Melanie Chambliss is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences department. She teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history. Melanie is currently working on her book manuscript "Saving the Race: Black Archives, Black Liberation, and the Remaking of Modernity." Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Melanie earned her bachelors degree in English from Howard University and her PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Melanie also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University.
Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Halls professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She has conducted fieldwork in New Zealand and the United States with Samoan migrants. She has also written about Maori members of the NZ parliament as well as US corporate practices of hiring and US college students’ uses of new media when breaking up. She is currently involved in a project tentatively titled The Pandemic Workplace, in which she explores what the pandemic reveals about how US workplaces function as incubators for both democratic and autocratic citizens. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren, SSRC, NSF and, most recently, fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Notre Dame’s Institute of Advanced Study. She has edited a trilogy of imagined manuals written by ethnographers, the latest - Living among Monsters, will come out soon with Punctum Press.
Eduardo Brondizio is Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He developed a research program in Environmental Anthropology that is collaborative and international, interdisciplinary and problem-oriented, and, particularly dedicated to understanding rural and urban populations and landscapes and the transformation of the Amazon. For most of his career, he has studied small farmers and rural households in Eastern Amazonia as they have interacted with commodity markets, development programs and policies, social movements, and environmental-climate change. For the past decade, his research has extended to the analysis of rural-urban household networks, urbanization and urban problems, and the governance of indigenous areas and conservation units in the region. As a microcosm of global predicaments and diversity, marked by development contradictions, social inequalities, and accelerated environmental change, the Amazon has provided an entry point to engage on collaborative research focusing on global change and sustainability. He maintains a field-based, comparative and longitudinal research program that combines ethnography, survey, institutional analysis, geospatial methods, ecological assessments, and historical investigation, grounded in a belief that empirical analysis, theory and methodological development are inter-dependent. Brought together, his research contributes to a ‘ethnographically-grounded complex systems perspective’ to the study of regional and global change. This implies examining regions such as the Amazon as dynamic social-ecological-political-historical landscapes emerging from interacting local, regional, and global processes, and defying simplistic interpretations and one-size-fits-all solutions and policies.
Eileen Joy is a specialist in medieval literary studies and contemporary cultural studies, with a wide variety of publications in poetry and poetics, intellectual history, ethical philosophy and phenomenology, state violence and war, identity and disembodiment, eco studies, object studies, post/humanisms, and scholarly communications. She is the Founding Editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and Founding Director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion.
Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Professor Quito Swan is an award-winning historian of Black internationalism, Black Power, and the Black Pacific and a scholar of race, public policy, and the African Diaspora. Before joining Indiana University Bloomington as Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Dr. Swan was Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and directed its public policy driven William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture. He obtained his Ph.d in African Diaspora History from Howard University, and taught in its Department of History.
Ethan Michelson is Professor of Sociology and Law and currently chairs the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society at IU since 2003. His new book, Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts, was published as hardcover and open access editions by Cambridge University Press in March 2022.
Perpetually curious about information, she uses data in creative ways to gain new insights about user constituencies and ways to leverage them into successful and responsible marketing campaigns. She holds an BA from St. Lawrence University, an MFA from Purdue University, and has worked as a marketer in various fields including small business marketing, commercial agriculture, and scholarly communications. Alexa was the Journals Marketing Manager at the University of Illinois Press. Presently, Alexa is a Product Manager for Research Square. Research Square Company, a five-time INC 5000 award winner, exists to make research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. Through their industry-leading preprint platform, Research Square, research promotion tools, and AJE’s comprehensive suite of manuscript preparation services, they are proud to have supported over 2.5 million authors in 192 countries since their founding in 2004.
Gary Dunham is the director of Indiana University Press, where he oversees its publishing mission for scholarly and trade books and journals. His current areas of expertise are digital publishing and book acquisitions/editing. In regards to the former, Gary was co-P.I for the online version of the Lewis and Clark journals and current P.I. of the Mellon Humanities Open Book program where they have digitized over 150 IUP books and made them open access. In regards to the latter, he has acquired and edited around 1000 books in his career.
Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde, Ph.D. is a Memory Keeper, poet, ancestral priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, healing facilitator, doula, and a Reiki Master. Her research and creative work are grounded in contemplative and ritual practices and respectfully approach the Earth and human bodies as sites of memory, and always with the understanding that memory never dies, is subversive, and can be recovered to transform transgenerational trauma and pain into peace and power. She is the inaugural recipient of the Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.