2024 Presenters

Edda Fields-Black

Edda L. Fields-Black (she/her), is a professor in the Department of History and the director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research specialty is the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Throughout her career, Fields-Black has used interdisciplinary sources and methods to uncover the voices of historical actors in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora who did not author written sources.

Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War  was published by Oxford University Press in February 2024. She is the executive producer and librettist of Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice. She has been a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum and the Senator John Heinz History Center.

Sarah Hae-In Idzik

Sarah Hae-In Idzik (she/her) is assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research engages the intersections of critical rhetorics of race and (post)colonialism, critical adoption studies and Asian American and Ethnic studies. She also researches rhetorics of Asian American adoptees as a form of Asian American worldbuilding. She teaches courses on rhetoric and race and Asian American studies. Her current book manuscript, Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption, traces a genealogy of Asian American adoption discourse from the 1950s to the present in its various racialized, political and colonial contexts.

Alex John London

Alex John London (he/him) is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, co-leader of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies and Chief Ethicist at the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University.

An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. His book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics is available in hard copy from Oxford University Press and is also available as an open access title.

Atesede Makonnen

Atesede Makonnen (she/her) is an assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English. Her research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and investigates how the approaching end of slavery sparked new consideration and wariness of Black subjects and gave birth to persistent forms of anti-blackness. She works across periods and media to paint a picture of how cultural objects contribute to and bolster ideas about race. Her current book project, Sensing Blackness in the 19th Century Britain, explores how the language of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch were employed to preserve racial boundaries.

Michael Trujillo

Michael Trujillo (they/them) is an assistant professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Their research examines the social and health consequences of stigma, the pathways that link stigma and health, and the strengths exhibited by stigmatized populations that mitigate these experiences. They apply an intersectional framework to their research questions to move towards greater health equity for all. They received their B.A. from CSU Long Beach, Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University and additional postdoctoral training at UC San Francisco.