Welcome Remarks
Ayako Kano is a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan, with broad interests in all aspects of the humanities and arts in the world. Her early education includes a German kindergarten, Japanese elementary school, and public high school in suburban New York. With an undergraduate degree in English literature from Keio University, and MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, she has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 1995. Her affiliations at Penn include the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature, History, History of Art, and she is a core faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program. She is currently working on a book on fiction to film adaptations in modern Japan. She is the author of Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (2016) and Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (2001), and the co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2018) as well as articles and translations on related topics.
Julia Verkholantsev is a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, linguistic culture, religion, and intellectual history. Her publications and research focus on the cultural space of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. She is the author of The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome: The History of the Legend and its Legacy or, How the Translator of the Vulgate Became an Apostle of the Slavs (Cornell UP, Northern Illinois UP imprint, 2014) and Ruthenica Bohemica: Ruthenian Translations from Czech in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland (Lit-Verlag, 2008), which received the Best Book Award from the Early Slavic Studies Association (2015) and the Zora Kipel Book Prize from the North American Association for Belarusian Studies (2009), respectively. She is currently completing a book on the role of etymological commentary and storytelling in historical discourse, provisionally titled The Etymological Method and Historical Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She also founded and serves as editor of two book series, Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe with MIP, Kalamazoo, and Medieval Library of Rus, Ruthenia, and Muscovy with NIUP-Cornell, both dedicated to making primary sources on the early history of these regions available in English translation for teaching and research.
At Penn, she founded and directed the interdisciplinary program in Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2017–2024) and served as Director of the Undergraduate Humanities Forum at the Wolf Humanities Center in 2022–2023 and 2024–2025. She is honored to serve as the Wolf Humanities Center's Topic Director for 2025–2026, leading the exploration of the theme Truth.
The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making
Jennifer Sierra’s research explores human-machine relationships among Shipibo-Konibo people (who refer to themselves as “Shipibo”), an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, Indigenous studies, critical digital media studies, and science and technology studies (STS), her work offers a nuanced cultural analysis of digital technology use and media infrastructure access in the Amazon region. Jennifer earned her Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan, where she also completed a graduate certificate in digital studies.
Althea Wasow is Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is revising her monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, which analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in early cinema. She is also developing an essay film on Bert Williams entitled, Nobody. Her films—including the wannabe (featuring Ramón Rodríguez) and The Whole World Revolved Around Her (featuring Wangechi Mutu)—have screened at film festivals and cultural institutions such as Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Queens Museum of Art. Wasow is co-PI of “The Satellite Coast” (PI Lisa Parks & co-PI Carlos Jimenez, Jr.), an NSF-funded Science and Technology Studies project that examines impacts of increased commercial satellite launching. She is a co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and has taught in jails and prisons in New York and California.the Wolf Humanities Center's Topic Director for 2025–2026, leading the exploration of the theme Truth.
Institutions of Learning
Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches interactions between global media and radical leftist politics, with a particular focus on Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Prof. Alekseyeva's first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (UC Press), was published in February 2025.
Prof. Alekseyeva is also author-illustrator of the award-winning graphic memoir Soviet Daughter (Microcosm, 2017). She has published several articles on film, art, and politics in Film History, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, ARTMargins, The Nib, The Sixties, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. Most recently, she published a translation of an article by antifascist documentary filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Prof. Alekseyeva is also the guest editor of three forthcoming issues for Arts, JCMS, and The Journal of Japanese and Korean Studies.
Chris Halsted is a historian of early medieval Europe, focusing on borders, boundaries, and the creation of ethnic identity in the ninth and tenth centuries. His research explores subjects including connectivity and trade in eastern Europe and Eurasia, witchcraft, and the intersecting construction of gender and ethnicity. His work has been published in venues including Viator, Early Medieval Europe, and Medium Ævum, and is forthcoming in Speculum and The Haskins Society Journal. He has received support from the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His first book, The Silver Age: Globality, Society, and the Slave Trade among the Baltic Slavs, 750-1050, is currently in process.
Emily Ng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for East Asian Studies and the Asian American Studies Program, and a member of the graduate groups in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her research centers on madness and mental health, cosmic and spectral politics, post/socialist worlds, and political-aesthetic imaginations of rurality, with a geographic focus on China. She is the author of A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (University of California Press, 2020).
Ege Yumusak is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how the social interacts with the psychological. Her current project concerns political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. As a faculty fellow, she will be working on a theory of everyday political conflict. She has also examined questions concerning political language, social movements (e.g., the labor movement and feminism), and ideology. Her public writing has appeared in Boston Review, The Drift magazine, and The Point magazine.
Land and its Technologies 
Nikhil Anand is the Silvers Family Presidential Professor of Anthropology, and Interim Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change, and addresses their relations by researching the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His award-winning first book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. In 2018, Nikhil published a coedited volume (with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta) The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press 2018). The book shows how infrastructure provides a generative analytic and site to rethink questions of time, development and politics in different parts of the world. His forthcoming book Amphibious City (under contract with Duke University Press), is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Penn Global Inquiries Fellowship. The book provincializes the historical and ongoing worlds made by urban planning to show how its infrastructures have produced and intensify an unequally borne climate crisis.
