2019-2020

Neil Coffee, Professor, Classics

Neil’s interests include Latin epic poetry, Roman social history, ancient philosophy, and digital approaches to literary and intellectual history. He is the author of The Commerce of War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic; Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome, and co-editor of the forthcoming Intertextuality in Flavian Epic Poetry: A Contemporary Approach. He founded and directs the Tesserae Project, an effort to use digital methods to trace intertextuality. His current book project is entitled Serenity and Engagement: An Ancient Search for Balance.

Meredith Conti, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance
*OVPRED/HI Public Humanities Faculty Fellow

An assistant professor of theatre and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and culture in the United States and Britain, Meredith’s research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; popular entertainment forms (minstrelsy, world fairs, music hall, etc.); gender and race in the Victorian period; and gun violence in theatre. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (published in 2018 by Routledge), and is working on her second monograph entitled Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and the U.S. American Theatre. For this second book project, Conti has received fellowships and grants awarded by UB’s Gender Institute, UB’s Humanities Institute, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Christian Flaugh, Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures

Christian Flaugh is Associate Professor of French, Africana, and Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Operation Freak: Narrative, Identity, and the Spectrum of Bodily Abilities (2012, McGill-Queen’s UP), and co-editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt (2018, Caribbean Series, Brill). He also has articles published in journals such as Cultural Dynamics, L’Esprit Créateur, Francosphères, Journal of Haitian Studies, and Theatre Topics.Flaugh co-founded and performed with Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte (2000-08), consulted with the AT BUFFALO creative team on the performance of “black” archives from Buffalo’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition, and has collaborated on devised, multi-lingual adaptations of African and Caribbean texts.

Andrew Lison, Assistant Professor, Media Study

Andrew studies the theory and history of digital media. A former information technology professional, his research focuses on the confluence of technology, political economy, and culture from the mid-20th-century invention of discrete, electronic computation to the present. He is most recently co-author of Archives (meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and currently working on a monograph, New Media at the End of History, examining the late-1980s rise of digital multimedia alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has also begun work on a project considering the material limits of computing.

Ariel Nereson, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance

Ariel directs the MFA in Dance and is Associate Director of Graduate Studies for UB’s Department of Theatre & Dance. Her current book project, Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary Performance, and the Racial Past, demonstrates how formations of aesthetics and genre and questions of how and why we remember the past interanimate one another in movement-based practices. At UB Ariel teaches courses across the undergraduate and graduate curricula centered on performance, history, embodiment, and race. Ariel is also a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.

Michael Rembis, Associate Professor, History
*OVPRED/HI Public Humanities Faculty Fellow

Mike is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of History. He has authored or edited many books, articles, and book chapters, including most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Disability History co-edited with Catherine Kudlick and Kim Nielsen (Oxford University Press, 2018). Rembis is currently working on a book entitled, ‘A Secret Worth Knowing’: Living Mad Lives in the Shadow of the Asylum.

Bill Solomon, Professor, English

Bill is the author of Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression and Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s and has published articles on film, literature and popular entertainment in numerous journals. His current book project is a study of the relationship of American literature in the 1960s to the contemporaneous rise of the counterculture in this country.

Victoria H. Wolcott, Professor, History

Victoria received her Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Michigan. Her first book was Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001). In 2012 Wolcott published a second book, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America. In addition, she has published articles in The Journal of American History, The Radical History Review, and the Journal of Women’s History among others. Her current book project, Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement, explores the role of interracial pacifist communities in the civil rights movement.

*Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development sponsored fellows for 2019-20.

All photos this page by Douglas Levere.