. His work has been published by Poetry Magazine, Deep Vellum Press, Gulf Coast, NYU's Black Renaissance for the Institute for African American Affairs, Girl Blood, and elsewhere. His translation of “A Hymn to Ra” was anthologized in the inaugural Best Literary Translations anthology, a publication devoted to global humanities. His sculpture exhibition, “New Prophets” is currently on view at Wesleyan University. His work in sculpture, poetry, and translation, explores the histories, mythologies, choirs of meaning, that migrate across the North Atlantic in rhythms of relation, a New World remix.
Lanre Akinsiku is a multi-genre writer whose work is inspired by the process of wandering, the instability of narrative and language, and the opacity of the self. His short fiction and essays have appeared in NPR, the Washington Post, the Kenyon Review, Gawker, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Joshua Babcock (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and a faculty affiliate in the programs in Linguistics, STS, and the Southeast Asian Studies Initiative. Josh’s current book project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinctions in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore, explores how totalizing colonial images structure the aspirations for belonging in diverse modern societies while simultaneously making belonging virtually impossible. In his emerging work, he studies the Singapore Sling, U.S. school board politics, and a ghost town called Singapore, Michigan. Josh is the Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.
Dr. Georgia Ennis is a linguistic anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Western Carolina University, where she directs the Multimodal Ethnographic Learning and Design (MELD) Lab. She is the author of Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (2025, University of Arizona Press). Her current research ranges from Indigenous Amazonian engagements with social media to the role of mutual aid in Appalachian disaster recovery.
Paja Faudree is a faculty member in Anthropology and Linguistics at Brown. Her research touches upon such themes as Indigenous authors and musicians and linguistic activism in Mexico, the politics of translation during New World colonization, the history of global trade in psychedelic plants, and the gendered nature of “genius” as a social category. Though varied in focus, these projects all aim to recover voices from the distorting, marginalizing influence of popular narratives and intellectual histories. Paja is also a literary author whose experience as a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and journalist undergirds her commitment to produce public-facing work.
Namrata B. Kanchan is the International Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023.
Grace Talusan teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program in the English Department at Brown University and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Born in the Philippines and raised in New England, she is at work on her second book.
Suzie Telep is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a jazz singer-songwriter and performer. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Paris, France, and a Certificate in jazz voice, music theory, and composition from the Bill Evans Piano Academy in Paris. Her current book project, entitled Speaking Like a White Person, focuses on racialization processes through language and the body among Cameroonian immigrants in Paris who imitate linguistic and bodily practices of French White people through whitisation (whitening). In 2021, Suzie Telep received the international prize Richard Mille - La Francophonie en débat awarded by the city of Quebec and the Swiss Center for Quebec and Francophone Studies.
Felisa Vergara Reynolds is Associate Professor of French for the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her focus is on literature in French from the Antilles, West Africa, and North Africa. She primarily works on the legacy and impact of colonialism on literature in French, from the former colonies. Her research is particularly concerned with the continued influence of colonialism in the post-colonial era, and how it is represented in cultural production.
Her book The Author as Cannibal: Re-Writing in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre (1969–1995) was released in 2022 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is currently at work on her second book French or Francophone: The Legacy of the Manifesto for a World Literature is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, as well as co-editing a volume on Maryse Condé entitled Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings that is forthcoming from Liverpool Press.
Kamala Visweswaran is Professor of Anthropology and T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Transnational South Asian Studies at Rice University and Faculty Affiliate in the Medical Humanities Program and Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She writes and teaches in the fields of algorithmic cultures, genomic governance, surveillance studies, science and technology studies, feminist theory and ethnography, transnational and diaspora studies, ethnic and conflict, human rights, colonial law, post/colonial law and literature, comparative South Asia and Middle East studies. She has taught in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and worked in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, India, receiving Fulbright and American Institute of Indian Studies awards for her research, as well as fellowships at the University of Chicago Humanities Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies. She was a past editor of the journal Feminist Studies (2013–17), and was the North American editor of Cultural Dynamics (1998–2005). She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minnesota, 1994) and Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Duke, 2010). She is also the editor of Perspectives on Modern South Asia (Blackwell, 2011), and Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (Pennsylvania, 2013). Her current book under contract with Duke University Press is A Thousand Genocides Now: Gujarat in the Modern Imaginary of Violence. Her new work is in surveillance studies, genomics, and public health.
Renia White is a writer, writing instructor, and consultant originally from Maryland. She is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats selection. She studied journalism at Howard University prior to earning her MFA in poetry from Cornell University and has taught writing courses at Pratt Institute, NJIT, Cornell University, and other institutions. A Freund Prize recipient and Hurston/Wright College Writers Award honoree, White’s work has appeared in The Audacity, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Daily, NO NIIN, and other venues. Currently visiting faculty in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark, she is based in Brooklyn, NY where she’s at work on full-length poetry and prose projects.