Senior Fellows

Kevin Bruyneel is Professor of Politics at Babson College. He wrote The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He presently writes on the relationship between race, colonialism and collective memory. He is writing a book, entitled Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity in the Political Life of Race in the United States, which will be published in the Critical Indigeneities Series of the University of North Carolina Press. He has recently published articles in History & Memory, Settler Colonial Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal, and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Bruyneel was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Bruyneel completed his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York City. At Babson College, Bruyneel teaches courses in Political Theory, American Politics, Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Radical Politics.

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. They are also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Science, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Research Clusters. Their research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics. Chen’s 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press) was the winner of Alan Bray Award from Modern Language Association’s GL/Q Caucus and explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of “animacy.” A second book project concerns the relationships among the conceptual territories of “toxicity” and “intoxication” and their involvement in histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability. 

In the Fall of 2009, Chen convened “Species Spectacles”, a U.C. Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group focused on animality, sexuality and race. Chen’s short film, Local Grown Corn (2007), explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, illness and friendship; it has played in both Asian and queer film festivals. In 2018-2010, they taught as a Robert Sterling Clark Professor at Williams College.

Pablo F. Gómez is Associate Professor of History and the History of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His work examines the history of health and corporeality in the early modern world with a particular focus on Latin America, the Caribbean, the African diaspora and, more generally, the Iberian and Black Atlantic Worlds. His book, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (UNC Press, 2017) was the winner of the William H. Welch Medal, the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize, and Honorable Mention-Bolton-Johnson Book Prize. In it, he explores belief making and the creation of evidence around the human body and the natural world in the early modern Caribbean. Gómez is currently working on a history of the quantifiable body and the development of novel ideas about risk, labor, and disease that appeared in Atlantic slave markets during the seventeenth century. He is also actively involved in projects of digital archival preservation in Colombia, Cuba and Brazil.

Sherine Hamdy, Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, studies medical anthropology and science and technology in the Middle East. She is an experimental ethnographer who uses comics to bring her research to a wider audience. Her first graphic novel, Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017), is a co-authored fictional piece, integrating her research on organ transplantation and failure, Muslim bioethical accounts of what you can and can’t do to the body, and health and inequality— why certain people end up in organ failure and others don’t— through the story of two characters who were based upon hundreds of interviews. Outside of her work in comics, Hamdy published Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggles for Human Dignity in Egypt (UCI Press, 2012), which received the Clifford Geertz Honorable Mention Book Prize . Her anthropological studies have been published in Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics; and American Ethnologist. Hamdy earned her PhD in Anthropology at New York University in 2006.

Vivian L. Huang is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University, specializing in race and performance studies. Her first book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, theorizes minoritarian aesthetics of inscrutability in contemporary Asian American literary, visual, and performance cultures.