Samaneh Olad Ghadikolaei, Ph.D is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the author of Women, Faith, and Family: Reclaiming Gender Justice through Religious Activism.

Peter W. Marty serves as editor/publisher of The Christian Century, a journal devoted to shaping America’s conversation about religion and faith in public life. He writes a monthly column for the Century. He is also a Lutheran pastor (ELCA) who spent 39 years in parish ministry, the last 28 of which as senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church, a 3500-member congregation in Davenport, Iowa.

Rebecca Gibson is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Anthropology in the School of World Studies at VCU. Dr. Gibson's research spans a multitude of topics, from historical biological anthropology, to whether or not zombies have gender, to cyborgs and robotic technology.

Join the HRC AI Futures Lab for a screening and discussion of the film Her (2013).

Join the HRC Graphic Narratives Lab for a discussion & book signing of Precious Rubbish by Kayla E, Texas-born artist of Mexican-American descent. Her comics practice centers around her childhood and functions as a map-making exercise. She currently works as the creative director at Fantagraphics and is the co-founder and former president of Nat. Brut Inc.

David Golumbia (1963–2023) taught in the English Department and the Media, Art, and Text PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the author of The Cultural Logic of Computation, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, and many articles on digital culture, language, and literary studies and theory.

Join us for the Spring 2025 History and Health Symposium, "Unburying Voices: Community-Engaged Reparative Justice."

Join the VCU Humanities Research Center, VCUarts, Rams in Recovery, and Richmond’s Inclusive Recovery City Initiative for Recovery in Practice at the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art from April 17-19, 2025.

Margaret Hu is the Taylor Reveley Research Professor and Professor of Law, and Director of the Digital Democracy Lab, at William & Mary (W&M) Law School. Her research focuses on the intersection of civil rights, national security, cybersurveillance, and AI.

Jo-Jo Koo joined the Department of Focused Inquiry at VCU as an Assistant Professor starting in the Fall of 2022 and is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS). He has teaching and research interests (among other areas) in critical thinking, normative and applied ethics, philosophy of race and gender, critical social philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, Chinese philosophy, and the debate of determinism versus free will.