Jay D. Aronson

Department of History

Jay D. Aronson is the founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a professor of science, technology and society in the Department of History.

For the past several years, he has been focusing on deaths in law enforcement custody in the United States. His most recent book "Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), co-authored with Dr. Roger A. Mitchell, examines the history of efforts to counteract official government ignorance on this issue and proposes a variety of practical solutions to the lack of data about how many people die in custody each year.

Previously, Aronson spent nearly a decade examining the ethical, political and social dimensions of post-conflict and post-disaster identification of the missing and disappeared. He has also been involved in a variety of projects that seek to improve the quality of civilian casualty recording and estimation in times of conflict.

Aronson received his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Minnesota and was both a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Camille Rankine

Department of English

Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her first book of poetry, "Incorrect Merciful Impulses," was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her chapbook, "Slow Dance with Trip Wire," was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Discovery Poetry Prize and fellowships from and the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Hawthornden Foundation and the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her poetry has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, A Public Space, Tin House and elsewhere. She co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, and is an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Uju Anya

Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics

Uju Anya is a scholar of new language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism. She is an associate professor of second language acquisition in the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics, the 2023 Duolingo Research Fellow, and a 2023 Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow. Her fields of inquiry are applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, world language education and multilingual education in the metaverse. She primarily conducts critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students.

Anya's current project, AfroMetaverse, is an intercultural Afro-diasporic online platform for Black youth in the US, Canada, Brazil, Colombia with three components:

1. a virtual reality (VR) multilingual educational gaming site;
2. an online mini social network community; and
3. a repository of multilingual interaction data for collaborative, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and international research.

Barbara George

Department of English

Barbara George (she/her) is a teacher and researcher in environmental communication, technical writing and within writing studies pedagogy. Barbara's book, "Mapping Environmental Risk and Energy Communication" (Bloomsbury, 2025) explores energy discourses surrounding energy and global climate change. Barbara also co-teaches a Grand Challenge course focused on Equity and the Environment. Barbara researches linguistic explorations of the intersections of environmental risk and communication, issues of intersectionality within environmental deliberation, and environmental justice within environmental communication. Additionally, Barbara explores the use of narrative in finding new ways to “reimagine” environmental frames, particularly in Rust Belt communities. Barbara has also researched different student retention efforts: best practices for literacies across disciplines, multilingual initiatives, and writing center supports. Barbara’s work appears in Composition Forum, Environmental Sociology, and Communication Design Quarterly, among others.