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Keith Brown is Professor of International Studies and
Director of the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes. Keith Brown holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He taught at Bowdoin College and the University of Wales before joining the Watson Institute in 1999 as an assistant research professor. He has also been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a visiting fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and has delivered lecture series at the University of Oxford and at the Institute for National History in Skopje, Macedonia, where he was a Fulbright fellow in 2012-13. He has served as director of BIARI since 2010. His research focuses primarily on the Balkans, especially relations between Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria. More recently, he has also worked with diverse learning communities in the US military. His most recent book is Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Indiana University Press, 2013).

David B. Edwards, is the W. Van Alan Clark ’41 Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences at Williams College. His interests include documentary film and visual culture, humanitarianism and post-conflict societies, and the Near East and South Asia. He is the author of numerous publications including: Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (University of California Press, 1996), and Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (University of California Press, 2002). He also directed and produced the documentary film Kabul Transit (2006).

Kerry B. Fosher is the Director of the Translational Research Group at the United States Marine Corps’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning.  She is a social anthropologist who focuses on the integration of social science in security institutions and activities. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Her initial field research on homeland security in the Boston area was sponsored by the NSF and a Claudia DeLys grant. She also conducted applied work related to exercise design and evaluation, port security, and bioterrorism. From 2002-2004 she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where she participated in the Managing the Atom Project and the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness. In 2007, she became a Visiting Professor at Air University, serving as the Director of the new Cross-Cultural Competence Project. While there, she launched the Cross-Culturally Competent Airmen initiative as the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan. She became the first Command Social Scientist for Marine Corps Intelligence Activity. Her current work focuses on how military organizations perceive and consume science, theoretical maturation of the domain of practicing anthropology, and broader issues of sustainably integrating social science and social scientists in military activities.

Ömür Harmanşah is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University and Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013-14 Acedemic Year. He is the author of Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge 2013) and directs Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a regional survey in central west Turkey. His research and teaching focuses on the architectural history and material culture of the Middle East, but also on questions of space, place and landscape, on the politics of archaeological practices in the Middle East, collective memory, cultural heritage, and political ecology.

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies and Acting Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke 1996) and the co-author/editor of Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw-Hill 2001/2005), Between Woman and Nation: Transnational Feminisms and the State (Duke 1999), and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota 1994) as well as two digital multi-media scholarly works, Dead Reckoning and Precision Targets. She is completing a book on aerial views and militarized visual culture.

Morag Kersel is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at DePaul University. She is currently a CAORC Fellow at the American Center for Oriental Research in Jordan‎. Her research interests include the prehistory of the Levant, cultural heritage policy, and the trade in archaeological artifacts from the Eastern Mediterranean. She co-directs with Meredith S. Chesson the “Follow the Pots” project in Jordan – an innovative investigation into the multiple social lives of artifacts. Morag is a co-author (with Christina Luke) of the recently published US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (Routledge 2013).

Catherine Lutz is Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. She has researched and taught in a number of areas, including militarization and its shaping of social life beyond the battlefield, the car and its place in US culture, cultural understandings of the emotions, popular photography and ideas of race and gender in the U.S., and changes in local democracy with economic restructuring in the last part of the 20th century. She is the author of Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against the War (with Matthew Gutmann). (University of California Press, 2010) and Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives (with Anne Fernandez-Carol). (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Adrian Myers is an archaeologist based in Vancouver with AMEC Environment & Infrastructure, an engineering and environmental science consulting firm. He holds a BA in History from the University of British Columbia, an MA in Historical Archaeology from the University of Bristol, and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. For his dissertation research project he excavated the site of a prisoner of war camp that held Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers in Manitoba, Canada. Adrian’s research interests include the archaeology of the Second World War, historical material culture, and satellite remote sensing.

David Price is  a cultural anthropologist a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at St. Martin’s University, in Lacey, Washington, where he has taught since 1994. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Price studied anthropology and intellectual history as an undergraduate at the Evergreen State College. He received his AM from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida, studying under anthropologist Marvin Harris and conducting field research on the ancient and contemporary irrigation systems of the Egyptian Fayoum. He has conducted cultural anthropological and archaeological fieldwork and research in the United States and Palestine, Egypt and Yemen. David Price is the author of Atlas of World Cultures: A Geographical Guide to Ethnographic Literature (Sage, 1989). He is writing a three volume series of books using the Freedom of Information Act and archival sources to examine American anthropologists’ interactions with intelligence agencies. His Book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Persecution of Activist Anthropologists (Duke University Press, 2004) uses 30,000 pages of FBI documents to examine governmental attempts to suppress academic freedom.

Felipe Rojas is an assistant professor of archaeology at Brown University. He has conducted fieldwork at various sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and is the director of the Brown University Labraunda Project. He is currently writing a book about how the people of Greek and Roman Anatolia used material remains to imagine and explain the local and universal past.

Maria Theresia Starzmann is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Concerned with the relationship between structural and direct violence, she  studies how capitalism and colonialism organize social epistemologies. While her recent work explores political violence in the 20th century from an archaeological perspective, her scholarship is also dedicated to a critical analysis of the politics of anthropological research. Maria Theresia Starzmann seeks to engage moments of tension between scholarly knowledge and the political desires that emerge beyond academic spaces.

Mayssun Succarie  is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown Univcersity. She received her PhD from the University of California/Berkeley. Her research cover the Political Culture of Development in the Global South with focus on the Arab region. She also works on Social Politics of youth in the Global Economy.  She has taught for three years in the American University of Beirut in the departments of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies and The Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She also taught in the Anthropology department at the American University of Cairo. Last Spring, she was the ARCAPITA visiting Professor at the Middle East, South Asia and African Studies- MESAAS at Columbia University.