Samuel Profitt Driver is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Dickinson College, having completed his Ph.D. in Slavic Studies at Brown University in 2024. His research examines the intersection of photography, truth, and identity formation in Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture. He has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and has served as a Visiting Scholar at Charles University (Prague), the Open Society Archives (Budapest), the Museum of Modern Art (Thessaloniki), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Beyond academia, Samuel works with organizations focused on nuclear nonproliferation and Euro-Atlantic security, connecting his scholarly research with policy engagement.
Delbar Khakzad is a social historian of science and religion in the Indo-Persianate world and the Middle East, focusing on how the entanglement of science and religion, particularly Shi‘i Islam and Zoroastrianism, shaped the discourse of nationalism in modern Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. During her fellowship year, she is affiliated with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Department of History & Sociology of Science. She is currently working on her first monograph, Solar Islam: Time, Race, and the Enchantment of Modern Science in Iran, which explores the history of time and temporality, as well as the relationship between science and the formation of a Shi‘i-Persian identity from the early modern Indo-Persianate world to modern Iran. Her dissertation, which forms the basis of this book project, received an Honourable Mention for the Best Dissertation Award from the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS). Part of her research, “The Time of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Iran: Cyclical Time (Dawr), Solar Islam, and the Formation of the Solar-Hijri (Hijri-Shamsi) Calendar,” was published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME). Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
M. Susan Lindee is Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the history of genetics, the study of radiation and nuclear risk, and the broader history of militarized science and technology in the twentieth century. Her books include Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Harvard, 2020); Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago, 1994), The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995) and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Hopkins, 2005). Honors include the Schuman Prize of the History of Science Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. She is working now on the history of the complex roles of the Army Corps of Engineers in the management of the Atchafalaya Bain, a Louisiana swamp where she has family origins.
Borders
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where they are affiliated faculty in Global and Comparative Literature and the Center for Latin American Studies. Their first book, a critical reframing of autotheory’s place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. They are co-editor of Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and have also guest edited special issues of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021) and College Literature on trans literatures (2025). Their scholarship and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Diacritics, Representations, TSQ, Critical Times, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.
Hardeep Dhillon is currently an Assistant Professor in Asian American History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research largely investigates how legal status can serve as an analytical tool to study the distribution of rights, resources, and privileges in society. She is particularly interested in how legal status has been historically used as a proxy for race in structuring inequality in the United States. Her research is published in several leading historical journals and public forums, including the Journal of American History, The Historical Journal, and, most recently, Modern American History.
In her first year at Penn, Professor Dhillon was awarded The Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching by the Standing Faculty at Penn. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Dhillon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Bar Foundation. She earned her doctorate at Harvard University in History with a secondary field of study in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. At Harvard, her teaching also earned her the Faculty of the Year Award.
Mina Magda is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis with an emphasis on global and comparative Black cultural studies. Her work in visual, media, and performance histories seeks to renegotiate geographic boundaries in the study of Black dispersal and dislocation to consider Russia and the Soviet Union as critical sites in the articulation of a global blackness.
Magda’s current book project, Becoming Modern, is on belonging, modernity, and the making of race at the turn of the 20th century in Paris. It looks at the corresponding and, at times, collaborative ways Black American and Slavic artists contrived spectacles of racial embodiment to forge modes of survival and sociality in diaspora. Her article on the troubled entanglement of Black aesthetic labor, pictorial space, and Russia’s scramble for Africa today, “The Russian Image of the Black: On Matters of Race and Perspective,” was published in Slavic Review in January 2026.
Spencer Small is a scholar of Soviet and Post-Soviet literature, culture, and digital media. He earned his PhD from Yale University in Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research investigates the relationships between narrative, art, and politics. Spencer is affiliated with Penn’s Department of Russian and East European Studies and is working on his book manuscript, The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing. His project combines literary analysis with narrative ethics to develop the ethical pact as an original theoretical tool of narratology to study the intersections of ethics and cultural expression through first-person Russophone wartime narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Before joining the Wolf Humanities Center, Spencer was a lecturer of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale.
Closing Remarks
Caitlin Adkins is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Penn. She specializes in topics of gender, labor, and media, specifically in Japan, with broad interests in feminist and queer theory, law and society, and film and literature. Her dissertation examines figurations of female criminality in Japanese contexts, clarifying connections between media representation and legal processes that are critical for understanding 21st century social movements. Her research has been awarded generous support, including the Phyllis Rackin Graduate Award and the E. Dale Saunders Council on Buddhism Prize for Excellence in Japanese Studies. She has served in various roles at Penn, most recently as Teaching Fellow (EALC/ RELS) and Graduate Associate (GSWS). She holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies and a B.A. in Japanese Studies summa cum laude from the University of Findlay.