Jocelyn Chua earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Chua is broadly interested in people's lived experiences of suicide, death, and violence in the contemporary world, and particularly how mental health professionals and therapies intervene to reshape how people respond to these experiences. She has conducted research in India on suicide, and is currently working on a new project examining the use of psychiatric medications in war by the United States military.

Jennifer Larson earned her PhD in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and is the Director of Credit Programs and Summer School at Digital and Lifelong Learning at UNC. She is also a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative literature. Her research interests include African-American literature (especially African American drama), Film Studies (especially race in contemporary cinema), American literature, and Composition (especially writing in/about law). She teaches courses such as Film & Culture, Literature & Law, and ENGL 105.

Jeannie Loeb earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill, specializing in Behavioral Neuroscience. She has been a Teaching Professor in the Psychology & Neuroscience Department since January 2005 and is currently also the Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has taught a variety of courses over the years, but currently, she focuses on teaching General Psychology, Biological Psychology and a graduate course on college teaching. In her spare time (ha, what’s that?), she enjoys watching sci-fi and K- and C- dramas; walking on trails and sleeping.

Claudio L .Battaglini, PhD, is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science (Exercise Physiology Specialization) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Battaglini received his BS degree from the Catholic University of Brasilia Brazil (1992) and his MA (1999) and PhD from the University of Northern Colorado in 2004. Dr. Battaglini’s research focuses on the effects of acute and chronic exercise on physiological, psychological, and physical functioning in cancer patients.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory. She is both an award-winning teacher and also among the most highly-cited scientists worldwide. Her books, Positivity and Love 2.0 have been translated into dozens of languages. She has been President of the International Positive Psychology Association and the Society for Affective Science. In 2017, Professor Fredrickson was honored with the Tang Prize for Achievements in Psychology, awarded to recognize exceptional career contributions to the well-being of humanity.

Dr. Arne Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has Adjunct Professorships in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Department of Public Policy, and the Curriculum in Global Studies. He received his BA from Brooklyn College and his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on topics related to the sociology of work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor markets, and social stratification. He served as Secretary of the American Sociological Association from 2001-2004 and as its President in 2007-2008. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Social Forces, an International Journal of Social Research.

Maxine Eichner, the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing particularly on family relationships, social welfare law and policy; feminist theory; sexuality; and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces. Professor Eichner is the author of The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2010).  She is now finishing a second book, The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored), which considers the harsh effects that market forces are having on American families today, and which argues that the government’s role is to shield families from these forces.  She is also an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (eds., Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, Czapanskiy, and Eichner, 2014). In addition, she has written numerous articles and chapters for law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes on law and political theory.

Cary Levine is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, examines the work of three important Southern California artists. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image focuses on the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award and a 2014 recipient of the Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. He has lectured nationally and internationally, has written for various magazines and museum catalogues, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anna Bardone-Cone, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She graduated from Williams College with a BA in Mathematics and French, received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed her predoctoral clinical psychology internship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. Her research interests are in eating disorders and body image, in particular: 1) defining eating disorder recovery; 2) identifying and testing pathways to disordered eating with particular interest in the role played by psychosocial variables (e.g., perfectionism, self-efficacy, social comparison, stress) and how these variables interact; and 3) examining cultural, familial, and media factors related to disordered eating and body image.

Nadia Yaqub is professor of Arab culture in the Department of Asian Studies and adjunct professor in the department of English and Comparative literature. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has treated Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. Her recent publications include Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press 2017), a volume of essays co-edited with Rula Quawas, and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), a monograph about Palestinian cinema of the long 1970s. She is currently working on a book about engaged cinema from the Arab world of the 1970s and 1980s and an edited volume about visual representations of Gaza.

Jennifer Gates-Foster is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Curriculum in Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2005 and has been at Carolina since 2013. Her primary research interest is in the archaeology of the Hellenistic and early Roman Eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, with a focus on the construction of identity and political authority in border regions.

Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she have been a faculty member since 2005. She grew up in Turkey and earned her B.A. (in Economics) and M.A. (in Anthropology/Sociology) at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a feminist political and cultural geographer interested in bodies, borders, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. Her research analyzes embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory.

Much of Yaakov Ariel’s research has focused on Protestantism, especially Evangelical Christianity, and its attitudes towards the Jewish people and the Holy Land; on Christian-Jewish relations in the late modern era; and on the Jewish reaction to modernity and postmodernity. He has published numerous articles and three books on these subjects. One of these books, Evangelizing the Chosen People, was awarded the Albert C. Outler prize by the American Society of Church History. His latest book, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews, was published in 2013 by New York University Press. His current project looks at the religious aspects in the life and career of poet Allen Ginsberg who was, in significant ways, a pioneer and prophet to many of his generation.

Peter Gordon’s field is the psychology of language and his interests in that field are very broad. Right now his basic research focuses on several topics related to word recognition and to higher levels of language comprehension. These include: the nature of the memory processes involved in understanding complex sentences, the interaction between lexical and higher-levels of language processing, and the coordination of language processing with more general mechanisms of memory, perception, attention, and motor control. Research on these topics in his laboratory uses two primary methods, eye-tracking during reading and measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs).

Afroz Taj’s research and teaching center around South Asian media, with emphasis on the film industry and television. His book, The Court of Indra and the Rebirth of North Indian Drama, explores the origins of the Urdu-Hindi musical theater in mid-nineteenth century Lucknow. His current book project focuses on the dynamics of the transition from the Parsi theater to early sound films in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also interested in the aesthetics of cinema, filmmaking techniques and technologies, and the history of Bollywood. While researching the history of Indian cinema he began to collect past issues of Shama magazine; in his next project, he will trace the impact of Shama on South Asian popular culture, including its visual and verbal constructions of gender identity in twentieth-century India and Pakistan.

