Robert Brain is a cultural historian of science with special interests in the relations between the sciences and the arts in fin-de-siècle Europe. His recent work includes a forthcoming book, Physiological Aesthetics: Experimentalizing Life and Art in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, which examines the roles of experimental psycho-physiology and cultures of bodily techniques in the arts of early modernism, and a co-edited special issue of Science in Context entitled “Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and Culture.”

Dana Claxton (Lakota, Canadian, b.1959) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and based in Vancouver. Drawing on Lakota cultural values, history and language, Claxton questions the multifaceted layers of identity inherent to indigenous ways of being. Issues surrounding indigenous labour and resistance, resource extraction and capital feature prominently in her latest research and work on the Service, Office and Retail Worker’s Union of Canada’s (SORWUC’s) 1978 protest action against the Muckamuck Restaurant.

Claxton’s work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival, Eiteljorg Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), and held in several major Canadian public collections. Her awards include the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. Her work was selected for the Sydney Biennial (2010), Biennale de Montréal (2007), Biennale d’art contemporain du Havre, France (2006), Micro Wave, Hong Kong (2005) Art Star Biennale, Ottawa (2005), and Wro 03 Media Arts Biennale Wroclaw Poland (2003).

Adam Frank is a professor in the UBC Department of English whose research and teaching areas include affect theory and poetics in US literature and culture. His essays have appeared in ELH, Criticism, Critical Inquiry, Science in Context and elsewhere. He is the author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015), co-author (with Elizabeth Wilson) of A Silvan Tomkins Handbook (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) , and co-editor (with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press, 1995). He has also produced a dozen recorded audiodramas in collaboration with composers locally, nationally, and internationally.

A philosopher of science with a focus on biology and psychology, Paul Griffiths was educated at Cambridge and the Australian National University, receiving his PhD in 1989. He taught at Otago University in New Zealand and was later Director of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the the University of Sydney, before taking up a Professorship in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to Australia in 2004, first as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and from 2007 as University Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. His books include What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago Univ. Press, 1997, and most recently (with Karola Stotz)Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013.

Alexandra Murray Harrison a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and on the Core Faculty of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Post Graduate Certificate Program at University of Massachusetts Boston. Dr. Harrison has a private practice in both adult and child psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Her clinical and academic interests focus on development across the lifespan and include therapeutic action in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the use of videotape in child evaluation and treatment, and supporting the caregiving relationship. In the context of visits to orphanages in Central America and India, Dr. Harrison has developed a model for mental health professionals in developed countries to volunteer their consultation services to caregivers of children in care in developing countries in the context of a long term relationship with episodic visits and regular skype and video contact.

A PhD student in the English Deparrtment at UBC, Sean McAlister is completing his dissertation “Secondary Authorship: Aesthetics and the Idea of Mass Culture in the United States, 1835-1866.” An essay on Poe and the concept of interest has recently appeared in the journal Criticism.

David Metzer is a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century music. His work covers a variety of genres, including popular music, classical, and jazz. He nimbly jumps from Barry Manilow’s power ballads to songs by Aaron Copland. His research explores cultural issues of race, sexuality, gender, and emotional expression. A new project looks at how musicians have confronted the toll of incarceration in American society and how musical works have shaped understandings of incarceration.

He is the author of The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music.  The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé is the first history of the ballad in recent popular music and discusses why these songs have become emotional touchstones in our lives and American society. David has published articles in a wide range of music and interdisciplinary journals, including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Popular Music, Modernism/modernity, and Black Music Research Journal.

Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Rebecca Todd was a contemporary choreographer probing relationships between embodiment, mental imagery, affect, and memory before turning to the tools of cognitive science to investigate the same themes.  She has a Master’s degree in Dance from UCLA, a PhD in Developmental Science and Neuroscience from University of Toronto, and post-doctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at the Rotman Research Institute and University of Toronto.  She is very happy to be joining the faculty of the UBC Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor this July.  Her work focuses on how affective salience influences how we perceive and remember the world across the lifespan and between individuals.

Jessica Tracy is an associate professor of psychology at UBC where she is also a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar and a Canadian Institute for Health Research New Investigator. She completed her undergraduate degree at Amherst College in 1996, and her PhD at the University of California, Davis, in 2005. Tracy’s research focuses on emotions and emotion expressions, and, in particular, on the self-conscious emotions of pride, shame, and guilt. She was lead Editor of The Self-Conscious Emotions, a comprehensive volume of theory and research published in 2007 by Guilford Press, and she is currently an Associate Editor at the journal Emotion. Tracy has published over 60 journal articles, book chapters, and theoretical reviews, and regularly publishes in the leading psychology (e.g., Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and cross-disciplinary (e.g., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLoS-ONE) journals. In 2005 she won the James McKeen Cattell Dissertation Award from the New York Academy of Sciences; in 2010, the International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award; and in 2011, a University of British Columbia Killam Research Prize. Her research has been covered by hundreds of media outlets, including ABC’s “Good Morning America”, NPR’s “All Things Considered”, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The New Scientist, and Scientific American.

Elizabeth A. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is trained in psychology and works with psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory. She is the author of Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body  (Duke University Press 2004) and Affect and Artificial Intelligence (University of Washington Press 2010). She is currently completing a project (Gut Feminism) that explores how biomedical data about depression is helpful for feminist theories of the body. With Adam Frank she is writing an introduction to the work of Silvan Tomkins.