Caleb Knapp is a doctoral candidate in English at UW whose dissertation, The Persistence of Property: Sexual Violence and the Making of American Freedom, explores how liberal freedom in the US is imagined and constituted through forms of sexual violence. He has received a Mellon award to participate in the 2017-18 Sawyer Seminar on Capitalism and Comparative Racialization at the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race. His master’s essay on sexuality in the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois won the Hallien Johnson Memorial Fellowship in Women and Literary Study. He is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society Studies, and volunteer teaches at the Monroe Correctional Complex.
Alan-Michael (AM) Weatherford is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at UW. He studies neocolonial violence under transnational liberal capitalism in the Americas post-WWII across the Franco-, Hispano- and Anglophone empires. He has worked with the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Theater for Change group that employs Freirian and Boalian Theater of the Oppressed tactics as a form of critical pedagogy. His work is deeply informed by Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Hemispheric Studies, and Queer of Color Critique in hopes of furthering theories of decolonization. He regularly teaches literature courses and French and Spanish language, in addition to volunteering at the Monroe Correctional Complex.