Faculty Fellows

Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator, and curator. She is the founder of Black Fashion Archive , co-founder of the Fashion and Race Syllabus , and is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the...

Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian of the American South and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books and the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history. In 2021, the Wall...

Elijah Gaddis is from Cabarrus County, North Carolina, the home of George Clinton and Dale Earnhardt. Currently he is the Hollifield Associate Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Community Histories Workshop at Auburn University, where he...

Kim Gallon is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work examines Black cultural expression alongside pressing questions about data, technology, and knowledge production. At its core is a commitment to Black contestation as...

Kristin Ann Hass is a Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She teaches and writes about public memory, place, and race. Her most recent book - - Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Infrastructure in Memorials...

A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. He is the author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization...

Laura Wexler writes about the photographic cultures of the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and has been on the faculty of Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Peking...

Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation, writing and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. Her projects map the past onto geographies of the present. Her work has been...