Angela S. Allan is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Brown University. Angela's dissertation, "Postmodern Realism and the Neoliberal Imagination," examines the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and economics in postmodern American literature. She argues that the novel form articulates an alternative to the market-centered ideology of the free market under neoliberalism. She has also taught a course about privacy and paranoia in the 20th-century novel and film. Angela is a co-organizer of this Mellon Workshop.
Devon Anderson is a doctoral student in English at Brown University. Her research interests include queer theory, affect, and privacy. She has taught courses on both 19th and 20th-century American literature and transatlantic modernism. Her dissertation examines queer modernist authors - including Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes - and reads moments of failed communication, affective incongruity, and accident as critical expansions of queer subjectivity. Devon is a co-organizer of this Mellon workshop.
Meredith Bak
Maggie Hennefeld is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her teaching and research interests include comedy, gender, silent cinema, and state politics. She has published in the journals Screen and Media Fields, with essays forthcoming in Discourse, Projections, and a Blackwell Companion to D.W. Griffith. Maggie’s dissertation, “The Politics of Film Comedy: from Vaudeville to Terrorism,” historicizes the emergence of narrative film form through the comedy genre. She looks at film comedy's social inheritances from vaudeville and other media, and its uneven depoliticization throughout the silent era, including its intermittent censorship and abrupt instrumentalization as state propaganda during WWI.
Meghan Kallman
Mercedes Lyson
Brandy Monk-Payton is a doctoral student in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She received a B.A. in Film and Media Studies from Swarthmore College and an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Her research focuses on the intersections of celebrity culture, fandom, and tabloid media; in particular, she is interested in issues of racialized publicity and the formation of black subjectivity in film and television as it relates to visuality and (over)exposure. She has published on South African television for the online journal, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture and her essay, “Programming Slavery: Race, Technology and the Quest for Freedom,” is forthcoming in the edited collection, Race and Ethnicity in the Works of Joss Whedon (McFarland).
Sara Pfaff is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown University. Her dissertation examines the body politics of neoliberalism and the cultural turn, specifically focusing on a seam of pathological embodiment in Ethnic American novels after 1968. She has taught a course on contagion and race in twentieth-century American literature, and her interests include Native- and African-American literature, science in literature, constructivist epistemology, and political theories of liberalism.
Timothy Syme
Devon Anderson is a doctoral student in English at Brown University. Her research interests include queer theory, affect, and privacy. She has taught courses on both 19th and 20th-century American literature and transatlantic modernism. Her dissertation examines queer modernist authors - including Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes - and reads moments of failed communication, affective incongruity, and accident as critical expansions of queer subjectivity. Devon is a co-organizer of this Mellon workshop.
Meredith Bak
Maggie Hennefeld is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her teaching and research interests include comedy, gender, silent cinema, and state politics. She has published in the journals Screen and Media Fields, with essays forthcoming in Discourse, Projections, and a Blackwell Companion to D.W. Griffith. Maggie’s dissertation, “The Politics of Film Comedy: from Vaudeville to Terrorism,” historicizes the emergence of narrative film form through the comedy genre. She looks at film comedy's social inheritances from vaudeville and other media, and its uneven depoliticization throughout the silent era, including its intermittent censorship and abrupt instrumentalization as state propaganda during WWI.
Meghan Kallman
Mercedes Lyson
Brandy Monk-Payton is a doctoral student in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She received a B.A. in Film and Media Studies from Swarthmore College and an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Her research focuses on the intersections of celebrity culture, fandom, and tabloid media; in particular, she is interested in issues of racialized publicity and the formation of black subjectivity in film and television as it relates to visuality and (over)exposure. She has published on South African television for the online journal, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture and her essay, “Programming Slavery: Race, Technology and the Quest for Freedom,” is forthcoming in the edited collection, Race and Ethnicity in the Works of Joss Whedon (McFarland).
Sara Pfaff is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown University. Her dissertation examines the body politics of neoliberalism and the cultural turn, specifically focusing on a seam of pathological embodiment in Ethnic American novels after 1968. She has taught a course on contagion and race in twentieth-century American literature, and her interests include Native- and African-American literature, science in literature, constructivist epistemology, and political theories of liberalism.
Timothy Syme
