Visiting Speakers

Monica R. Miller holds research interests in religion in youth culture, popular culture, identity and difference, new black religious movements and theory and method in the study of religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Theology, Ethics, and Human Science from Chicago Theological Seminary (2010), M.T.S. from Drew Theological School (2006) and B.A.  in Religious Studies from Fordham University (2004). Among a host of articles and book chapters, Miller is the author of Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012).

Sarah Milov is a historian of the twentieth century United States. Her work focuses on how organized interest groups and everyday Americans seek to influence government policy and the terms of political debates.

Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist and scholar from Baltimore, Maryland.

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, (Routledge, 2004), Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015), and and the co-editor of How to Watch Television (NYU Press, 2013). He maintains the blog Just TV.

Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs, which explores the militarization of law enforcement, the social history of drug consumption and sale, and the political economy of mass incarceration in late twentieth century California. She is also author of the forthcoming Revolution in Our Lifetime from Verso Press (October, 2016), which explores the history and the legacy of the Black Panther Party for its 50th anniversary.

Luc Nijs is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University.

Bethany Nowviskie is a research associate professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and the director of the international Digital Library Federation at CLIR, the Council on Library and Information resources, a DC-based non-profit organization focusing on the intersection of information technology with cultural heritage and higher ed. She has been a pioneering designer and developer of interpretive platforms for humanities computing since the mid-1990s.

Michael Leo Owens is a scholar of urban politics; state and local politics; political penology; governance and public policy processes; religion and politics; and African American politics. Author of God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), his current book project is Prisoners of Democracy, a study of the politics, policies, and attitudes that diminish the citizenship of felons in the United States.