Dr. Taj is also a creative writer: he has written, published, and recited his ghazals, geet, dohe, and short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Over the past ten years, he have undertaken to film interviews with important literary figures of South Asia, and he has made a number of short films in conjunction with the Door Into Hindi and Darvazah language-learning websites. His interest in media has enabled him to pioneer the use of new technologies and multimedia resources in language teaching.

Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow in Central European Studies in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research uses art, film, and science fiction to explore how the future was imagined in socialist Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. She is an alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her science fiction stories have been published in English, Polish, and French. The great paradox of her life is that she constantly thinks about outer space but would never want to travel there.

Caela O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program. She got hooked on researching farmers and the environment in particular while studying Spanish at the Universidad de Habana in Cuba. Dr. O’Connell runs the Socio-Ecological Change Research Lab (SECR Lab) at UNC investigating different aspects of sustainability, agriculture, inequality, water, disasters, adaptation, crisis and environmental conservation and partnering with community organizations for engaged scholarship. Her work is primarily in the Caribbean and North and South America. When not thinking about the future for farming and our global environment, Dr. O'Connel enjoys cooking, baking for friends, hiking (nothing too steep), taekwondo, tracking hurricanes, and traveling with her family.

Anna Krome-Lukens is a Teaching Associate Professor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on the history of welfare and public health policies. She teaches courses about the intersection of policy and history, including “Why History Matters to Public Policy” and a first-year seminar on higher education policy. She also directs the UNC Public Policy Capstone program, facilitating the work of student teams who do policy analysis for non-profits and government agencies. She loves thinking about how the history of food systems shapes their possible futures, and she also loves cheese.

Matthew G. Springer is the Hussman Distinguished Professor of Education Reform and chair of the Educational Policy and Organizational Leadership area in the School of Education. Matt is an interdisciplinary policy scholar by training and studies educational innovations and policies for improving system effectiveness and access to educational opportunities. Matt consults widely with government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Governor’s Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the governments of the United Kingdom and Mexico, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He has taught courses on the history and current trends in higher education, k-12 educator policy, research methods and causal inference, reading and writing academic research, and public policymaking. Matt’s research has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN’s Top of the Hour, and National Public Radio and in The New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. He was on the faculty at Vanderbilt University for over a decade before joining Carolina in the Fall of 2018 and falling in love with all things Carolina blue.

Formally trained as a marine geologist, Jeff Warren has spent the past 17 and a half years in State-level science policy positions including the coastal hazards policy specialist for the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management (2004 to 2010), the science advisor for the North Carolina Senate (2011 to 2017) and, most recently, the research director and now executive director for the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017 to present). Warren earned his BSc in geological sciences from the University of Arizona (1994), his MSc in geology from Auburn University (1997), and his PhD in geological sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006). Warren’s academic research included field sites in the southeastern US, northern Mexico, the East and South China Seas, and Antarctica for which he received the Antarctica Service medal of the United States of America from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his primary duties at UNC Chapel Hill with the Collaboratory, Warren has also been appointed a Professor of Practice in the Department of Public Policy.

Chris Lundberg is a professor of rhetoric, a political consultant, and a corporate communications strategist. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, where he writes about and teaches courses in public speaking, debate, persuasive communication and political rhetoric.
His academic work includes multiple books and award-winning articles on rhetoric, speech, and persuasion, including: The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008, 2e 2017); Public Speaking: Choices and Responsibility (Cengage Publishers, 2014, 2e 2016, 3e 2022); and a book about the psychology of public persuasion called Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (University of Alabama Press, 2012). He has served as a debate and messaging consultant for numerous US Senate races, gubernatorial campaigns, and cabinet-level confirmation processes. His international work features extensive work in the United Kingdom, including work on the UK Prime Ministership, the Scottish leadership election, and consulting services for the “Vote Leave” campaign during the EU referendum. He is also the founder and CEO of Vocable Communications, a speech focused and data-driven communication consultancy serving senior leadership at multiple fortune 500 corporations. He received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2006, and his Master of Divinity from Emory University in 2000. In addition to his experience in the classroom and with consulting clients, he has over fifteen years of experience in speech and debate coaching, serving most recently as a coach and argument consultant for Harvard University. He has coached national championship intercollegiate debate teams at four separate universities (Liberty University, Emory University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University), and has coached multiple competitors to the top individual speaker award at the National Debate Tournament.

Dr. Steven Buzinski is a Teaching Associate Professor, the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Directs the Karen M. Gil Internship Program, in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. He is also the Executive Director of Instructional Development for the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. Dr. Buzinski is an award-winning instructor who primarily teaches courses in Social Psychology, including Introduction to Social Psychology, Attitude Change, and Self-Regulation. His research focuses on the development of self-regulatory interventions to improve health and education outcomes.

Ram Neta is Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he's taught since 2002. His research attempts to understand the nature of rationality, and its relation to knowledge. He has published many articles in the leading academic journals in philosophy, and (in collaboration with his Duke colleague Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) has taught a Coursera course on reasoning and argumentation to over a million students around the world.

Colin Wallace is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research work focuses on identifying conceptual, reasoning, and problem-solving difficulties students experience when studying physics and astronomy. He has developed many pieces of research-informed curricula, including the Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy, which are used by tens of thousands of college students across the nation. He leads professional development workshops across the country on effective teaching and assessment. Since 2017, he has been the director of UNC’s Summer Institute for College Teaching, a week-long professional development experience in which participants learn how to foster diverse and inclusive classroom environments; design learning goals; optimally implement active learning techniques; and assess the quality of their instruction.