Steering Committee
Geri Augusto is an Associate Visiting Professor of Africana Studies and Watson Fellow of International Studies at Brown University. Her current interests are science and technology policy and higher education policy in the Global South; the interaction between the technosciences and indigenous local knowledges, particularly in Southern Africa, Brazil, the US, and the Caribbean; black transnationalism; and visuality, orality and digitality in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Lundy Braun is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies. Trained as a biomedical scientist, her current research focuses on the history of race in science, public health, and medicine with special emphasis on the contemporary debate on health inequality and genomics.
Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry and the current Chair of the Committee on Science and Technology Studies. Her most recent book, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, examines the social nature of biological knowledge about animal and human sexuality.
Sherine Hamdy is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. from New York University Department of Anthropology in 2006. Her current book project, Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam and Medicine in Egypt is under contract with the University of California Press. Hamdy teaches courses on theories and controversies in Science and Society, and the anthropology of bioethics. Her research focuses on the anthropology of medicine, health, science, and technology, and the production of knowledge. Her field experience has been in Egypt.
Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History. She is interested in natural knowledge and the imitation of nature in early modern Europe. Her research has examined links among alchemy, religion, gender and politics in the Holy Roman Empire.
Vanessa Ryan is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in
nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her research and
teaching explore the relationship between science and humanities,
especially cognition and literature, in the nineteenth century and
today. Her recent book, Thinking
without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, is
about how scientists and novelists worked together in the Victorian
period to rethink the concept of “thinking.”
Corey D. B. Walker is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown. His researach revolves around a series of critical investigations into the historical, philosophical, and theological problems of modern thought and political practice. He has published work and continues to critically examine ethics, politics, and knowledge production, philosophy and race, and religion and science.
Bill Warren is Chancellor's Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences. He studies human perception and action, and he is interested in whether behavior can be understood as self-organized within natural constraints. His research on the visual control of locomotion and spatial navigation combines experiments in virtual reality with dynamical systems modeling.