About the Speakers

Rohan Kalyan is a political ethnographer and filmmaker whose scholarly interests lie at the intersection of political culture, media and globalization. Kalyan is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he teaches courses in international studies, political economy, and film/media studies. Rohan’s filmmaking has involved documentary shorts and features. His most recent film, co-directed with Gorav Kalyan, is entitled Badiou and has screened in film festivals around the world. He is actively involved in several pedagogical and progressive visual media projects.

Gabriela León-Pérez, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of migration and medical sociology. Specifically, Gabriela’s research explores migration from Latin America to the US and how social and contextual factors shape the health and integration of Latinx immigrants and their children. Her research has been published in academic journals in the fields of sociology, public health, and demography. At VCU she teaches courses on immigration, racial and ethnic health disparities, and research methods.

Brooke Newman is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family. She’s the author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), which received the Gold Medal for World History in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, and was named a 2019 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. She is also the co-editor of Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Her research has been extensively supported by distinguished institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including, most recently, MacDowell, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and the Omohundro Institute and Georgian Papers Programme for research in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Dr. Newman’s current book project, The Queen’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery (under contract with Mariner), chronicles the evolving policies and attitudes of the British Crown and prominent members of the royal family toward slavery, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and the abolition movement, from Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria.

Ryan K. Smith is a Professor of History at VCU, where he specializes in American religious history, material culture, and historic preservation. He received a Ph.D. in American civilization from the University of Delaware and an M.A. in history from the College of William and Mary. Dr. Smith has expertise in public history, having worked at the Library of Virginia, the Winterthur Museum, the St. Augustine Historical Society, and the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, among other institutions.

His most recent book, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) is an exploration of the history and recovery of the burial grounds of Richmond, Virginia, through the lens of race. The book’s accompanying website, Richmond Cemeteries, features research and podcasts by Smith’s undergraduate students from the past several years. He is currently working on a project tracing the reclamation and restoration of historic lighthouses across the United States, as well additional projects on Shaker furniture and on the landscapes of body snatching in the nineteenth century.