Anne Brubaker is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program, where she teaches courses on modern American literature, gender, science and technology studies, and science fiction. Her research on the intersections among literary criticism, modern American writing, and mathemathics has appeared in American Quarterly, New Literary History, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics. 

Her summer research projects include an article on Octavia Butler's lesser known 1983 speculative short story "Speech Sounds," a story about a pandemic that renders people unable to speak, write, or comprehend language. The story's relevance to our contemporary moment is less an example of science fiction's predictive power and instead tied to a continuum of racial justice movements from the 1960s onwards. Anne's other project is a co-written paper with Jennifer Lieberman (Professor of English at the University of North Florida) for a special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture. 

Emily Harrison is a Lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Wellesley College and an Instructor in Epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. A historian of science, technology, and medicine, her research addresses the politics and culture of epidemiology, public health, and social medicine. She is particularly interested in problems of authority, justice, and trust. Her work has been published as articles in the American Journal of Public Health, the European Journal of Epidemiology, and Scientific American, as chapters in a number of international edited volumes, and in public media coverage ranging from the Anchorage Daily News to The New Yorker. As a Newhouse summer fellow, she will be revising a book manuscript on the history of clinical epidemiology in which she examines imagined and actualized roles of modern science in managing political and ethical tensions for matters of health governance. 

This summer at the Newhouse I'm conducting research for a new artist's book provisionally entitled "Sistering in the Shadows." I am fascinated with the self-reflexive nature of artist books and how the intersection of text, image and materiality may complicate dominant narratives.

My starting point is a set of inchoate memories from childhood. I grew up just over the hill from a residential school called the Wisconsin School for Girls. Not all of the students there were delinquents, but those living nearby knew it to be a place from which girls ran away—often. Thinking back to that familiar, furtive presence of girls on the run (sometimes abandoning their boots in the field of purses in our barn) I began researching the school, which operated next door to my parents' farm from the early 1940's through the mid 1970's. 

What brought so many girls to that place in the woods and then through our fields? In the years before Roe v Wade, how many were pregnant? And how did the subsequent transformation of that facility (now a correctional institution for men, surrounded by a 6,000 foot stun fence) echo the proliferation of so many prisons across the US? 

Vernon Shetley has taught in the Wellesley College English Department since the fall of 1984. His areas of teaching include film, literature, and composition, from cinematic horror and film noir to romantic comedy and the contemporary novel. He has published essays and reviews on film, poetry, dance, and theory. His writings on cinema include articles on the Olsen Twins, Blade Runner, and Scarlett Johansson's science-fiction films. While a Newhouse fellow he will work on completing a manuscript on American neo-noir filmmaking from The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) to Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) and beyond, focusing on the representation (often oblique or implicit) of the realm of the economic in neo-noir.