Susan E. Alcock
Director, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World; Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology; professor of classics; professor of anthropology. Research interests include archaeologies of landscape, memory and imperialism (with an emphasis on the ancient Mediterranean and ancient Western Asia); her experience in regional field projects has also led to a concern with issues of landscape and site preservation and presentation. research page
John Bodel
Professor of classics and history. Director of the U.S. Epigraphy Project, the purpose of which is to gather and share information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions preserved in the United States and create a “virtual edition” of the disparate material (spread among some 75 museum, university, or private collections), including the history of American collecting of antiquities. research page
Keith Brown
Associate professor of international studies. He has worked extensively on national identity, memory, and history in Macedonia. His teaching and research interests also include oral history and documentary work, and their role in social activism. research page
Paul Buhle
Senior lecturer in American civilization. His interests are comics, Rhode Islandiana, and Underground Rhodeislandiana. research page
caroline frank
Visiting lecturer in American civilization. Research interests are Early American and global history; material culture studies; and historical archaeology. She completed a dissertation in American civilization entitled "China's Object and Imaginary in the Making of an American Nation, 1690-1790," which won the 2008 Gabriel Prize in American Studies. She teaches courses on material culture and the China trades. She codirects the Greene Farm Archaeology Project in Warwick, RI, and is beginning a related project on Native American enslavement in southern New England.
Matt Garcia
Associate professor of American civilization, ethnic studies, and history. His book, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2001) was named co-winner for the best book in oral history by the Oral History Association in 2003. His current book project, Nature’s Candy: Labor, Protest and Grapes in the California-Mexican Borderlands, explores grape cultivation and the formation of the Farmworkers Movement during the second half of the twentieth century. research page
Gayle Gifford
Adjunct lecturer in public humanities. Her interests include organization and revenue development within small to medium-sized nongovernmental organizations; nonprofit governance, especially the complex responsibilities of citizen volunteers; meaningful public engagement in collaborative policy-making; and strategic alliances and management.
Elliott Gorn
Professor of American civilization and history. Research focuses on the United States from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. He writes on the history of popular culture—through topics such as sports, crime, and labor organizing—and has paid particular attention to how class and gender shape cultural forms. research page
Stephen Houston
Professor of anthropology. Interests in Classic Maya civilization, architecture, ancient literacy, decipherment, the origins, development, and extinction of writing systems, and the comparative study of royal courts. research page
Shepard Krech III
Professor of anthropology and environmental studies and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Interests include anthropological approaches to material culture, collecting, and museums. research page
Steven Lubar
Professor of American civilization and history. Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center and the master’s program in public humanities. Writes on American technology and invention, the history of museums, and museum practice. research page
Patrick Malone
Professor of American civilization and urban studies. Interested in museum interpretation, historical preservation, material culture studies, the urban built environment, the history of technology, and industrial archaeology. He is presently working on a book about waterpower in Lowell, Massachusetts. research page
Richard Meckel
Associate professor of American civilization. Historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who explores the state’s relation to children and families especially in the areas of health and health care. research page
molly rice
Playwright and adjunct lecturer in American civilization. Teaches on site-specific theater.
Seth Rockman
Assistant professor of history. A scholar of the Revolutionary and Early Republic United States with a particular interest in the intertwined histories of slavery and capitalism. His work explores labor, race, and social welfare as they relate to American economic development. research page
pieter N. Roos
Executive director of the Newport Restoration Foundation and adjunct lecturer in American civilization. Teaches on the mechanics of cultural policy in America.
Patricia E. Rubertone
Associate professor of anthropology. Interests include historical archaeology, ethnohistory, culture contact and colonialism, landscape and memory, material culture, Native North America, and New England. research page
Kerry Smith
Associate professor of history. Teaching and research deals in part with the social histories of disaster, natural and man-made, in modern Japan, and with their representation in public memory and memorial spaces. research page
Kevin P. Smith
Deputy director and chief curator at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Interests include the ethics and practice of interpreting and working with ethnographic and archaeological collections and with their producers, source communities, and descendants for mutual benefit and the public good. Archaeological research focuses on issues of the anthropology of law and the integration of political and economic processes in the coalescence of early states.
Susan Smulyan
Professor of American civilization. Author of two books: Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) and Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), she has published a range of articles and book reviews in both the scholarly and popular press. In addition, she has worked on three large web projects: Whole Cloth: Discovering Science and Technology through American History; Freedom Now!: An Archival Project of Tougaloo College and Brown University; and Perry Visits Japan. She is a cultural historian, teaching courses in popular culture, advertising history, radio, digital scholarship, and American studies methods. research page
jonathan stevens
Director of economic development for the city of Newport and adjunct lecturer in American civilization. Teaches on the mechanics of cultural policy in America.
Jeff Todd Titon
Professor of music and director of graduate studies and the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology for the Department of Music. Interests include public folklore, applied ethnomusicology, music, and sustainability. Visit his sustainable music blog. research page
Anne M. Valk
Associate director for programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center. A historian by training, her interests include oral history, local history, women’s history, and African American history. She has worked extensively on community oral history projects in the Midwest and the South, examining experiences of immigration, industrialization and deindustrialization, and racial segregation.
Ray Williams
Director of education for the Harvard University Art Museums.
C.D. Wright
Professor of English. Interested in fertile poetic constructions—the search for models in my terms becomes a search for alternatives. Restless in process and stable in sensibility, I am looking for a way to assist both myself and my students in addressing the commonly acknowledged challenges and crises of our time. I am convinced that we can enlarge the forum without compromising the immanent subtleties of any specialized practice. I have recently initiated a course called “The Documentary Vision in Recent American Literature.” I hope to continue to develop this course with the collaboration of students and faculty in disciplines that can elaborate upon its possibilities. research page
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Assistant professor of history. A historian of modern South Asia, presently working on a book on the history of archaeological practices in the north-west frontier of colonial India, a region renown for Gandharan Buddhist remains in what is present-day Pakistan. She is interested in the changing relationship of Muslims of the region to these Buddhist remains, local participation in the making of archaeological knowledge, and the ways in which this knowledge authorized competing notions of national as well as ‘world’ heritage. research page
Samuel Zipp
Assistant professor of American civilization. Urban and cultural historian with interests in the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the built environment, United States history since World War II, and nonfiction writing for the public. He has written essays, editorials, and reviews for a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baffler, Metropolis, Cabinet, and In These Times. research page
Janet Zweig
Senior critic at Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently working on several public art commissions around the country from Seattle to Queens. Interested in the history, theory, and practice of public art, and the ways it can generate civic discourse and participation. Teaching a course that brings RISD and public humanities graduate students together to collaborate and to share resources.