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PANELISTS

Curtis Austin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University and Associate Director at the Humanities Institute

Curtis Austin is an associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, where he is also the associate director of the Humanities Institute. He studies African American history with a focus on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, his first book, Up Against the Wall, examines the history of the Black Panther Party. He is currently writing Dare to Win: A History of the San Francisco 8, which examines the motivations behind the arrests of the San Francisco 8 and the history of their involvement in the Black Panther Party and its underground apparatus the Black Liberation Army. It also illuminates the years of community organizing by those who supported their efforts to remain free.

Jeffrey J. Cohen, Ph.D.
Dean of Humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University

Jeffrey Cohen is the dean of humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He is widely published in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, posthumanism and ecocriticism. His book, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, received the 2017 Rene Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. Cohen is laying the groundwork for projects that intensify the university's strengths in the environmental humanities; increase opportunities for the work of humanities scholars to reach wider publics; and ensure the next generation of scholars, teachers and researchers (especially in traditional fields) is the most diverse to date.

Devoney Looser, Ph.D.
Regents’ Professor of English at Arizona State University

Devoney Looser is a regents’ professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of eleven books on Jane Austen and literature by women, including the biography Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter in the Age of Austen. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Public Scholar and a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow. Looser’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate and the TLS. She's written on professional issues for The Chronicle of Higher Education and has been interviewed about Austen on CNN.

Ruben Espinosa, Ph.D.
Professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)

Ruben Espinosa is professor of English at Arizona State University and director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). He is the author of many titles including the recent Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin and New Literary History, among other journals and collections. He is the president of the Shakespeare Association of America (2024-2026) and he serves on the Editorial Boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Palgrave’s “Early Modern Cultural Studies” series and on the Executive Board of RaceB4Race. He is the co-PI on a Mellon-funded project focused on curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields. This project recently launched Throughlines, a free online resource for teaching race in the humanities classroom.

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