The conference is convened by Brown University doctoral students.

Felicia Denaud (She/Hers)

Africana Studies
Dissertation: “At the Vanishing Point of the Word: Blackness, Imperium, and the Unnameable War”
Keywords: war | state formation | Black rebellion

Jeff Feldman (They/Theirs)

Political Science
Jeff’s dissertation considers minor traditions of conceptualizing “the revolutionary general strike”: not just a mass work stoppage, but also an important material, organizational, and symbolic process by which radically democratic subjects are formed in the context of racial capitalism.
Keywords: general strike | radical democratic theory | subjectivation | temporality

Julia Huggins (She/Hers)

Modern Culture and Media
Julia’s research deals with theories of nonverbal communication as they intersect with science and technology, media, and the law.
Keywords: media studies | dust | expertise | forensics | expression

Kristen Maye (She/Hers)

Africana Studies
Kristen’s dissertation project examines black studies as it exposes the limits and contradictions of disciplinarity.
Keywords: Black studies | the university | knowledge production | incorporation | liberalism

Marah Nagelhout (She/Hers)

English
Marah’s dissertation offers extraction and “extractive reason” as an analytic for thinking capitalism as a racializing force in a manner that can account for both labor exploitation  and anti-black oppression in a materialist framework.
Keywords: colonial ecologies | Marxism | environmental violence | abolition | 20th-century/contemporary novel

Rachel Nusbaum (She/Hers)

Political Science
Rachel’s dissertation asks why our habitual ways of thinking about responsibility fall short when faced with problems that are fundamentally political, and explores the kind of practices that an explicitly political approach to responsibility might generate.
Keywords: responsibility | structural injustice | intersubjectivity | collective action

Nick Pisanelli (He/His)

English
Nick’s dissertation, “Obsolescent Life: Modernism and the Aesthetics of Acceleration,” theorizes the emergence of the obsolescent as a historical and aesthetic category in the first few decades of the 20th century.
Keywords: modernism | aesthetics | technics | fiction | individuation